#008 - Weird and creative games
Hey friends, foes and those yet undecided!
After a heat wave heavy July, I've been loving the weather in August. We've got a lot of lovely summer rain and I've enjoyed listening to the raindrops dance on the roof of our office and the windowsill of my bedroom.
There were many wonderful moments this month. I made new friends both online and offline, got talked into a fun art installation project at work, bought a season ticket for the local hockey team and touched grass after rainy days.
Creative, weird games
I love gaming, especially non-digital games (board games, card games and ... well, just games without boards or cards necessarily). I especially enjoy games that put an emphasis on creativity, storytelling and creating interesting games on the fly rather than doing whatever it takes to win.
Today, I want to introduce you to some of the weird and wonderful that people have designed.
No More Jockeys
Let's start with the great No More Jockeys. Mark Watson and Tim Key, two great British comedians, came up with the game in 2002 and it became a regular Youtube show during the pandemic with Alex Horne.
The game's rules are very simple: you name people (real or fictional) one at a time and then name a category they belong to (for example, "Leonardo DiCaprio, no more Academy Award winners"). In future turns, nobody can name people belonging to any of the categories listed during the game. If someone does, any other player can challenge them and if they in fact made a mistake, they are out of the game.
It's such a fun game that you can play anywhere with anyone. There are no physical components and you don't even need to keep score. A perfect game for long train rides with a group of friends (or strangers who then become friends!).
1000 Blank White Cards
1000 Blank White Cards is a perfect game for people who not only enjoy playing card games but have more than once imagined designing their own cards.
The game starts with blank cards and players design and draw the cards as the game goes on. In future sessions, you can then bring previous piles of cards as a starting point for future games and over time, amass a collection of cool, fun, weird and absurd cards designed by many different people.
Its origin story is wonderful:
The story, if anybody is remotely interested, is extremely simple. I was sitting at the Café one day, musing, staring off into space, across the room, past the booth, where a woman sat making flash cards. As my no doubt fatigued, caffeinated brain tried to find some good or wholesome thing to cling to, it lit instead on the wording on her box of cards. It read, 1000 BLANK WHITE CARDS. I read it as the GAME of 1000 Blank White Cards, and therein was born...
Before the pandemic, we used to play a lot of games at the office on Fridays and I often brought my set and we had a lot of fun drawing cards.
The cards can do anything really, only the sky is limit. The game is best when played with a group of people who want to create a good, beautiful game rather than drawing a card that says "I win".
Nomic
Nomic is a game designed in the early 1980s and it's a game of democracy and politics and law.
Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed. - designer Peter Suber in Nomic: A Game of Self-Amendment
The game starts with an initial set of rules and from there onward, players propose, debate and vote on rule changes.
Anarchy Chess
Anarchy Chess isn't exactly its own game but rather a variant of chess, and in this case a specific instance being played in Reddit. In 2021, a Reddit user u/scurlocc made a post with a chess board and the only rule of the game: "Top comment picks the next move, legal or not".
Youtuber Harping Harp has made an excellent video about the mayhem that followed over the 70 day collaborative community game.
All of these games are examples of people making the game themselves within a small foundational rules and how the quality of a game session is purely derived from the creativity of the players and a shared willingness to a good game the goal over winning a game.
Stuff I made this month
August has been a very blog-heavy month with the blogging festival Blaugust being a big focus. I posted 31 blog posts in 31 days and for the third year in a row I reached the highest award of the festival: a Rainbow Diamond Award.
When the month started, I wasn't feeling particularly creative about it and set my goal to a more modest 15 posts. But as soon as the month started and the community got active in Discord and Fediverse and their blogs, I started to get ideas and inspiration, got into many wonderful discussions, learned a ton and made new online friends.
One blog post that went viral in the web this month was Dotfiles feel too intimate and personal to share in which I wrote about how despite my love for sharing and open sourcing stuff, for some reason dotfiles feel too intimate to do so.
I wrote about my experiences of picking wallabag as my Pocket replacement after an almost 3-month experience with it. Spoilers: I really like it and haven't looked at other options after I picked it.
Blog comments were a big discussion point in the Blaugust community in the mid-point of the month and I threw my thoughts into the pot as well.
I thought about how handwriting's slower pace helps me think while I write and how notes require regular gardening to be useful.
For this month's IndieWeb Carnival, I wrote about #971226, my colour in the web. We had a really good group of bloggers participating this month and you can find all of them in Marisabel's post.
Finally, I want to highlight a post I wrote about taking initiative in building the things you want to see in the web. Recently, there's been a lot of chatter in the web about wanting to have more personal blogs, discussion forums and non-corporate places to gather in the web and I encourage people to build those things and starting new communities!
Community activities
As the summer is coming to its end, I've started to become more active in building our community programs for the fall.
Turku ❤️ Frontend has four wonderful meetups scheduled for the fall, including our 10 year anniversary meetup in December! I'm still working on finishing the details on the last speaker slots but the program looks great already.
archipylago will bring local Python developers together three times this fall: twice for a meetup with really interesting talks booked and once for an Advent of Code programming sprint session.
I'm also very excited for PyCon Finland in October and tiny ruby #{conf} in November which both I'll be attending to learn new stuff and meet lovely people.
In Mastodon, I've been participating in Fediverse Donut Club for a while now and while our community is small, it's always nice to see people post photos of their donuts and other pastries on every other Friday. I like to ask people to share a win, no matter if small or big, from their week so we can celebrate together on our casual, distributed coffee break moment. If you're in Fediverse, join us! Next one is Friday September 12th and all you need is a pastry of some sort and a post with hashtag #FediDonutFriday.
Lovely bits from the internet
Vibe-coded fish saw problems
Last month I shared DrawAFish website, a collaborative art project where you drew fish and they swam together.
Shortly after that, the developer shared a postmortem about an incident that allowed people to do nasty things
Every single username was transformed to a heinous slur, many unsavory fish had made it into the fishtank, and many beautiful fish were gone. How did this happen?
It's a good read for anyone working with tech and especially anyone who does vibe coding.
Evolution of Spider-Man's web swinging in TV and cinema
I came across Alex Boucher's video How Spider-Man's Web Swinging Changed and enjoyed learning about different Spider-Man media and how improvements in technology and the art of making movies have changed Spider-Man's most iconic movement tech.
Bourne Identity without exposition
Another great film video essay I saw this month was CinemaStix's yep, turns out the movie still works without all the exposition about how the first movie in Jason Bourne series would have worked wonderfully if the viewers would have learned about Bourne at the same pace as Bourne himself did.
Did you know you can do all this with CSS?
Lyra posted You no longer need JavaScript in which she walks us through many new CSS features you might have missed and how they can help us write better software for the web.
It's a must read for any frontend web developer.
Looking beyond collective blogging
V.H. Belvadi published another great essay Looking beyond collective blogging which sparked many ideas in my head and we had a bit of back and forth email discussion with him about it.
I'm still processing my ideas but I'm looking forward to writing a couple of blog posts of the ideas that sparked from this essay.