Is there anything you're into that no one or basically nobody is into?
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How to use game design for education around political and social issues and complexity science
Edit since a few people asked: I don't have good answers for this yet, but some thoughts:
- According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
- Some excellent examples include Wintergreen and Bloc by Bloc. Basically any storygame can, if you want it to.
- Games are basically a voluntary and temporary acceptance of an arbitrary set of rules, with an arbitrary goal that you strive to overcome. They often include metrics that tell you how well you are doing. To some degree, the same can be said about modern bureaucracies (albeit less voluntary and temporary), where the metrics might be KPIs or money.
- Games can satirise this in educational ways, e.g. this was the purpose of The Landlord's Game (the precursor to monopoly)
- This is another C. Thi Nguyen thing - really worth listening to his podcast episode on the Ezra Klein show.
- Some games show amazing emergent complexity. That is, complexity that isn't due to underlying complexity of the system parts, but emerges as a result of their many interactions, like turbulent eddies, or bird murmurations.
- Go/Baduk is an extreme example of this. 2 rules that have produced 3000 years of culture surrounding one of the most difficult and engaging games I know.
- Tak is another example that's a lot easier to learn (because it doesn't require building up a bank of pattern recognition)
- TTRPGs are also super interesting to me, because narrative is one of the tools that the human brain has developed to help understand complexity. I don't think they exhibit emergent complexity so much, but they bring in a lot of complexity via the players' life experience, and via the setting/world.
- Different game mechanics and story tropes provide different affordances - that is, they allow or encourage some behaviours, and disallow others.
- No one ever forments a revolution in monopoly, right? Why not?
- Affordances is an excellent frame for understanding how agency relates to systems, because all systems have attributes with affordances (and constraints). What are the affordances of a capitalist democracy? I think games are an ideal vehicle for explaining affordances easily.
There are probably plenty more links. I've been playing some of those games for years, but am still relatively new to some e.g. story games. And I'm just starting out looking in to game design..
edit 2: also, a plug for [email protected]
Please tell me more
- According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
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I bet you also enjoy Technology Connections.
Ohh yeah! Though I do wonder:
Why limit themselves to the guy who is evangelizing (and rightly so!) when he could also hang out with crazy swamp guy HyperspacePirate who not only thinks of the crazy cycles but actually builds some as well? -
My wife discovered "Powerwolf" recently. Not death metal, per say, but I've yet to meet anyone else whose heard of it. Worse still, this lead her down a rabbit hole to Dwarf Metal and the accursed song Diggy Diggy Hole which has bored its way into my brain.
I mean, demons are a girls best friend
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My favorite thing in the whole world is dropping LSD, and listening to obscure music or watching weird shit...
Dude I can't find ANYONE to hang out with me... I wave that flag in every social situation I find myself in. I really thought there would be more people into it.
Well, that or I'm completely unbearable to hang out with. If that's the case I just wish people would tell me.
You should try a festival. You'll find something fun to do and plenty of people go alone.
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Its fine as hobbies if you dont force it on others really. I hate llms but I also hate pop and rap music, as long as im not forced to use it im fine.
Everything shoving llms in my face (that really dont work at all) is the equivalent of a car driving by blaring rap at 110 db. Instant anger.
Im into cars as well, I think lemmy is more hating that we are forced into having to use cars, and assholes who drive unneeded trucks. I dont think anyone on here cares about people who are mechanics or tinkerer. Its more the system that forced us to be reliant on cars.
It's totally understandable why people think AI is slop, the stuff that isn't is unnoticeable. And because most of it is slop. Even the "good" stuff sucks most of the time. But you can get gold out of them there hills. But you gotta mine it. Which means a lot of shoveling dirt. These companies don't give a fuck. They'll feed you dirt happily.
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There's an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It's in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it's one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you're into there's at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It's actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn't have a community associated with it?
I like to rescue dogs. I just rescued one last week that I'm taking to get groomed. He's sleeping in his crate right now. It's not ideal, as I live in a small house with two cats, three people, and two dogs. But holy shit is it rewarding. Most of the time they just scamper away, although blessedly it's usually to their home. Every once in a while you get a friend for a while, and someone else gets a friend for life. Dogs are lovely animals, and they exist as they do because of humans. It is our duty to take care of them.
This little guy needs to be housetrained and neutered but then he's off to live a life on the open road as my trucker friend's road companion. Or at least that's the plan!
Idk how to attach pictures on this app so you'll have to imagine a very sweet Yorkshire terrier who only has a few dreads left to snip! When I found him he had a dread that was legit like two feet long. Poor baby.
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There's an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It's in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it's one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you're into there's at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It's actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn't have a community associated with it?
I don't know anyone else who likes horror films.
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How to use game design for education around political and social issues and complexity science
Edit since a few people asked: I don't have good answers for this yet, but some thoughts:
- According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
- Some excellent examples include Wintergreen and Bloc by Bloc. Basically any storygame can, if you want it to.
- Games are basically a voluntary and temporary acceptance of an arbitrary set of rules, with an arbitrary goal that you strive to overcome. They often include metrics that tell you how well you are doing. To some degree, the same can be said about modern bureaucracies (albeit less voluntary and temporary), where the metrics might be KPIs or money.
- Games can satirise this in educational ways, e.g. this was the purpose of The Landlord's Game (the precursor to monopoly)
- This is another C. Thi Nguyen thing - really worth listening to his podcast episode on the Ezra Klein show.
- Some games show amazing emergent complexity. That is, complexity that isn't due to underlying complexity of the system parts, but emerges as a result of their many interactions, like turbulent eddies, or bird murmurations.
- Go/Baduk is an extreme example of this. 2 rules that have produced 3000 years of culture surrounding one of the most difficult and engaging games I know.
- Tak is another example that's a lot easier to learn (because it doesn't require building up a bank of pattern recognition)
- TTRPGs are also super interesting to me, because narrative is one of the tools that the human brain has developed to help understand complexity. I don't think they exhibit emergent complexity so much, but they bring in a lot of complexity via the players' life experience, and via the setting/world.
- Different game mechanics and story tropes provide different affordances - that is, they allow or encourage some behaviours, and disallow others.
- No one ever forments a revolution in monopoly, right? Why not?
- Affordances is an excellent frame for understanding how agency relates to systems, because all systems have attributes with affordances (and constraints). What are the affordances of a capitalist democracy? I think games are an ideal vehicle for explaining affordances easily.
There are probably plenty more links. I've been playing some of those games for years, but am still relatively new to some e.g. story games. And I'm just starting out looking in to game design..
edit 2: also, a plug for [email protected]
I want to know more. Part of my job involves teaching lessons on climate change in schools. I have often wondered how I could incorporate games like Minecraft into this.
- According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
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I’m an avid reader, and I like reading in original language. That has brought me in a variety of rabbit holes, including trying to learn Russian, then Japanese. Unfortunately, I forgot most of it. I also forgot most of my ancient Greek, but my Latin is still vaguely useful. My German and Spanish never reached the “I can read anything” level, that is a shame because I really want to read the Don Quixote and Goethe... But I’m proud to easily read in 3 languages, struggling in 2-3 others (depending how much dictionary use is allowed).
I haven’t been able to find a community of people that like this. Most like a specific culture and go deep into a single language.
I'm currently reading in 3 languages, but a bit more narrowly than you.
When I was a young teen, and reading SF&F books voraciously (sometimes a book a day, or more if I had them), I ran across the Perry Rhodan series.
Finally something I wouldn't run out of! It started in Germany in 1961, and published a novella weekly since. (They haven't missed a week, and are currently past issue 3,000.)
The first 150 or so were translated into English and I scoured used book stores until I had all of them.
Now, 50 years later, I spent a week in Germany and bought issue 3323 in a railway station bookstore. My German was never great, and is now worse, so Google Lens has helped me get through it.
When I came home I did some searching and found all the English translations as e-books. I've read a couple dozen of the early ones and they are pretty dreadful. My 14-year-old self was not very discerning.
I also found e-versions of the German originals up to about #2000, which I could read laboriously, and French translations of the first 1,000.
The latter is a game changer because my French is good enough to read with only occasional dictionary lookups. Reading with Google books allows me to tap as word and see the English instantly, so it's quite convenient.
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The fact that Diggy Diggy Hole exists is such a wonderful thing. It was fun to watch the original, and then various evolutions of it. Its what the internet should be instead of the corporate, pay to play garbage we have ended up with.
Also Powerwolf and Wind Rose are just fun bands to listen to. Metal that doesn't take itself too seriously of great.
Blind Guardian is another good one that makes songs inspired by fantasy. Their Wheel of Time album is pretty great.
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My wife discovered "Powerwolf" recently. Not death metal, per say, but I've yet to meet anyone else whose heard of it. Worse still, this lead her down a rabbit hole to Dwarf Metal and the accursed song Diggy Diggy Hole which has bored its way into my brain.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Blind Guardian is another good one that makes songs inspired by fantasy. Their Wheel of Time album is pretty great. My personal favorite is Ride Into Obsession, which is sung from the point of view of one of the series' main antagonists, though the last section of the eponymous "Wheel of Time" is also a banger.
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My favorite thing in the whole world is dropping LSD, and listening to obscure music or watching weird shit...
Dude I can't find ANYONE to hang out with me... I wave that flag in every social situation I find myself in. I really thought there would be more people into it.
Well, that or I'm completely unbearable to hang out with. If that's the case I just wish people would tell me.
Watch Scavengers Reign and Common Side Effects - they're absolutely terrific tv shows that should be right up your allley.
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200 is a lot of people for a mud. The only one I know of that's that big is aardwolf. Which do you play?
I play aardwolf.
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I curate about 90 cartoons and almost as many indie animation channels to create a weekly block of Saturday morning cartoon programming for my wife and kid.
I edit it together in kdenlive from files on my media server, and we stream it to my mini projector each weekend. Been going over a year now, only missing weeks when we're traveling. I would love to be able to share it with a wider audience, but I'm still not sure how, given it's all pirated.
Living every good dad's dream
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There's an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It's in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it's one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you're into there's at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It's actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn't have a community associated with it?
I like to contribute to various open-source implimentations of classic games from the 90s
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I ended up flipping through a bunch of Punch magazines from the 20's a bit ago, albeit just digitally. It was fascinating. You get a perspective that way that reading curated highlights and stories compiled afterwards just can't give you.
Edit: I guess you actually have to specify 1920's now.
I have a habit of looking at archive.org’s recently uploaded magazines because it is always cool to look at periodicals from a different time.
Even things that seem unrelated to my interests at all end up being a riveting window into something unfamiliar!
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There's an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It's in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it's one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you're into there's at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It's actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn't have a community associated with it?
I like to analyse stickers stuck on traffic lights and road signs.
I plan on making an app someday where people can contribute to a database of stickers and compare the sticker culture of different regions.
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Living every good dad's dream
wrote last edited by [email protected]It's the highlight of my week. It's great to have culture in common with my kid and to get each others references. I also like to cook big breakfasts that day, lots of waffles, bellinis, fancy stuff, fresh fruits. Real bougie with it.
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It's the highlight of my week. It's great to have culture in common with my kid and to get each others references. I also like to cook big breakfasts that day, lots of waffles, bellinis, fancy stuff, fresh fruits. Real bougie with it.
I just set them up as a playlist; editing them together is a great idea!
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I don't know anyone else who likes horror films.
Hi
I'm 1hitsong. Now you know me.
What are your favorite horror movies?
Some of my favs are Nightmare on Elm Street, Trick r Treat, Shaun of the Dead, Evil Dead.
