Rules of Play: One of Five

Online game site 1UP has posted a short piece on the five must-read game design books. I’m proud to see Rules of Play, the book I wrote with the brilliant Katie Salen, at the top of the list. One of the comments under the article disparages Rules of Play because it reads too much like a textbook. Luckily, that’s exactly what it is!

Late-breaking addition to this post: I just found out that Rules of Play – as well as The Game Design Reader, the anthology that Katie Salen and I edited – are among the handful of recommended game books on the Games for Change book resources page. Thanks, G4C!

Filed under: Books, Media Mentions, Writings

Figment – a new card game

I love making games for any occasion. Figment is a game I designed for a book.

When friends and colleagues Thom Bartscherer and Roderick Coover approached me to contribute something to their book Switching Codes, I told them as a game designer I’d rather make a game than write an essay. Switching Codes is a book from the University of Chicago Press about dialogs between technologists, artists, and scholars, and I decided to make a game that literally re-mixes the interdisciplinary discourse of the book.

Figment takes the form of cards that you cut out of the book (or you can download the PDF and rules here if you want to keep your volume intact). Each card has a snippet of text taken from one of the essays in the book, and by playing your cards in combination, you make statements alternately profound and absurd. Players must follow the rules of grammar while also making statements that other players deem as genuinely insightful. The first one to play all their cards wins.

Part Apples to Apples and part Exquisite Corpse, Figment always seems to inspire both deep philosophical conversations as well as hysterical laughing fits. I like the way that Figment intervenes playfully in the rest of the book, using unsuspecting essays as its raw material and encouraging readers to deface the object they just purchased. And the rules of Figment don’t have to be applied just to Switching Codes – with the properly chosen source texts, Figment is a process that could be applied to other documents as well.

I’d love to hear from you if you play the game! Post here on my blog or drop me an email at e @ ericzimmerman.com.

Filed under: Academic, Books, Figment, Games, Writings

My latest book: Real-Time Research

Hot off the digital presses is a book project I created with all-star game scholars Seann Dikkers, Kurt Squire, and Constance Steinkuehler. Real-Time Research is the outcome of a series of workshops we staged at conferences like the Game Developers Conference and Games, Learning, & Society. At at Real-Time Research workshop, people form guerrilla research teams across wildly different disciplines and conduct experiments in game scholarship during the conference they are attending. The RTR process was modeled on game design itself and involved game-card constraints, improvisational design, and enforced uncertainty.

The book chronicles these misadventures, including many examples of the resulting projects as well as in-depth guidelines (and even game card templates!) for creating your own Real-Time Research events. Special thanks to Drew Davidson at the ETC press for publishing the book – and with such a lovely cover and interior design too! Props to my co-authors Constance, Kurt, and Seann. Available in paper and digital form.

Filed under: Academic, Books, Writings