Silver Jacket

Category: Games

  • Dodgeball 101

    Dodgeball
    I recently spotted a paper (pdf) in the July 2008 issue of the influential journal Psychological Science with the following title: "Objects on a Collision Path With the Observer Demand Attention."

    Hey, you think I should pay attention to that thing headed for my face? Leave it to scientists to require grant funding to figure out what they were supposed to pick up in gym class by like first grade.

    Seriously, those guys would not stand at chance at Mentalball.

    (Super-seriously, there are some new findings in the paper. Don't let the cool kids tell you science is not cool.)

  • Mentalball

    Dodgeball
    In my interview with games designer Jane McGonigal for the June issue of Psychology Today, I asked her if she and her twin sister made up a lot of games together as kids. She said, in part, "We went through a phase of making up playground games, versions of hide and seek but incredibly convoluted versions that you would have to explain like a hundred times to people." That reminded me of piece of hypertext fiction I wrote in college that was set in a particle accelerator/psychiatric hospital. Inmates played a game called Mentalball. I remember my teacher Robert Coover really liking the passage:

    (more…)

  • Come Out & Play!

    Splash_header450
    Typically I would not choose to do go outside and sprint around the city in 95 degree heat as I did both days last weekend, but I had an excuse: A swarm of wonky and wonder-eyed game designers from around the world coalesced with their crazy-ass inventions to bring the Come Out & Play Festival back to New York. Here's a roundup of what I played:

    (more…)

  • A fascinating, and queasy, new competition.

    Clive_guitar_2
    To be a journalist is to occupy one of the worst stations in life one can imagine. Picture it: Tied to a computer, sometimes on the road, occasionally forced to talk to strangers, always starting from square one on a new topic after each deadline. And you are maddeningly, incessantly indentured to the hard truth of reality, or the hard reality of truth, or some combination thereof, with the nitpicky public waiting to jump on you for any creative deviation from "fact." What a life! It’s enough to drive anyone to drink, or let their hair go, or at least compete with coworkers to slip inane specimens of verbiage into front page stories. Well, we know which route(s) Malcolm Gladwell has (claimed to have) taken.

    In case you missed it, read Jack Shafer’s rundown on Slate. Gladwell told a tale, broadcast on NPR, about challenging a colleague at the Washington Post back in the day to rack up instances of the phrase "raises new and troubling questions" in their articles. Then they moved on to round 2 with "perverse and often baffling." It’s a fun story, but Shafer did some legwork and called bullshit on most of it. Anyway, there was a flurry of attention in the blogosphere that seems to have abated.

    But wait! A new contender has entered the ring! Who else but Clive Thompson? First, let me quote from a February 11 story in the Canadian paper The National Post: "Malcolm and Clive? Both went to the University of Toronto around the same time. Both are whip-smart and terrifically ambitious. [True.] … The only difference? Clive never made it to pop culture level, and as one tittle-tattle who knows this world well tells me, ‘Clive has always been a little envious of Malcolm.’ [Unverified, and to be fair, Gladwell instills both envy and schadenfreude in writers from this country too.]"

    So what does Dark Horse Thompson do in his latest Wired magazine column? He creates a mashup that’s one part "perverse and often baffling" and one part "raises new and troubling questions." The result: "These tools raise a fascinating, and queasy, new ethical question." You can look it up, right on page 60.

    Malcolm, are you listening? That’s Thompson: 1, Gladwell: 0.
    Hop to it.

  • Bunnydome

    To complete the Mad Max effect, Burning Man has its own Thunderdome. Two people dangle from the top via bungee cords and go at each other with padded bats.

    Thunderdome

    This year the Billion Bunny March descended upon the ‘dome and claimed it as their own. I was not there to witness the event, but legend has it that the following was uttered: "Two bunnies enter, 40 bunnies leave."

    Bunnydome

    [image sources: 1, 2]

  • Bootstraps or Leather Straps? Your Call.

    BouncerDo people with better memories store more information in their brains? Maybe not. Last month a cognitive neuroscientist (Edward Vogel at the University of Oregon) published a paper in Nature showing that certain types of memory capacity may have less to do with how much raw data you can store than with how selective you are at letting in relevant information. (Here‘s a press release describing the experiment.)

    Notably, Vogel describes the brain filter that keeps the bad stuff out as a nightclub bouncer. Regrettably, I think my brain hires bouncers from a temp service. Sometimes I get the "come one, come all" circus caller who will let in hobos, Hiltons, and stray cats ("Hey look at that piece of lint! Oh, wow, tin foil!") and sometimes I get the off-duty SWAT team member ("I’m sorry, did you just say something?").

    (more…)

  • Hot in Herre. No, Seriously, I’m on Fire.

    DdiWell there is now a game out called "Dance Dance Immolation!" You put on a fireproof silver jacket, dance around like a spazz, and get flames shot at you. Sounds familiar:

    If only I had the fireproof facemask then (January 1997) that I have now. But at least I didn’t have any facial hair to singe off.

    [P.S. If you are pop-culture-deficient, a band named The Prodigy made a b&w music video in 1996 where a strange man dances around in a big tunnel and screams in a British accent, "I’m the firestarter! Twisted firestarter!" You can watch it here. My friends Ken and Glen and I decided that was a bad message to send to the kids, so we created "Twisted Firefighter" for their public access TV show, "The Ken and Glen Show." The more you know, kiddies…]

  • Worst. Jenga move. Ever.

    CbgLast night during a heated game of Jenga, my friend became frustrated with her prospects for success on her turn.  So she copped out and removed a piece from the top row, only to place it back on top. If you’ve ever played Jenga, you know how lame this is, not to mention illegal. Here’s the kicker: while cheating she also managed to knock over the entire stack.

    This moment was perhaps topped by her move in the subsequent game. Again frustrated and pessimistic, she took a swipe at the stack to bring the game to an abrupt close. Apparently a flash of extreme regression. But this time, only the upper third of the stack fell. A failure relative to her previous debacle. Ouch.

    In Drinking Jenga fashion, the party of 10 or so had written tasks on the blocks with pens. There were the usual drinking moves (chicks/dicks take a drink, "waterfall") and naughty moves (kissing, spanking, "eye for an eye," and the occasional lap dance) but my favorites were "solve a Rubik’s Cube," "demonstrate bowhunting skills," and "chug a pitcher of sangria." (Fortunately for Abby, we had a pitcher of sangria handy, and even more fortunately, it was nearly empty.)

    Quote of the night: Fed up with our trash talking, Abby–a compact but tough-as-nails rugby player–threatened us with, "I’ll kick your all ass!" Instant classic.

  • Rock On

    WorldrpsPeople don’t think there’s any strategy to Rock, Paper, Scissors, but the website of the World RPS Society delves into some of the common psychological and  physical strategies used by players in the know. They also name the eight most popular gambits:

    Avalanche (RRR)
    Bureaucrat (PPP)
    Crescendo (PSR)
    Dénouement (RSP)
    Fistfull o’ Dollars (RPP)
    Paper Dolls (PSS)
    Scissor Sandwich (PSP)
    Toolbox (SSS)

    It’s hard to whether these people in full honesty believe RPS is more than a game of chance, but I defy anyone to beat my lifetime winning percentage of 56%.