{"id":47254,"date":"2015-10-20T21:42:09","date_gmt":"2015-10-20T21:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=47254"},"modified":"2015-10-20T21:43:01","modified_gmt":"2015-10-20T21:43:01","slug":"on-the-felicities-of-graph-based-game-board-design-five","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=47254","title":{"rendered":"On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: five"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — Hofstadter Langdon Kim — for Gabi Nasemann, & in recognition of G\u00f6del Escher Bach ]
\n.<\/p>\n

My friend the photographer Gabi Nasemann<\/strong> recently inquired whether I knew John Langdon<\/strong>‘s book, Wordplay<\/a>, and I responded, DoubleQuote<\/strong>-style, with Scott Kim<\/strong>‘s Inversions<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"SPEC<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I had the pleasure of meeting Scott Kim lo these many years past at the Computer Game Developers Conference<\/strong>, and he was kind enough to say of my HipBone Games<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

Your game does seem to really call to mind the Bead Game. Almost a divination system, much more metaphorical than most games.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

**<\/p>\n

Scott Kim and his friend Doug Hofstadter<\/strong> both have a keen interest in Bach<\/strong>, so I thought it might be neat to see Scott’s treatment of the name — an ambigram<\/strong>, lower panel below — and how John Langdon might treat it — upper panel:<\/p>\n

\"SPEC<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Langdon’s Bach I assembled from his own typeface, Biform<\/strong>, which apparently seeped from his grasp into the wider world under the entirely irrelevant name Lampoon<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

Of all Langdon’s ambigrams, the one that’s no doubt best known — since Dan Brown<\/strong> used it in one of his execrable books — is his square of the four elements, upper panel, below:<\/p>\n

\"SPEC<\/a><\/p>\n

It was a nice touch, though, that Brown offered Langdon an hommage <\/em>by naming his professor of symbiology after him. No doubt the fictional Robert Langdon<\/strong> would be familiar with the glorious diagram of the elements created by Oronce Fine<\/strong>, which he’d have run across in a 1549 Harvard Houghton Library volume, Le Sphere du Monde<\/a>, and which I have elsewhere compared with Jewish and Christian diagrams:<\/p>\n

<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sembl<\/strong> and HipBone <\/strong>gameboards are in the same genre.. being games of linkage that you play with your mind:<\/p>\n

\"games<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

**<\/p>\n

Sources and further readings:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
  • John Langdon<\/strong>, Ambigrams<\/a>\n
  • Scott Kim<\/strong>, Ambigrams on Google Search<\/a>\n
  • Scientific American<\/strong>, Remembering Martin Gardner, with Douglas Hofstadter<\/a>\n
  • Slate<\/strong>, Can You Really Be a Professor of Symbology?<\/a>\n
  • The New Yorker<\/strong>, Harvard_ No Symbology Here<\/a>\n
  • Wikipedia<\/strong>, Robert Langdon<\/a>\n
  • Random House<\/strong>, The Official Website of Harvard Symbologist Robert Langdon<\/a>\n
  • John Langdon<\/strong>, Biform<\/a>\n
  • John Langdon<\/strong>, Lampoon<\/a>\n
  • Triple Canopy<\/strong>, This is your brain on paper<\/li>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    [ by Charles Cameron — Hofstadter Langdon Kim — for Gabi Nasemann, & in recognition of G\u00f6del Escher Bach ] . My friend the photographer Gabi Nasemann recently inquired whether I knew John Langdon‘s book, Wordplay, and I responded, DoubleQuote-style, with Scott Kim‘s Inversions: I had the pleasure of meeting Scott Kim lo these many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[837,526,627,529,644,624,840,778,678,286,383,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bach","category-charles-cameron","category-doublequotes","category-games","category-graphical-thinking","category-hipbone-games","category-paradox","category-photography","category-sembl","category-series","category-symmetry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47254"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47280,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47254\/revisions\/47280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}