The Enigmatrix: another diagram of games & stuff
(Visited 7385 times) Game talk
Apr 232009
The Complex Universe of Games and Puzzles, Simplified, claims Wired. I think I disagree mightily with many many of the links and clusters (code and math are way more tightly related than that! And I can’t tell why they see Board Games and Games as separate nodes. And…
But it’s a cool visualization, and there are lots of cool gems hidden away. Ah, look, there’s Sprouts, a game I always forget the rules to.
4 Responses to “The Enigmatrix: another diagram of games & stuff”
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There wasn’t a real logical sense to it all. You’re right in that math and code are way more closely related and that the distinction between games and board games seemed arbitrary. I thought there was a large stretch to link Card Games with DnD as well. Where did the basis of research come from to build that graph? It just looks like someone threw all the stuff on paper and took a few passes at organizing it based on their experience and presto, published it.
I’m thinking that the enigmatrix is more to do with part of the May mystery issue of Wired…
The placement of the nodes is the same as the Tree of Life from Jewish Kabbalah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephirot). This looks far more like someone trying to organize a set of games onto the tree of life’s correspondances than someone trying to organize games for games.
What KalevTait said. It looks like a pathetically small non-representative sample of everything was conveniently miscategorized in order to make what someone thought was a cool-looking chart. (The overall effect is rather silly and falls short of its goal.)
Would there be value in dissecting the Wired graph, in order to determine how a more comprehensive and properly laid out graph should be designed? It might more precisely resemble that used by Screenplay Systems’ Word Menu program, with top-level categories and as many levels of subcategories as are needed. The trick would be determining what the sublevels would be. (e.g. In the roleplaying game category, what would be the next subdivision? Genre and setting? Level vs. point based systems? Linear vs. epic?)