Gaming
aardvarchaeology | September 30, 2008
I'm reading Steven L. Kent's engrossing 2001 book The Ultimate History of Video Games, and of course it reminds me of a lot of games I played as a kid. My first real video games were played on the Atari VCS/2600. (The book is in my home because my 10-y-o son is both a video gamer and a bookworm, and took it out from the library.)
A memory. It's 1982 or '83. The Nintendo Donkey Kong Game & Watch is the hottest game around. My classmate Pär comes up to me in the hallway in school and asks me if I "saw Donkey Shot". Confused I reply that of course I've seen Donkey Kong, everybody has one…
aardvarchaeology | September 20, 2008
My son just played me a song he can't get out of his head, "Still Alive". It's the closing-credits music of the 2007 computer game Portal, sung by a heavily vocoded Ellen McLain. As it turns out, the song was written by science fiction pop songster Jonathan Coulton, whose excellent love songs about robots and zombies I have heard on the Escape Pod podcast. And here's Coulton himself performing "Still Alive".
aardvarchaeology | September 14, 2008
With kudos to Mattias who sent me the link, here are Stephen Lynch & Mark Teich performing a fine song about being a 14-y-o D&D-playing young man. To those of our readers who currently fit that description, let me say that just a few years from now you will no longer have the least interest in sneering high-school jock girls. Instead you will attract the intimate affections of bright college freshwomen, some of whom will demand to do some pretty wild things with you, including but not limited to the playing of D&D.
aardvarchaeology | August 30, 2008
Continuing our military theme from the other day, I regret to inform you, Dear Reader, that the Axis won World War II. After Pearl Harbour, the US couldn't decide whether to concentrate its efforts in the Pacific or the Atlantic, and ultimately came to play only a minor role in the war. Britain, meanwhile, defended itself well and harassed the Axis in Northern Africa, but it lost almost all its overseas colonies to the Japanese and never gained a toehold on the Continent. After losing two huge battles against the Germans in the Ukraine, the Russian forces collapsed, and the Axis powers…
aardvarchaeology | August 18, 2008
I got my driver's licence late, at age 22, because I wasn't interested in cars and didn't want to support automotive culture. When I finally did get myself a licence, it was because I was starting to feel embarrassed at being driven everywhere by my wife and my colleagues. I didn't buy a car of my own until I was 33.
But long before trying out any real cars, I learned a thing or two about them from the 1987 computer game Test Drive. Most importantly, I learned what the gears are for. They are there because a car's engine can't stand an infinitely high rate of revolution. And, I also learned…
aardvarchaeology | August 10, 2008
Scrabble was first published in 1948. Shortly thereafter, it was ripped off for the Swedish market by a firm named Lemeco, under the tell-tale Anglophone title Criss Cross. The main difference between the ripoff and the original is that individual letters don't have point values in Criss Cross: instead you get five points per vowel and ten per consonant.
Criss Cross does not bear a printing year. I date it at about 1950, because my copy still contains the notebook where my dad and his kid sister recorded their games. A signature of my dad's in the notebook looks like the handwriting of a…
aardvarchaeology | July 26, 2008Anybody got a copy of Chaosium's 1980 game-rules booklet Basic Role-Playing? And the 1982 Worlds of Wonder boxed set, specifically the Magic World booklet? I'd love to have a look at them (photocopies or a brief loan would be fine), since combined and translated they became the first Swedish role-playing game, Drakar och Demoner (1982). It turned me on to gaming when I was twelve. I haven't played DoD in years, but It would be great to get to compare the Swedish rules with the original Chaosium products.
aardvarchaeology | July 22, 2008
Pandemic is a new board game for 1-4 players. The players take on the roles of field operatives for the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA, as four simultaneous pandemics threaten global life and civilisation. It's a collaborative game: either you find cures in time and everybody wins -- or everybody loses. And it's really exciting!
I recently learned the term "game fluff" from my old buddy and long-time Aard regular Akhorahil. The fluff is the story that hangs on the abstract framework of a games' rules. In order to win a game, you need to understand and exploit the game mechanics…
aardvarchaeology | June 15, 2008Played a fun card game with a somewhat off-colour name today: Spank the Monkey from 2003. The object of the game is literally to catch a monkey and whack its little hairy behind. Why? Because all the players are employees at a junk yard, and the monkey's being a nuisance. It's built itself a tower of junk and sits atop it, making ugly gestures, screeching and probably flinging poo at the customers. To catch it, you need to build a junk tower of your own while keeping the other players from building faster than you and catching the monkey.
Much of the fun stems from the absurd combinations of…
aardvarchaeology | June 12, 2008Lately I've been playing more board games, thanks to gaming friends moving to my area, and also to my son and his buddies reaching an age where they can understand and enjoy games. I have a number of good board games from the 70s, 80s and 90s, and the newest one in the house is Blokus from 2000. Now I'm thinking of buying something new, and I'd appreciate some suggestions.
Here's what I have in mind.
A new game, 2006 or later.
Suitable for age 12 upward.
Typical session length less than 4 hours.
English, German or Scandy.
Not a spin-off on an earlier game such as Settlers or Carcassonne.So,…
aardvarchaeology | May 30, 2008
In 2005, a team led by myself and Howard Williams excavated a 9th century boat inhumation burial at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Ãstergötland, Sweden. The finest finds we made in the grave were a collection of 23 amber gaming pieces. These are extremely rare, the previous Swedish set having surfaced in the 1870s when Hjalmar Stolpe dug at Birka.
Now the County Museum in Linköping has incorporated the Skamby gaming set into its new permanent exhibition! The official opening takes place on Tuesday evening 3 June, at 6 pm.
I am very proud that our finds will be seen by so many museum visitors.…
aardvarchaeology | May 2, 2008
Now and then I like to play board games: mostly Blokus, Drakborgen (a.k.a. Dungeonquest), Scrabble and Roborally. The latter is an award-winning 1994 game where each player programs a robot to move through a treacherous obstacle course and tag a series of numbered flags. More often than not, your robot ends up a smoking laser-riddled wreck or disappears down a bottomless hole.
On the box, Roborally is recommended from age 12 up. I am proud to be able to tell you that the game works just fine with (bright, geeky) 9-year-olds as well. Yesterday after lunch I took Junior and his pal geocaching…
aardvarchaeology | March 13, 2008Lore Sjöberg at Wired celebrates the achievement of recently deceased gaming wizard Gary Gygax with an entertaining look at what it would be like if Dungeons & Dragons characters behaved like archaeologists.May 16
We have nearly finished our initial survey of the outer flagstones of the dungeon entrance. Already we have made wonderful discoveries! Initial tests indicate that the stones may have come from an open pit quarry near the Elonges River, nearly two miles from here! Also, we were attacked by a Phantom Fungus and lost two more graduate students.
Thanks to Johan Lundström for the…
aardvarchaeology | August 29, 2007There's been some discussion lately about chess-playing software and intelligence. Some smart humans play chess well. Certain software can beat them at chess. Does this mean that the software is smarter than those humans? Of course not.
For one thing, intelligence is about versatility, about being able to perform innumerable different and unfamiliar tasks that take smarts. No software in the world, least of all chess software, is anywhere near passing the Turing test. If you talk to present-day software you soon become aware that there's no intelligence in the box. If we came across a human…
aardvarchaeology | August 23, 2007Back in 1996 I played Curses, an extremely good text adventure game. I also read the inspiring documentation for Inform 3, the programming language Curses was written in, and found it extremely elegant. (The game, the programming language and its documentation were all the work of one Graham Nelson.) I had vague plans for writing my own game in Inform, but never got round to it. Instead I went through various interesting upheavals in my life (mainly involving women and the resulting children) that pretty much catapulted me out of geekdom, certainly as far as gaming was concerned.
Now,…
aardvarchaeology | August 16, 2007You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The original text adventure game, ADVENT, was written in the mid-1970s by Stanford student Will Crowther. This game begat Zork, then King's Quest, then any number of other adventure games on various computer platforms until the present day, when Second Life and World of Warcraft are scarcely recognisable as its descendants.
ADVENT is still around and has been ported to pretty much every machine in use today. But this is a late version of the game, expanded and beefed up by Don Woods. Crowther's original version has long been considered…
aardvarchaeology | July 13, 2007That Myers character has snared me in his net again. Did I say Myers? Sorry, M e i e r. Sid Meier. The Civilization guy.
It's been years since I spent any significant amount of time on computer games. The other day, however, I picked up a copy of the 2005 hit Civilization IV cheaply on eBay, and now I've gotten sucked into it. I used to play the board game, I used to play it with house rules, I've even played it with house rules and a home-made alternative map, and I played the original PC game a lot too. I quit when I realised that the outcome of a game was largely determined by the size of…
aardvarchaeology | June 9, 2007From age twelve to twenty-five, I was a gaming geek. It started with the Swedish version of Runequest (Drakar och Demoner) and the Lone Wolf solo adventure series, and soon branched out into computer games and sundry board games. Gaming was a big part of my life and I had a lot of fun with it.
In my teens I used to hang out at a gaming store and go to gaming conventions. There my friends and I encountered innumerable somewhat younger and even more enthusiastic gamers who milled around at belly height of us big guys. We scoffed at their "hack 'n' slay" gaming style, so much cruder than our own…