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Board games are discrete and closed, often in a well-thought-out and beautiful way. It's generally intended as a social experience, but the discrete world makes
by michaelochurch 14y ago
Board games are discrete and closed, often in a well-thought-out and beautiful way. It's generally intended as a social experience, but the discrete world makes the game possible to take apart and analyze, so that if you want to dive deep into the game, you can. It's up to you what kind of experience you want to have. If you want to play today and forget who won tomorrow, that's fine. On the other hand, if you want to get analytical about why starting that external conflict in a game of T&E was such a good (or bad) move, you can do that as well. In a continuous, real-time computer game, you can't as easily reason "to the bottom" because the mathematical microstructure is hidden, and often emergent.
Germany, Hungary, and to some degree, France, have a really strong (tabletop) gaming culture, which is a really cool thing. I tend to think that games confer a lot of benefits not just for "weird gamer types", but for everyone. It's a lot easier to get to know people over a board game than when there is nothing "in the center" to talk about: can people really carry on a 2-hour conversation about the fucking weather? I'm a weather geek and even I would prefer not to (possibly because I know from experience that it bores most people).
I actually think there's space in the world for a "board game cafe" niche. Instead of board games being a fringe activity that require corralling people, I don't see why there couldn't be a revival of the culture where a person can walk into a coffee shop at any time and find a game.
- kriro 14y agoI love to analyze games and as a programmer there's quite a bit of neat stuff you can do due to the discreteness. Build DSLs for the game logic or strategy, the whole field of AI, modelling of games as FSM, Petri Nets whatever seems interesting. There are quite a few of these cafes. They have game collections and you can rent a table+game and pay for the drinks. You can also bring you own etc. the atmosphere is usually pretty nice/relaxed.
- michaelochurch 14y agoAre you taking this Coursera course, in April? https://www.coursera.org/course/ggp https://www.coursera.org/course/ggp It looks really interesting.
- kriro 14y agoPretty nice wasn't aware of this course. A colleague of mine actually has a student that is doing a paper on GGP this semester. I'll sign up for it but will mostly just follow along and not treat it like a real course (that's kind of how I do all my online courses).
- DanBC 14y agoI'd love to see some more analysis on "Button Men" - (http://www.beatpeopleup.com/start.html http://www.beatpeopleup.com/start.html)
- Adrock 14y agoThere is a "board game cafe" in my neighborhood: http://www.thebrooklynstrategist.com/ http://www.thebrooklynstrategist.com/ They seem to be doing quite well.
- michaelochurch 14y agoAwesome! This deserves 5 upvotes, but I only get to give you one, so here's this. Does one just show up and play games, or is there a specific time when it's best to arrive?
- marekmroz 14y agoFunny you should mention the board game cafe concept. In Toronto we have Snakes and Lattes, it's very popular and constantly expanding into adjacent buildings/floors. Fun place to go and hang out, have a beer play with friends. I think that somehow in last several years board games begun to be perceived not as a nerdy thing to do but something cool. I have seen people go on dates to SnL.
- michaelochurch 14y agoThis is a great idea. Adults tend to become socially retarded once Work gets in and asserts total dominance over peoples' lives, and board games are a great way to build a context that's independent of (a) people trying to hit on each other, which becomes pointless once you're married, and (b) people trying to assess each others' professional status and "network". One of the things that I see in board games is their subversive potential of breaking down barriers. Adult life is so shit-broken in so many ways, and one of those is socioeconomic stratification. A healthy game culture could kill that by creating cross-class connections.
- rpfennig 14y agoThat's interesting, I'm using games at Work to help build up networks because it's something that draws in people from different departments (developers, product managers, customer support) and makes it easier for people to approach each other outside of the lunch hour games.