My father sent me this link to the Center for Ludic Synergy. It’s reawakened some of my interest in word and mind games, which apparently Ludic Synergy is about. Great sounding but meaningless name.
Anyway… following some links I ended up at some interesting games. Firstly the Game of Kennings, or Konnexions. Also an older game I had heard of before called Nomic, probably heard of it via Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas. (I’ll have to buy a copy and read it or add it to my half read Mind’s Eye and GEB.)
I’m quite interested in Nomic to do with the online community thinking I’m doing at the moment. Nomic is a game of changing the rules, a game purely about that. There are an initial set of rules and players take turns voting to change them. The game seems to me to be a good archetype (probably not the right use of word) for gaming the rules in a community. It could be a good game to play with that would model, on a fast timeline, these rules and their changes.
The Kenning Game I think would be a nice SMS game to play. The designer calls it a game, but to me it seems more like a method to create small poetic puzzles or riddles; a cross between symbolic mathematics and poetry. Beautiful and cunning in their simplicity. The Kenning Chain Idea though is the only one that approaches a true game. That would be nice over email, IM or SMS.
