Games change this because they create meaningful experiences that I can later draw back upon in conversations with my friends and other people.  Exciting moments become ways to strengthen the relationship.

However, the games currently offered on most mobile devices do little to actually strengthen personal connections and relationships.  They’re often interesting diversions that help maintain connections (or at least slow the disconnect) but they rarely create beautiful moments where I actually feel like I am doing something unique with friends.

The game that has come the closest to doing this is League of Legends.  Running away from enemies down a lane, beating an opponent that outmatches you, winning the game, or even losing the game are all great ways to build connections.

This is why I actually think that challenging co-operative games (that require asynchronous play) could be an awesome way for individuals to develop meaningful moments together (via a distance) without requiring the time-sink that is competitive gaming leagues.

The post Small Moments appeared first on The Game Atlas.

Clever – Being clever is about doing things that look intelligent, original, or individual.  It’s about valuing individuality over the right thing.  It’s about proving “how good you are”.  Clever looks at the crowd and purposefully tries to do something difficult.  Clever is about self.

Smart – Smart is about doing the thing that is most logical, empathetic, and contextual.  It’s about recognizing that as a human being you are fallible and that trying to make things as easy for yourself as possible is a lot more important than making yourself look good.  Smart does the right thing instead of the individual thing.  Smart is beyond self.

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The local co-op next to my college has one of the awesomest receipts I have seen.  It is clean, conserves space, and communicates the information that is important to the user.

A: The receipt itself is short, almost less than 6-inches long, which is a lot smaller than a typical receipt.

B: An awesome use of the logo to clearly announce to the viewer where the receipt is from (also good ad space).

C: Clearly announces contact information.

D: Allows user to see when the user made the purchase and who they interacted with.

E: The purchases are clearly outlined as well as the price of each.

F: The total is bolded and towards the end so that the customer can add the items as well as clearly understand what the price was.

G: The back again announces the date and time of the purchase.

H: The use of space to once again declare what the price was.  An awesome use of repetition to make sure that the customer can’t miss what’s being described.

I: The use of space allows the receipt to announce to the customer how much they saved as well as the percent of items were purchased locally.

J: The item count is another cool touch because I find I often have some general idea of how many different items I purchase without actually knowing how much I purchased.

K: Finally the economic use of space allows for a nice “Thank you” at the end of the receipt.

The post Deconstructing a Receipt appeared first on The Game Atlas.

Education, it seems, is the next big target for “disruption” and “innovation” from the tech industry.  Education, the pundits argue, is backwards, behind the times, and inefficient.  They’re waiting for the next “Facebook story” that will revolutionize this “archaic” institution.

And the educational institutions, for their part, have seemed rather unperturbed by this idea.  Education is prepared to weather this storm with its broad shoulders and strong intellectual foundations.  But it’s difficult to weather a storm when you’re already underwater.

Institutions are formed because of a necessity to protect and maintain sets of practices and knowledge in the face of cost and danger.  This made sense in a world where the transference of knowledge itself was incredibly costly and dangerous.  Before the Internet existed, the mere notion of transferring sets of ideas from one community to another was laborious and fraught with peril.  Educational institutions existed to take the risk of maintaining and creating knowledge for the rest of the world.  Teaching was sacred because the transference of knowledge came with a significant monetary cost.

But that world doesn’t exist anymore, and educational institutions need to come to terms with it. Education is no longer the “protector” of information. It can’t be.  Emerson saw this coming nearly 150 years ago when he proclaimed that scholars couldn’t be individuals simply willing to pass on old information; he argued that they had to be leaders, searching for truth and beauty even when that search wasn’t popular.

Education is already behind.  Efficient teaching used to be the financial argument that educational institutions used to justify themselves.  I think most teachers would recognize that this wasn’t why they taught, but it was a good argument.  But if institutions keep using teaching efficiency as a measure of success, they will rapidly lose relevance to the disruptors, who can develop programs to efficiently teach people.

Institutions could find the smartest teachers, teach the awesomest courses, and even give away iPads at every class and they would still lose.  If the fight is about who has better courses, tests, material, or extracurricular tie-ins, educational institutions will lose.  Period.

I’m willing to bet a very pretty penny that there are ten year-olds who have made broader theoretical impacts on their communities than some academics have in this country.  If this is true, it belies a stark reality: the Internet can more efficiently spread, intertwine, and create new ideas than an educational institution ever could.

But education can do something better.  It can make connections, behave flexibly, and, yes, actually out-innovate Internet-based learning.  Learning about trends in successful innovation, it becomes clear that location is incredibly important.  Bringing groups of like-minded, committed, and intelligent people together in a single location creates massive outpourings of positive creativity and change.

Institutions should try to take as much advantage of this as possible, not just because it’s something they can do better, but also because it’s something that will (shockingly enough) also deepen educational experiences. Instead of funneling students into classes, they should be guided (in the way that only an intelligent and experienced body of administrators, faculty, and staff can do) into creating, organizing, and innovating a wide range of ideas.

Within this really special space, failure becomes a potent learning experience on which new ideas, identities, and relationships are formed.  Institutions can’t just paste technology into classrooms and call it a success; they must re-evaluate the basic principles that technology challenges.  Education morphing from an exploration of values and consciousness into a race to see who can accrue more titles and skills would be a nightmare. It would deprive our world of insightful individuals who can effectively solve problems and defend the rights of their fellow citizens.

Or can institutions use the wave of disruption to innovate again, to deconstruct the student-teacher binary, to give students the opportunity to truly experiment and explore without the confines of “courses” with imaginary mandates and responsibilities?  Institutions should allow students to take control of their time and lead their own experiences and projects while providing tools for innovation and creativity, like an experienced and wise faculty.  If institutions did this, I say bring on the disruption.

The post The wolves are coming… appeared first on The Game Atlas.

Mario Party Monopoly

The game board has shrunk (a lot!).  Its is now only 10 by 10 instead of 17 by 17 so that players can get around the board quicker.

Now there are different start spaces for each of the different characters so that players aren’t running into each other at the beginning of the game.

The rooms can now be entered walking “through” the door instead of landing on the exactly correct space.

Some of the rooms have been changed around slightly so that it is easier to gain cards from them.

Finally, though this change isn’t implemented on the board itself, each character now has different “victory point conditions” where they trade specific sets of cards in for victory points to create some diversity in the game.

More info and playtest results to come later.

The post Monopoly Remade Remade appeared first on The Game Atlas.

Here are some rough logo sketches (did I say unfinished?) I’ve done for labels from the family “farm” (it’s more like a large-ish patch of soil we grow crops on).

Included is the version in black and white and the version with colors added.  It clearly is a ways to go, but it’s a start of sorts.

The post ‘Cuthbert Farms’ Logo appeared first on The Game Atlas.

Tolstoy summed it up best:

“Lincoln is a strong type of those who make for truth and justice, for brotherhood and freedom. Love is the foundation of his life. That is what makes him immortal and that is the quality of a giant.”

Having spent a significant amount of break reading Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (and still failing to complete the book), I feel qualified to give a completely unqualified look at the lessons I learned from Lincoln’s life and presidency.

What spoke strongest to me about Lincoln was the fact that he didn’t have a specific goal to accomplish: he did not grow up dreaming of ending slavery.  In fact, slightly to his discredit, early into his presidency, he found no reason (or way) to end slavery where it existed within the South.  He did, however, want to make his “dent in the universe” (to steal a Steve Jobs phrase).  The earlier chapters of the book speak quite definitively about his desire to leave a lasting impact on the course of the world and his fears that all of the great challenges had already been overcome.

Lincoln repeatedly lost his bids for congressional office before achieving the presidency.  He was often mistreated and underappreciated by his opponents (and sometimes even his allies).  Even so, he kept a clear view of the long plan, unwilling to sacrifice the future for present gains.  One of his most notable tactics was ensuring his supporters treated potential voters for the Republican nomination with courtesy and kindness.  He explained that they were unlikely to be the first choice for anyone but his goal was to be the best second option. He knew he couldn’t win outright, so he planned to win in the event of a deadlock and in doing so was successful.

Lincoln’s success did not come early.  He spent many years working to teach himself law, working as a simple country lawyer, and working as a rather unknown senator before he got his break.  The “overnight success that was years in the making” paradigm was clearly at work throughout his story.

Lincoln held many incredibly absurd views.  He felt that Caucasians and African-Americans could not live peaceably together.  He went so far as to convene a council to convince the majority of soon-to-be freed slaves that relocation to Africa was their best option and he was a staunch believer that the Civil War should not be a war to end slavery.

While he was slow to change his mind, he showed a clear willingness to be proven wrong and make decisions that challenged his previous beliefs.  Most notably, he reversed his decision to try to colonize freed slaves and he made a decisive change with the Emancipation Proclamation, formally making the war a war to end slavery.  He managed to successfully navigate incredibly difficult political waters through compromise while maintaining his staunchest values.  Even people who disagreed with him recognized that once he made a decision public, it would not be revoked.

I think that Lincoln’s strongest quality was his ability to see beyond the (sometimes petty) politics to make the changes he recognized were most important.  While president, half of the Union thought he was a dunce, a lunatic, or a simpleton.  He was consistently able to weave his way to an endgame that supported all parties as best he could and he felt deep empathy for the men and women whose lives he impacted.

What was most inspiring for me was the fact that he was not a “great” man in many senses of the word.  It is unlikely that he could be considered a polymath today.  He did not have the connections or vocabulary to move easily among the upper echelons of society.  He accomplished great actions not through his ability to “play the game” of politics well, but because he created sincere connections with people and valued progress over ego or politics.

May we all accomplish things so simple and bold.

The post On Lincoln appeared first on The Game Atlas.

I’ve been really interested in the different mechanics that make up Monopoly because on their own they are very interesting though the Monopoly game itself is rather dry.

This game takes one key element, rolling dice and moving, and expands it to be the point of the entire game.

While I don’t have rules attached yet, the basic goal of the game is to move around to the different rooms and collect cards while avoiding other players (and jail).  Players can collect coins and compete with other players.

Rules (and test results) will be up soon.

Room Runners

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The goal was to have a number of sections, each with a unique theme that repeated over the course of each loop.

Each ring//loop represents a different layer of importance and complexity.  The most inner ring is the simplest and must fundamental, while the outer ring represents the combination of the different values.

The sections are as follows:

Blue: Interaction with Others

Black: Interaction with Self

Red: Production

Green: Behavior

The idea behind using a loop was also that it could be unwound and read from end to end in a single line, thus listing off the different values from another perspective.  The goal was to pack as many different types of values into a single (simple) entity as possible.

The post Values Chart appeared first on The Game Atlas.

At the same time I’ve changed the rules slightly.  Instead of trying to collect points, players are trying to send cards at one another when they destroy them.  The goal of the game is to be the first player to get rid of all of their cards, similar to Uno.

Players start with 10 cards in their hand at the beginning of the game and the goal of the game is to get rid of all the cards in your hand. Right now, when you destroy cards you send them to your opponent, but I could definitely see a variation where you have to collect them instead.

For the time being I think it will be a good idea to postpone this and instead work on a different project so the ideas about Fractallus have some time to percolate and settle.

Fractallus Print Sheet 13

The rules of the game are as follows. Cut out each of the individual hexagons in order to play.

The game plays from 2-6 players.

Shuffle the deck of hexagons and deal each player 7 cards.  Play proceeds in clockwise fashion with each player laying down a single card so that a one of the sides with red, blue, or yellow connects to another piece of the same color.

If the connection creates a set such that 3 or more cards of the same number are adjacent from one another they explode and destroy al numbers in descending order that are smaller than them.  These destroyed cards are sent to your opponent’s hands.

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