The Said Symphony: Board and Gameplay
I shall play my moves first, one at a time, in the forums my friend Howard Rheingold, web pioneer and author of Smart Mobs, has set up for graduates of his online classes. I may at times make two or three moves there in a day — or wait a week and ponder what my next move should be.
But I don’t want to clutter up ZP every time I made a move, so I shall wait and gather them, and post here on Zenpundit when I have a suitable cluster to offer.
It was Howard‘s gracious invitation for me to introduce my games to his alumni that first nudged me off my perch and got me started playing this game that I have been thinking about for some years now –and Zenpundit is my home on the open web – so this double presentation is natural.
You are most welcome to follow along, comment and kibitz – but let me make two things clear from the outset:
The fact that I “play” a particular person, image, work of art or headline in no way means that I endorse that person or point of view – any more than a novelist or historian quoting Hitler, Churchill, or Stalin necessarily endorses the swastika, Union Jack or hammer and sickle:
Quotation does not imply endorsement or disparagement.
And the fact that I juxtapose two situations, events, anecdotes, quotes, processes or persons in no way means that I equate them – any more than a juxtaposition between the soccer game that kicked off the Football War (El Salvador and Honduras, 1969) and the Fischer-Spassky match that was a minute but focused skirmish in the Cold War (USA vs USSR, 1972) implies that soccer is or somehow equals chess — or is its exact opposite — or provides or implies a moral equivalence between America and Russia:
Linkage does not imply equivalency, moral or otherwise.
There will be symmetries, there will be asymmetries, as you’ll see — and indeed it may well prove that the discrepancies, oppositions and imbalances between two adjacent moves will be as fruitful as any parallelisms.
What I would suggest is that every move, like it or loathe it, should be heard.
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And briefly, the HipBone Games:
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The project builds on my previous development of the HipBone family of games, which began as an attempt to make a playable variant of the Glass Bead Game described in Hermann Hesse‘s Nobel winning novel, Magister Ludi.
I recently posted an introductory account of the games on Bryan Alexander‘s New Digital Storytelling blog; game boards are available for download at HipBoards; and the basic games rules and invitation to play are still up at my now ancient HipBone Games website.
I’m happy to take questions in the comments section.
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Next up:
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In my next post, I’ll play the opening moves…
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Lexington Green:
June 17th, 2011 at 8:43 pm
Charles, you operate in realms beyond my comprehension.Standing by to see what this is all about.
Charles Cameron:
June 18th, 2011 at 5:15 pm
Hi, Lex:
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Ha — I’m tempted to say that as an attorney, you operate in realms beyond mine, too!
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I hope the first nine moves, now posted (1-5 and 6-9), will give you more of an idea of how the thing works, but I’m also aware that I’m encouraging a new "way of reading" in the way that composers often do with a new "way of listening" — I’m learning itself by doing the writing.
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It’s a bit like reading at the slow, contemplative pace of lectio divina — except that here the contemplation rests on the affinities and disparities between the linked ideas, rather than on the ideas themselves.