"Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair"

There was a Minecraft sculpture contest at PAX East, and the winner was Nakki, with this awesome display of block-sculptury:

Click for full size.

The sculpture is of Penny Arcade characters Twisp and Catsby.

For those who haven't been inside of Minecraft, you'll have no real sense of the size of this 3D structure, which is made of hundreds of blocks that are about 1 meter high in the scale of the game. That makes this ... well, really big. It just makes me want to break into "Ozymandias."

Monopoly is for Commies

Henry George

This post about Monopoly from The Straight Dope (via Kathy Shaidle) made me realize that not everyone is aware of the bizarre origins of Monopoly. The game was, in fact, created to teach the evils of property ownership and promote Georgism, a kind of red-headed stepchild of socialism and capitalism. Georgism opposed private ownership of land and sought to replace all taxes and tariffs with a single tax on land use. George's beliefs have stirred a faint bit of interest lately thanks to Matthew Bellamy, lead singer/guitarist of Muse and an ardent Georgist.

The designer of the game, Lizzie Magie, was a passionate follower of Henry George, and created The Landlord's Game to illustrate (rather poorly) George's ideas. Lizzie was obviously a little light on the rhetorical skills, since the person who owned the most monopolies and properties actually was the winner in her design, thus proving that being a slumlord and robber baron is pretty cool and you should get started on that right away.

Henry George and Karl Marx hated each other, and George's definition of "socialism" would have made Marx see red. (Wait a second...) George had no problems with free trade and didn't hate capitalism all that much (although he really hated the Chinese). Monopolies and landowners, however, made him hoppin' mad. George was no crank, and some of his suggestions align fairly well with Distributism. He didn't believe the State should own land (he didn't trust them either): he thought no one should own land. In contrast to the sweaty lunatic ravings of Marx and Engels, he comes across as kind of sensible and moderate, even though his ideas are completely unworkable.

Lizzie's game did a pretty rotten job as socio-political propaganda, but it did help teach generations of aspiring capitalists the allure of easy money. As you can see from her original designs, that was probably not part of her plan. (That little circle in the upper right-hand corner shows the Earth encircled by the phrase“Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.” It would later wind up with a more catchy name: "Go.")

Patents show the evolution of Magie's game. This is her first filing for The Landlord's Game in 1904:

And here's an original version:

This is the 1924 patent revision (filed under her married name of Elizabeth M. Phillips) which adds the concept of a monopoly for the first time.

This is a modern rendering of the 1924 revision.

In 1932, Dan Layman created Finance (published by Knapp Electric) which was one of the final stages in the evolution of Monopoly.

Finally, Charles Darrow ripped off all these elements and created Monopoly:

This is one of Darrow's early versions of Monopoly from 1933, printed on oilcloth and ... holy smokes, it's round!

And it all began with Lizzie Magie, shown below in a photo that captures her in mid-transformation into Groucho Marx.

PS: Monopoly has come full circle, so to speak. Monopoly Revolution, released last year, uses a round board like that found in Charles Darrow's original printing:

Forbidden Island in 3D

I love fan-made versions of board games. The good ones show some amazing modeling skills, and are always labors of love. This one is a sculpted recreation of GameWright's co-op sinking-island game Forbidden Island. The original game was designed by Matt Leacock as a family-friendly version of concepts from his hit, Pandemic. Here's one overview of the board, but check out the link for a full set of pictures. I think the creator is named Baptiste Derrez, but I'm not certain of that.

Here's a picture of the original for comparison:

The Wearing of The Grin

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, but I just have not been able to put in my usual gaming time. February through May is a busy season for extracurriculars around these parts.

But I didn't want St. Patrick's Day to pass without posting my favorite Irish cartoon. (Yes, "McDonald" is Irish, not Scottish. Although, in all likelihood, it's probably Scottish if I go back far enough, and I do have a remarkable fondness for Uncle Scrooge McDuck. Also, I'm fairly keen on kilts.)

"Now isn't this sight enough to set the heart crosswise?"



The audio is a little bit out of sync, but you can find this one on The Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. 1 DVD set.

Cheap Clicks: Zynga Sexualizes Children

Click for full size

If you're wondering what the picture above shows, let me take a moment to explain it to you.

Zynga has a piece of crap "social game" called FrontierVille, which is just more of the same FarmVille compulsion-loop tripe, only with a pioneer theme. At a presentation during the SXSW Expo, Zynga's lead designer Brian Reynolds displayed this image showing something they learned from FrontierVille. See that picture of the girl with the sheep? Well, she may either be pushing it or hugging it, but a lot of people seem to think she's doing ... something else with it. (I know, it doesn't make any sense since a girl can't ... never mind.)

Anyway, Reynolds observed that this unexpected innuendo lead to "our highest post rate and our highest clickthrough rate." They attributed this to the unintended sexual innuendo. As the above slide observes, "the younger ones [meaning children who play the game] never notice any innuendo; the adults 'share' it constantly."

So they started deliberately adding things like "Scott just got wood" and "Margaret needs a few good screws." Haha! See! It's funny when we sexualize children for the amusement of adults! And waddaya know, the inhabits of our Jersey Shore culture kept reposting, responding and clicking through the posts with innuendo at a much higher rate than they did for the posts without.

Have we become such a debased culture that everything must be sexualized? When sexuality and innuendo is everywhere, then its mystique, and ultimately its appeal, becomes lost. We're raising up a hyper-sexualized generation by creating a public square wherein every piece of visual and audio stimulation is saturated in sexuality. That's not amusing or even erotic. It's just boring.

Popular culture is at an interesting point. There's a struggle going on right now between those who wish to push us further down the road of excessive sex and violence, and those who want to reclaim a more respectable tone for mass entertainment. Look at pop music, where the grotesque, derivative, perverse Lady Gaga and the sweet, talented, girl-next-door Taylor Swift have almost identical record sales. One exalts the freakish and outlandishly sexual, and the other exalts the commonplace and relatively chaste. It's the same in gaming, with the tug-of-war between the family-friendly Wii games and the uber-violence of some modern action games. These dichotomies are not hidden: in fact, they're part of the appeal, with each camp having their own advocates.

But when mature elements are deliberately added to something as apparently child-friendly as FrontierVille, the lines become blurred. Parents may overlook something like FrontierVille because it seems to be innocuous, but all the while designers are slipping in mature content under the guise of cartoon sheep and little girls.

I was disappointed to see Brian Reynolds attached to this kind of garbage. Reynolds is a talented guy who worked with Sid Meier and was the lead designer on Civilization II and Alpha Centari. Unfortunately, his own company, Big Huge Games, floundered despite doing two excellent games: Rise of Nations and Catan. I've met and interviewed Reynolds and he's a genuinely nice guy with a gift for making good strategy games. In this economy, I can't blame a man for going where the money is, and right now the money is with Zynga. I only hope some day he gets out with his dignity intact.

h/t Joystiq

Playful Quotes

"The life of a man is a combination of seriousness and play, and only he who knows the delicate act of balancing the two deserves to be called the wisest and happiest of men."

                                                           Goethe

"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."

                                                           Plato

"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play."

                                                           Heraclitus

A Closer Look: French Tarot: Trumps 9 & 10

Many people are familiar with the standard Tarot suits (the "Major Arcana") used for "divination" purposes, but they're less aware that Tarot cards were created for playing trick-taking games and have a rich and diverse design history. These images are part of an ongoing series highlighting the art of a single deck used in France, which contains scenes of rural and domestic life in the 19th century.

Click to enlarge

Trump No. 9 detail.

Tarot Trump No. 10

Games Magazine: May Cover Maze

Robert Abbott, master of the logic maze, created the cover puzzle for the upcoming May 2011 issue of Games. In the original maze, there are four types of animal that can come in four different colors. You have to travel from the blue fox at the bottom to the blue chipmunk at the top by moving between pairs of animals. You can move any distance horizontally or vertically, but you can only end your move on an animal of the same type or color as the animal on which you started your move.

Bob has programmed a Java version of this maze which you can try at his site, logicmazes.com.

After Bob finished the design, he decided that he could make it more challenging by adding diagonal moves and increasing the size. Check out his site for an interactive version of this harder maze.

Code-Breaking For Fun and Profit

c. xkcd.com

Codes and ciphers are an area of puzzling that I haven't really written much about, but they've fascinated me since I first read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug" as a child. As any history buff knows, cryptography and code-breaking has played a vital role in politics and warfare for at least 4000 years, and it has grown even more important in the digital age. Encryption is the key to the entire online economy. If it fails, the system fails.

Well, one small corner of the system has failed--spectacularly--and may have cost Microsoft at least $1.2 million.

All code breaking relies on the fact that everything, eventually, falls into a pattern, even if it's an incredibly complex--even shifting--pattern. Crack that pattern, and you crack the code. Modern computer cryptography is well beyond my knowledge set, but I do know that its relies on multiple branches of mathematics in order to create secure encryption keys.

But even the best keys have a pattern, and hackers have found the pattern for MS Points, the proprietary economy used by Xbox Live and other Microsoft services. People pay for games, multiplayer support, and in-game purchases with these points, which are normally purchased with real money.

MS Points are usually activated by entering a string of numbers and letters, and usually look something like H547J-3JK67-J84J0-etc...  Those numbers, however, are generated by a system, and that system has a pattern. Using old codes, some folks on the site The Tech Game (no, I'm not linking to it) discovered that pattern and created an algorithm to generate new, valid codes.

Microsoft isn't talking about this yet, but they've closed the exploit. We don't know yet if they'll be able to track down the scammers and take back their points. Of course, it's illegal and immoral, but it's a pretty impressive achievement. And a little bit terrifying.

By the way, let me veer slightly off-topic for a moment and just say that if you have a credit card with an RFID chip, get rid of it. Tech writers (including me) have been writing about the dangers of these chips for years. They are a hacker's dream. I've seen video of on-the-street tests of people using a few hundred dollars worth of equipment to read the credit card numbers from cards in people's wallets and purses. The RFID makers have implemented some pretty impressive cryptographic techniques in order to keep them secure, but one constant of computer security is the tendency to underestimate the determination and capability of hackers.

Over the Top: The World's Most Complex Rubik's Cube

I have never solved a Rubik's Cube, and never really tried. Thus, a Super-Sized Rubik's Cube, dubbed "Over the Top" by its inventor, holds even less appeal, particularly when it appears to take about a minute to align the parts correctly in order to make each turn.

A normal Rubik's Cube is 3x3x3. Designer Oskar van Deventer has used new 3D printing techniques and some impressive engineering to design one that is 17x17x17. You can even buy your very own version, for $2006.54, at Shapeways, a 3D printing company. Here's how it came to be, according the Shapeways

When Oskar heard of the world records being set for twisty puzzles, like the 7x7x7, 9x9x9 and 11x11x11 by Panagiotis Verdes from Greece, he wanted to try his hand at setting a new record himself. With sponsorship from his close friend Claus Wenicker, Oskar set about designing and testing a number of prototypes, and his third attempt was printed successfully with Shapeways. Sorting and dyeing all 1539 pieces took Oskar 10 hours of work, followed by 5 hours of assembling. The result is an oversized (140 millimeter, 5.5 inches) and fully functioning “Over The Top” 17x17x17 puzzle.

3D Printing is fascinating technology that allows anyone to create a viable 3D model, and then have it turned into a real object. Shapeways describes it as "any additive manufacturing process whereby one machine turns a digital file into a finished physical object by building up that object layer by layer. If you were to be more precise the technology would be called rapid manufacturing and 3D printing would just be one of the manufacturing processes used to create objects in this way."

These videos show Oskar explaining his amazing design. Frankly, the skill and technology that went into creating it is more interesting, to me, than the puzzle itself.

This is Shapeway's demo showing the entire process from design through completion:

Emily Dickinson's Puzzle Poems

Emily Dickinson's poetry is characterized by its highly compressed, idiosyncratic use of language to convey intense emotions. But she also wrote a series of light "riddle" poems in which the subject is never directly stated, leaving the reader to determine what the poem is about. They aren't difficult as riddles (except maybe for #1489), but they're important because of their use of language.

Here is the first, with the other three after the jump. I'll leave off the solutions for now in case readers want to solve them.

#291
It sifts from Leaden Sieves --
It powders all the Wood.
It fills with Alabaster Wool
The Wrinkles of the Road --

It makes an Even Face
Of Mountain, and of Plain --
Unbroken Forehead from the East
Unto the East again --

It reaches to the Fence --
It wraps it Rail by Rail
Till it is lost in Fleeces --
It deals Celestial Vail

To Stump, and Stack -- and Stem --
A Summer's empty Room --
Acres of Joints, where Harvests were,
Recordless, but for them--

It Ruffles Wrists of Posts
As Ankles of a Queen --
Then stills its Artisans -- like Ghosts --
Denying they have been --

Lego Carcassonne

I've written about Lego Catan in the past, but someone has now taken it to the next level by working on a complex version Lego Carcasssonne. Designer Cal Henderson isn't actually making the whole thing, mind you, since a full set based on this design would cost around $2000 to create, but he's showing how it could be done.

A new computer mockup of Lego Catan was making the rounds of the interwebs last week. It looks great, but it hasn't been built.

More Squirrels Playing Cards

9 out of 10 squirrels prefer cribbage. It's just a fact.

You can keep your "Dogs Playing Poker" paintings. I have something much better: taxidermy squirrels playing cards. I posted one with the site update earlier today, but I thought I'd roll out the rest of them here.

I'm not sure where they all come from. In my journeys around the internet I just save any weird gaming photos I happen to stumble upon. Some of them (such as the one at the top) are the work of Walter Potter, Victorian taxidermy's mad genius. And some are just the work of people with too damn much time on their hands.

Interesting fact: every tableaux includes a smoking squirrel. And most of them also have at least one kibitzer. See if you can find the tableaux where it appears as though one squirrel has bet his own tail. That's just hardcore.

from the National Museum of Play

Peaceable Kingdom: Stoat (?), Fox, Rabbit, and Cat. (The fox is cheating.)

"You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em..."

Site Changes (Plus Squirrels)

I've been fiddling with the site for the past week or so, with a new header and some added boxes & such.

For those of you who find this kind of post boring, here's a picture of squirrels playing cards.

For the rest of you, here's the rundown:

• Game Blog Feeds. This display the top posts from gaming blogs that I think are worth a regular visit, like Dice Hate Me or Purple Pawn. You'll find Seize Your Turn's weekly linkapalooza there, as well as other regular updates.
• Other Links. I'm not planning to create an encyclopedic set of links to gaming resources, but these are places I think are worthwhile.
• My Twitter Feed. I'm still not all that great with the Twitter thing, but I'm getting used to it. It's best just to Follow me on Twitter, but I've also included a feed update in the sidebar.
• Gaming Twitter Feed. This one is for my gaming Twitter list, and includes Twits that I follow. If you'd like to be a Twit, send me a message.
• Donation Button. Yes, I've become shameless enough to start requesting donations. It's all nice and secure via Paypal, and helps keep me from standing on the grassy median holding a cardboard sign that says "Will Game For Food." The recession has bit deep into our household, so anything helps.
• Facebook Button. Do you like me? Do you really like me? Then hit the brand new Facebook button on the sidebar.

iPad 2

You knew it was coming. Here's the news from today's Apple press event:

The iPad 2 will ship March 11 in the US.

It's lighter and 33% thinner.

It has a new dual-core processor that runs twice as fast as the old one, and a new graphics processor that's 9-times as fast.

It also finally has cameras front and back, a nifty flexible magnetic cover, and HDMI video output. They're calling it a complete redesign.

The prices will all remain the same: $500 to $850.

There will certainly be more information available as the day goes on.

Scrabble Ascendant

According to the New York Times, the proliferation of word games on Facebook and mobile platforms is driving a new renaissance for Scrabble-style gaming. The prime movers are Words With Friends (now owned by the demonstrably evil Zynga) and various adaptations of Scrabble itself.

More interesting is the information that digital sales are driving conventional sales, with 4 million Scrabble sets sold in 2010 alone. According to Hasbro, this represents a 100% increase over a five-year period. And, yes, it's because of apps.

h/t: Erik Arneson

A Closer Look: French Tarot: Trumps 7 & 8

Many people are familiar with the standard Tarot suits (the "Major Arcana") used for "divination" purposes, but they're less aware that Tarot cards were created for playing trick-taking games and have a rich and diverse design history. These images are part of an ongoing series highlighting the art of a single deck used in France, which contains scenes of rural and domestic life in the 19th century.

Click to enlarge

Trump No. 7 (Detail)

Click to enlarge

Trump No. 8 (Detail)

U.S. Representative Rush Holt (NJ) Defeats Watson

Apparently IBM's Jeopardy-playing computer can indeed be defeated, and by a congressman no less.

Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey, former Assistant Director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, was a Jeopardy winner 35 years ago when the show was in its initial run. Watson was pitted against several congressmen in promotional match in a Washington hotel, but Holt, who holds a PhD in Physics, was the only winner. The exhibition was a chance for IBM to promote potential government applications of their technology, and for politicians to promote the value of science education.

Holt was my Representative when I lived in his district. No, I didn't vote for him, but he always seemed like a decent guy, and we used to live in the same town. He's also the answer the Jeopardy question: "Who is the only Quaker currently serving in Congress?" (Quick: Which U.S. Presidents were Quakers?)

I promise this is my last Watson post. Until the next one.

Be a Mathlete: World Math(s) Day

March 1st is World Maths Day according to The International Committee for Proclaiming Days for Things.

Actually, this one is proclaimed and run by an Australian e-learning company, but it seems to have caught on and the competition raises money for schools (which is good) and UNICEF (meh). You can tell it's not American because they call it "maths" rather than "math."

(Why do the Brits say "maths"? Because  the word is a contraction of "mathematics," which is a plural. Thus, technically, the contraction should also be plural. That may appear to make perfect sense, but since we won the Battle of Yorktown and they didn't, we're right.)

Anyway, back to World Math Day. Over 5 million kids from 218 countries are taking part in a 60-second math challenge by logging in to worldmathsday.com and answering a series of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems. That makes it the biggest multiplayer session of the day.

Godzilla: Kaiju World Wars (Toy Vault)

Toy Vault has released some more shots from their upcoming Godzilla game, designed by the great wargamer designer Richard Berg. (Not to be confused with Richard Borg, creator of Memoir '44, Battle Cry, and others). It should be out some time this spring.

Players pick a monster and defend against military attacks and other monsters while stomping buildings and terrain. It comes with 4 painted 2 3/8 inch plastic monster figures, 90 stackable plastic tiles for building skyscrapers, four individual monster playmats, 86 terrain and power tokens, and much more.