Kestrell

It Starts Tonight at 11:59pm EST
https://virtualrealityday.org/

Kes: Another game which I wish was accessible, but I'm glad others have access to it.g

https://www.fastcompany.com/90666879/the-guardians-innovation-by-design-2021

Excerpt:

There are things we should all do, ranging from managing our finances to reading more books. But let’s be honest: Playing video games is more fun than balancing a checkbook, and more seductive than reading Tolstoy.

That’s why Craig Ferguson, lead platforms engineer at MIT’s Affective Computing group, has combined the two ideas into a groundbreaking app called The Guardians: Unite the Realms. It’s the winner of Fast Company’s 20201 Innovation by Design award in the Wellness category.

The Guardians—available for free download on iOS and Android—is basically a Trojan horse mental health app. At first glance, it’s like any monster-collecting and leveling game you know, filled with cartoonish magical creatures you need to assemble to take down evil. However, the only way to actually advance in the game is to step out of it—and accept real-life, on-your-honor tasks to complete.

Scientists call these tasks “behavioral activation.” Whether it’s exercise like going on a walk, or feeding your artistic side by drawing a picture, these positive experiences are proven therapy for anxiety and depression. Plus, they can help you acquire new skills or hobbies you might always find yourself putting off. So behavioral activation is a means of self-improvement, too.

....Meanwhile, Ferguson is planning to release a more polished sequel later this year, which will usher players from an enchanted forest to a tropical island. What a wonderful opportunity for us all to get hooked on our own mental health.

I was reading the BoingBoing holiday guide, and fell in love with this game
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/7/cathedral

Basically, it is a wooden board with a bunh of differently-shaped wooden blocks, and you play it like Go, with two players taking turns putting down white and black pieces and attempting to occupy as much of the board as possible.

My game geek housemate, who is also old-school SCA, said it is actually from the 1970s.

I love it because it is all wood, and the pieces fit together like a Japanese puzzle box. I figure that, even if I can't make it accessible, which actually seems like an easy thing to do, I will still enjoy using it like a medieval puzzle box.

My first idea for making it accessible is to mark one of the sets of colored blocks with a tactile dot to distinguish the black pieces from the white. The pieces all have a bottom and top side, so marking the top should be relatively simple.

I've also ordered a tactile tactices graph from 64 Oz. Games, which I mentioned recently in a post. I figure I will lay it on top of the board to mark the squares.

Around holiday time I read about the board game "Nemo's War"
https://www.victorypointgames.com/nemos-second-edition/
and began pestering my gaming housemates to get a copy. It came in a little over a week ago, I've played it with Alexx three times, lost twice, and already found myself getting excited about expansion packs and even found myself saying, "I think there's something wrong with these dice," despite being completely cognizant of the fact that that is a seriously delusional thing to say.

The idea is to use Alexa to create a voice-based adventure game that would allow the player to explore a virtual map of the MIT campus. I am including a voice companion which can add some additional features. I'm basing this companion on the MIT mascot, Tim the beaver, and I picture him as a steampunk-style beaver, still named TIM, but it's an acronym for Touring Intelligent Machine (for screen reader users, that is spelled t o u r i n g).
If I accomplish nothing else today, I will still consider the day a big win.

1. Communications Forum | Oct 25th, 5:00 PM |
37-252
Why I Write Poems
Linda Gregerson

Linda Gregerson will discuss her new book of poems,
The Selvage,
and her calling as a poet and professor of Renaissance literature in conversation with Forum Director David Thorburn and members of the audience.

A 2007 National Book Award finalist and a recent Guggenheim Fellow, Linda Gregerson is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English
Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature. She is the author of four books of poetry and two books of criticism. Gregerson's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Granta, The Paris Review, The Kenyon
Review, The Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. Among her honors and awards are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award
in Literature, the Kingsley Tufts Award, four Pushcart Prizes, grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Bogliasco Foundations,
the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Poetry Society of America, and the National Humanities Center.

2. Communications Forum | Nov 1st, 5:00 PM |
E14-633
Digitizing the Culture of Print: The Digital Public Library of America and Other Urgent Projects
Robert Darnton, John Palfrey, and Susan Flannery

3. October 26                "The Stuff of Romance: Lyric Materialities and the Old French Romance Tradition"
                                      Emma Dillon, University of Pennsylvania
Note: not much info, but refer to http://history.mit.edu/content/ancient-and-medieval-studies-speaker-series

4. Colloquium | Nov 8th, 5:30 PM |
32-155
Finer Fruits: Experiment in Life and Play at Walden
Tracy Fullerton
Sponsored by the Purple Blurb series. Note time.

Walden, a game, is an experiment in play being made about an experiment in living. The game simulates Henry David Thoreau's experiment in living a simplified
existence as articulated in his book Walden. It puts Thoreau’s ideas about the essentials of life into a playable form, in which players can take on the role of Thoreau, attending to the “meaner” tasks of life at the Pond—providing themselves with food, fuel, shelter and clothing—while trying not to lose
sight of their relationship to nature, where the Thoreau found the true rewards of his experiment, his "finer fruits" of life. The game is a work in progress,
and this talk will look closely at the design of the underlying system and the cycles of thought that have gone into developing it. It will also detail
the creation of the game world, which is based on close readings of Thoreau’s work, and the projected path forward for the team as we continue our sojourn
in experimental in play.

Tracy Fullerton, M.F.A., is an experimental game designer, professor and director of the Game Innovation Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she holds the Electronic Arts Endowed Chair in Interactive Entertainment. The Game Innovation Lab is a design research center that has produced several influential independent games, including Cloud, flOw, Darfur is Dying, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and The Night Journey -- a collaboration with media artist Bill Viola. Tracy is also the author of "Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games," a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide.

Not my cup of tea, but I know one or two Janeheads (or is that Austenites?)
https://www.facebook.com/janeaustengame

Kes: This is a fundraiser for the Cambridge Boys and Girls Club, but really, I think I know one or two people who are champions in this sport. It also seems like a really good exercise for people who want to design their own games and want to know what gamers hate.

"We Mock So They Can Play!"
Twelve straight hours playing games you hate? Live on Ustream? That's what our GAMBIT Game Lab is putting itself through on the 18th. A marathon of misery: the 2012 Crappy Game Complaining Marathon.

Why?

Because we love our local Boys and Girls Club. All the money we raise through our pain goes straight to them.
Donate now!
http://gambit.mit.edu/cgcm

We ask two things of you...
Donate $15 or more to the Cambridge Boys and Girls Club today.
Watch the complaining live on Ustream on the 18th between noon and midnight. The feed will go live at http://gambit.mit.edu/cgcm

We thank you for your support!
Your friends at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and MIT Comparative Media Studies
How to Part with Your $
Visit gambit.mit.edu/cgcm.
The Cambridge Boys and Girls Club puts it to great use, funding youth programs in leadership, the arts, sports, and much more.

Now I want to knowmore about Roman board and dice games
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2012/01/a-roman-brothel-token.html

Kes: And the word of the day is "gamic text."

from
http://depts.washington.edu/chid/node/98

block quote start
CHID 496F
Title: CLOSE PLAYING, OR, BIOSHOCK AS PRACTICUM

As part of a continuing series on video games generated by the Critical Gaming Project at UW, will discuss, develop, and do close playing.  Like close reading, close playing requires careful and critical attention to how the game is played (or not played), to what kind of game it is, to what the game looks like or sounds like, to what the game world is like, to what choices are offered (or not offered) to the player, to what the goals of the game are, to how the game interacts with and addresses the player, to how the game fits into the real world, and so on.  To engage all of this, we will take 2K's critically-acclaimed
first-person shooter Bioshock (Xbox360, PS3, PC) as our central gamic text (though other supplemental games will be included as needed).  block quote end