Discussed my game-essay (click on the pic to play) with Annette last friday. I sent her a link to the game  and was very  pleased to find she’d played it – and enjoyed it, too.  She told me about her  experiences as player – reader, which was really helpful.

The thing she particularly liked was being able to browse through the text in a random way. She is into things being rhyzomatic – meaning that they shoot off in unexpected directions – and doing research nomad style. So the game immediately appealed to her.

She also noticed that my writing has improved. It used to be somewhat wooden – Annette called it ‘sitting on a raft with Huizinga on one shoulder and Caillois on the other,  helplessly floating down the river’.  She now recognised ‘blog-style’ in my writing and was really pleased with the improvement. It feels natural to me, after blogging for 8 months, to write weblog-style. It also solves the puzzle of  how to  present my  thoughts: the good old ‘introduction – main body of text – conclusion’  that I was wrestling with (how to take the reader from one part of the text to another?)  has made way for an archipelago of thoughts that are interconnected and can be read separately and in ever different sequences.

For chances that you will play the same game twice are minimal. The software holds a random sequence generator: no game is ever the same. There are   [30!] variations, this being the mathematical formula for 30 x 29 x 28 x 27 x 26 x 25 x 24 x 23 x 22 x 21 x 20 x 19 x 18 x 17 x 16 x 15 x 14 x 13 x 12 x 11 x 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 which is a very large number indeed. This computation is based on the fact that for the first position you get to  choose one of a stack of 30 cards, for the second position one of a stack of  29 (for one card is already in place), etc etc. For the last position you have only one choice – that of the last card.  I still love math – it is so elegant.

Note: organise a test & feedback panel for the game.