Project Horseshoe: Peachy fallout
We’ll see whether this post goes out on the apparently damaged RSS feed!
There are a few posts around the web reacting to or riffing on or vastly extending some of the discussion in my Influences talk from Project Horseshoe.
Among them: Man Bytes Blog arrives at something that he feels may convey a peach, something in fact very similar to the “sense tunneling” approach that many PH attendees favored. He uses the word “metonymy” for it, but I think that a more accurate word perhaps might be “synesthesia.”
Brian Green posts the peach problem as one of his Weekend Design Challenges. It seems to evoke a passionate response from Grimwell in the comment thread…
Another Project Horseshoe attendee, Dan Cook of Lost Garden, has a lengthy quasi-rebuttal in which he says that we should not consider games inferior, but instead play to their strengths. He uses the example of the card game Asshole to show how games can tackle subtle points — not the taste of a peach, but deep looks at human relationships. Plus, one person in the comments thread calls me a whiner. 🙂
Dan also has his overall thoughts on Project Horseshoe, which he calls “a unicorn convention.”
7 Responses to “Project Horseshoe: Peachy fallout”
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Synethesia is clearly an appropriate term if you’re coming at it from the experiential side of things. I chose metonymy to keep with the grammar focus of my Round Table and the overall literary/storytelling nature of my posts. *kniw*
Thanks, as always, for great blog-fodder and even better – for your well thought and well intentioned challenges to the status quo of design!
It does not come to RSS.
I was going to write, but I couldn’t link. And my RSS wasn’t working either, so I didn’t know you were back up.
Welcome back.
Yehuda
[…] Comments […]
When you say “passionate” do you mean I sound crazy?
It’s the spiders I tell you!
(just catched up on horseshoe/peach thread) While reading the piece i kept returning to the same question: Can there be a “game” without specific and attainable goal? Would i like to play for result, or act for expirience of the action?
Goals of course can be very diverse, can be different for different users, change with time, etc. yet still most of games i can remember are goal-driven. one 2L player may want virtual date, another make $$ for his store yet in each case there is clear goal and some ways of achiving it.
It seems your challange is goal-less games, medtiation expiriences. Flapping: it wasn’t a game as long as it was “zen” of flapping. flapping for the “goal” of flapping. as soon as you put in clearly defined goal with flapping becoming a tool to achive a goal it snaped back to goal-driven hunter-gatherer expirience of typical game (“analize, predict, plot strategy, act”).
Math imho is just byproduct. it works great to describe goals, describe actions and the process how actions translate into results. remove goals and there will be little math. The final question i ended up with: will our hunter-gatherer culture play (massively enough) in something about expirience, not attaining results? will hunter-gatherer just enjoy flapping the bird for the zen of it, instead of stoning the damn critter, roasting it on campfire, enjoy his +10xp for the kill, +20 for cooking skill roll and go on on his merry way to solve the next goal?
[…] Attendee Dan Cook, on Lost Garden, said of Horseshoe, “Sparks were flying. And hay. Don’t forget the hay. … It gave me faith that if you just get the brightest people of our industry off their isolated islands and give them a chance to talk, amazing ideas are inevitable. Experience shared is multiplied, not diminished.” And Raph Koster’s Horsehoe talk, “Influences,” attracted much post-conference comment. […]