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What does it mean to say that games take place within set boundaries established by the act of play? Is this really true? Is there really such a distinct boundary? In fact there is. Compare, for example, the informal play of a toy with the more formal play of a game. A child approaching a doll, for example, can slowly…
If you give people a tool and tell them it will perfectly solve an important problem, any imperfection in the tool is going to make them angry. If you give someone a toy and say “Look what I made! Isn’t it fun? It kinda does this thing.” then you’ve set yourself up for a positive reaction. It’s much easier to beat low…
The observation that play gets short shrift as children come of age in the Western world is surely as old and as perennial as that civilization itself. The Bible puts it thus: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that 1 am become a man, I have put away childish things."…
We obviously have no written records from the age of foragers, and the archaeological evidence consists mainly of fossilised bones and stone tools. Artefacts made of more perishable materials – such as wood, bamboo or leather – survive only under unique conditions. The common impression that pre-agricultural humans…
How utterly we despise the silly little bricks of the toyshops! They are too small to make a decent home for even the poorest lead soldiers, even if there were hundreds of them, and there are never enough, never nearly enough; even if you take one at a time and lay it down and say, "This is a house," even then there…
To Parents The urge to create is equally strong in all children. Boys and girls. It’s the imagination that counts. Not skill. You build whatever comes into your head, the way you want it. A bed or a truck. A dolls house or a spaceship. A lot of boys like dolls houses. They’re more human than spaceships. A lot of girls…
The Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game is about storytelling in worlds of swords and sorcery. It shares elements with childhood games o f make-believe. Like those games, D & D is driven by imagination. It’s about picturing the towering castle beneath the stormy night sky and imagining how a fantasy adventurer might…
An RPG is a process of cooperative storytelling: the Gamemaster lays out a situation or scenario for the players, such as “you hear an alarm coming from the First National Bank!” The players then choose how their characters react (“We rush to the bank to see what’s going on!”). Things proceed in a back-and-forth…
Mix up a batch of 50/50 water and glue, dissolve a spoonful of Borax in more water, then mix the whole mess together. (If you want real numbers, mix 1/4 c water with 1/4 glue & dissolve 1 tsp Borax in 1/8 c water, but really, you can be pretty slapdash about this.) As you knead it, the slime will quickly start…
Explanation: Sophisticated and apt theories and illustrations, which provide knowledgeable and justified accounts of events, actions, and ideas. Why is that so? What explains such events? What accounts for such action? How can we prove it? To what action is this connected? How does this work? Interpretation: The act…
There was once a brainy baboon, Who always breathed down a bassoon, For he said, 'It appears That in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune'.
In sensory perception, multisensory integration is the rule, not the exception. In audition, we don’t just hear with our ears, we use our eyes to locate the apparent sources of sounds in the cinema where we “hear” the voices coming from the actors’ mouths on the screen, although the sounds are coming from the sides of…
RPG players are challenged to build many physical, mental, magical, and alliance- oriented traits and leanings for their characters, and to then build relationships with other characters as well. There is a natural design emphasis on how characters are built, and what building a character then means in the context of…
It never occurred to me that there was going to be any stumbling block. Not that I had the answer, but [I had] the joy of going at it. When you have that joy, you do the right experiments. You let the material tell you where to go, and it tells you at every step what the next has to be because you're integrating with…
The Earth Speaks, clearly, distinctly, and, in many of the realms of Nature, loudly, to William Jennings Bryan, but he fails to hear a single sound. The earth speaks from the remotest periods in its wonderful life history in the Archaeozoic Age, when it reveals only a few tissues of its primitive plants. Fifty million…
With respect to those who may ask why Nature does not produce new beings? We may enquire of them in turn, upon what foundation they suppose this fact? What it is that authorizes them to believe this sterility in Nature? Know they if, in the various combinations which she is every instant forming, Nature be not…
[The octopus has] an amazing skin, because there are up to 20 million of these chromatophore pigment cells and to control 20 million of anything is going to take a lot of processing power. ... These animals have extraordinarily large, complicated brains to make all this work. ... And what does this mean about the…
Action regarding the environment requires objectivity, precision, accuracy, validity, replication, constructive criticism, and consensus. Scientists, engineers, and economists have to stay focused on putting accurate data into the hands of decision makers, while they explain their findings to the public, which, in the…
[The chemical bond] First, it is related to the disposition of two electrons (remember, no one has ever seen an electron!): next, these electrons have their spins pointing in opposite directions (remember, no one can ever measure the spin of a particular electron!): then, the spatial distribution of these electrons is…
In the summer after kindergarten, a friend introduced me to the joys of building plastic model airplanes and warships. By the fourth grade, I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and…