The unexpected public game: Pervasive Games

Ok here is a topic I been wanting to type up about for a long time in some kind of video or blog but now I will be able to talk about Pervasive games and Alternate reality games (ARGs, not to however be confused with augmented reality games).

So pervasive games and alternate reality games are game are games that over lap into real world and to no single location such as when playing a board game it is only to the board, or when playing on console or pc it is kept to a single room, whilst the games I will be talking about today are amazing in the fact they break down this wall of single focus, as the game is played outside and sometimes even all over the world.

Let's start with Pervasive games, and look at the example given in the lesson we had on it, A game known as "Killer/Assassin".

Killer/Assassin is a funny game much like all pervasive games as it requests a certain amount of thinking as you play , you are an undercover assassin, using tools like weapons, bombs or even poison to find your target and eliminate them, but this elimination can take place anywhere other then sanctums and if you are skilled enough you can get them without them knowing in till the last second.

To play Killer you have ton give some basic information before you start like photo, name, possible and address and if the game is ran in studies such as college or university, then possibly even the course you are in. This info is past on to the one hunting you down, (other than things like phone numbers) so the hunter has a starting point in finding and killing you.

Your target can be anyone and the person hunting you could be anyone too!


"Killer/Assassin" is a popular and well know pervasive game that strongly breaks the wall of play from in a single location to anywhere, meaning the game can take days, months, even years with skilled players. The game probably derives from a short story called "The Seventh Victim" with a simile themes to the game.

The game has many different rules however a book was published called "Killer: The Game of Assassination" and is the main used rule set for this pervasive game. Whilst I could talk about Killer all day, some would like to more about this Alternate reality games topic I spoke about at the top of this blog and by god I need to speak about this so let's jump into alternate reality games!

Alternate reality games are a hidden game between the worlds of business, technology and life, the three worlds for a day, month, maybe three months, will merge together to make a game which will bring in millions of people with all sorts of skills, mathematics, language, medical skills, sporting fitness, and computer coders.
...but the game never has any rules, and never states it's a game.
To quote extra credits's Dan "...Because they never admit to a game, they can get away with offer up puzzles that would be considered by most designers as far too difficult to ask of a standard game audience..." This opens a world we have never seen before in till you see it, and even till you play it, I have spent too long searching down forms and websites and all the clues just to find someone already found that, but the rush of trying to find new things or the next link or a bridge across a problem that the players are having, is marvellous.

So let's type up some named examples and leave you to explore, cause this topic i don't want to spoil but i want to enlighten you on how many games you have missed over the years, that you could have joined into, for free, just by using you computer and a lot of time.

Augmented reality games list: The Beast, Year Zero, I love Bees , Why So Serious , Slusho!, Camdrome (A still running ARG that nobody can truly understand,) ,Cloud Chamber , Escape from god of the New world, World without Oil, and last but not least one I will have to spoil as no official name was given but "Portal 2's ARG" however I normally call this one Potatos = Potato + DOS
Ingress is another good one to look at but only if you have time as this links an ARG to a smart phone game.

I will recommend diving into forums or wikis searching up the names or info and seeing if you can find what some of them are linked to, you would be surprised on the amount of stories there are online.

And now I jump onto the sad news, ARG's are rare and far, but the pervasive games are even rarer, if you don't have a group to play with or the knowledge of the game, you can never play, in August 2010 a game by the name of StreetWars in london was halted and stop due to the use of water guns, and possible threat the game could have caused to the public, being called "irresponsible" however this is why the games are becoming not only rarer, but also more and more hidden and cryptic.

But diving down is just so fun!

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Have fun!

Bibliography:

Andersen, M. (2015). ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network. [online] ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network. Available at: http://www.argn.com/ [Accessed 24 Jan. 2015].

reddit, (2008). Alternate Reality Games • /r/ARG. [online] Available at: http://www.reddit.com/r/ARG/ [Accessed 24 Jan. 2015].

Whysoseriousredux.com, (2015). Why So Serious? Redux. [online] Available at: http://www.whysoseriousredux.com/ [Accessed 24 Jan. 2015].

Escape Senet: Co-op or die edition

Today we looked at Games Britannia part 2 and how the industrial era change games for politics, and money making style of game like buy squares on a board or moving around the board not as a race but as a positive feedback loop.

However instead of playing one of the industrial games we then looked at a game called escape Senet, in which the game adds another element, a player as the monster as they race to eat up the other 2 players.

The game makes player co-operation as the player can stack and team up with the other player to move along the place and abandon pieces (Which is only handy if the monster next turn as you can abandon a player into the line of attack meaning they have one less piece to get to the end and making your chances higher of winning however you also need to make sure it's a number less then a set amount eaten otherwise the monster wins making the game balanced more dynamic to the players cooperation and if they are willing to draw, rush for it, or attempt to block each other whilst a monster chases them down).

Early on in the game it seems to be a thing of picking if you would co-operate with the other player or be against them as the game really moved faster with team work, and players "piggy backing" on other players moves to get everyone moving.

The game people seemed to give the though that the monster was too over-powered or when playing impossible to win.
This changes depending on the players and how they co-operate or block each other for the monster to catch up.

This dynamic may not have been what was intended however it a good attempt and experiment with co-operational play that does not reward you for trying to beat your opponent, and by making sure you work in some way together to get a draw, rather then making the "monster" win.

Tablut: A game in which surrounding the king improbable

Tablut is a tafl game with a board that is 9 by 9 or 11 by 11(called Tawl Bwrdd)18 by 18(Alea Evangelii).

The game as two players with white or black, white has to protect the king and get him to the corners (or edge depending on the version of the rules you play) and black have capture the king by surrounding him.This makes the game compelling from the idea of movement on the board however king will more likely win then lose due to 1 piece movement and how you are forced as black to get 4 pieces around, when I say you can win with nothing but a king due to the movement style of rooks from chess, because of this the king can run away unless boxed into 2 or 3 boxes and then crushed slowly by the black team.

Whilst the game is meant to be fast paced, I think it would be better without a time limit as the game is trying to make pure strategy while playing as blacks, white can only move to retaliate what black does or does not move, meaning the game is over as soon as one or the other makes a simple mistake without seeing so in till 2 or 3 turns later when the move then makes you kick yourself into a corner in which you can be taken from.

The game is asymmetric and shows with the piece as the game gives more value to the king however the king counts just as much as another piece unlike in chess, where a king can do exactly what any other piece can do, so cornering can be just as hard (if not harder) then moving the king to the corner (or edge).

Duodecim Scripta, Tabula and how the modern game of backgammon came about!

The Game Backgammon came from that of a few old games as it evolved over the era's of play, and the original origins can be traced back to Duodecim Scripta, a old roman game played in inns and such places.

Duodecim Scripta was found in a silver mirror from the second or third century B.C.E
On the mirror's reverse side is an engraving of a young man and a damsel seated at a gaming table ,both dressed lightly. The translated words on the mirror are believed to be "I believe I have won." and the other word "Ofeinod" meaning is unknown.

The Game is a two player racing game, that is meant to last or be played for about 30 mins in duration time and needs a Special game board, with 15 pieces of their colour choice, plus three six sided dice.

The game starts with the piece off the board and build up, they can't move out of the home place in the middle in till you have filled and stacked the board, once this A/home row is filled then you move up to the top right of the board and move left along the top of the board and then once that is done down to the bottom and move right till the final phase of the game.

To move the pieces on the board you throw three dice and can use all the 3 dice as one or 2 dice for 1 and 1 for 1 or all 3 dice for 1 piece each, and on the final phase you use one dice to get the end of the board and off, if you don't get the number for off the board then you need to wait for the next turn or move another piece if possible.


The game has a blocking mechanic to help build strategy in the game, meaning moving pieces to help block or to advance has a choice and means you have to choose between safety or progression and know where or when to move, or even how to move the pieces in what line-up.

Capturing a piece is basic to if there is a single piece , it can be taken, if there is a stack of pieces then it can not be taken and helps save your pieces and slow your opponent limiting the choice they have.

The winner is the first one to get all the pieces of the board before the opponent and thus gaining a point, If the winner wins 10 times, they gain the title of Ultimate winner.

Let's now move on to Tabula and talk about how this game is a version that was iterated and changed to improve the game of Duodecim Scripta; So Tabula was a game populate with the Romans era and this solved the template for the game Backgammon as we know it today.

The game of Tabula was a race game, played with 2 players, with a game being about 25 minutes long and involving a board, 15 pieces for each player and 3 dice.

This game builds on the last ones mechanics but fixes moving and stacking to a point. The player must finish and get the pieces off the board, making progression force struggle between the players.

and thus we have the modern game of backgammon was iterated into existence!

Ur and Senet: Ancient Games with little understanding.

Ur and Senet are games of which seem little understood about them truly, as many different interpretations of rulings such as starting, the amount of counters.
Looking at Ur first, found by Sir Leonard Wolley as he excavated three complete boards, and "the halves of at least two more [...] in addition to many fragments of loose inlay pieces which must have belonged to gaming boards too." (Becker 2007 p .11).

The game was then looked at by Murray, Bell , and Becker to try and iterate them to make the game in a playable state, but they all looked at elements that were unknown to us in till some rules on a clay tablet was found and read to a mild understanding but some mechanics are still unknown or unexplained. Overall from the rules we used for the game made the game rather enjoyable as we iterated the dice mechanic to increase speed of the game and made it easier the counting 4 sided dice with a white tip for are score of the dice (Using this sort of style of dice would have made more sense back then, however now we have dice that really do the job for use and make sure we are not wasting time counting which is or is not a 1 or a 0).

Then we looked at the game Senet, a race game with the mechanic of blocking players and has a very spiritual being, Senet was found to be an interesting game as the rules seemed a lot more fleshed out and we have found a lot more of the game pieces and boards to figure out how it would have played.
Whilst playing Senet, I slowly saw how the game was more blocking focused as both players would rather block players from moving then race ahead, and because of this the game seemed much slower then it actually was, for example the player may have got them self a piece to the square 28 but after a lot of turns the player would forget about the piece as it needed to have a 3 to move and leave the board, making players go back to moving pieces back at the start of the game and not paying attention to the roll and where they move the piece from or to; More and more making the players try to block them and stop progression rather then race to the end.

A simple yet can be fun game with the right mind set and right players, however I enjoyed Ur more, it was somehow more fun to play and you saw progression a lot more, making the game feel more faster and fun, building up the players different strategies and how they used the game pieces, personally I wanted to get one piece though and then another there for having a full focus on a single piece, however the rush idea to get all the pieces on the board and clutter the board also worked for my opponent as the game work well with both, and then the taking of pieces or the safe squares which gave another turn to the player, made the game flow faster then it really was.

Thus I believe both games are enjoyable but if there was a choice it would much be a Royal game of Ur I would rather play.

Bibliography:

Becker, A (2007) "The Royal Game of Ur" in Finkel ed.pp. 11-15.

Game mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics

Board games and Video games have a lot of things in them, however everything in the making of the game depends on mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics of the game. So the game battleship was quickly looked at to explain all the elements talked about, so the mechanics would be turn based ruling system that is based around hidden information which slowly unlocks information as you play, then looking at the dynamics which would be guessing and random elements slowly building up to educated guesses and winning or losing due to randomness, and then the Aesthetics which is challenge and builds up frustrations and anger with missing but also getting pleasure in seeing the opponent miss a shot, and fellowship if you opponent is a sport and good with winning or losing.

This was then put into a broken game real-time game, and build an element of strategy and make the game be playable in may different ways. We added a shield mechanic and this change play as people slowly walled attacks, slowly making the game work around strategy of shooting them from behind, so they could not get away but this seemed overpowered so we choose to add accuracy into the game.

This made a concentrated hard game which revolved around thinking about the other players moves and how they slowly get a strategy and how the movements and turns you can do before being shot or needing to shoot.

Games Britannia

The BBC4 show called Games Britannia shows the board game and how it evolved though out the ages of the board game we know and play today.

Early games that had no board and thus the game was carved into stone of church benches and the games played whilst the long waits, which is much different to the modem games of today which are whilst sometimes long not always the same lines as being a more portable thing.

The show talked about a list of games and a main game that court my eye was alea evangelii which was a game where you would escort the king to one of the corners of the board, whist not as portable as the games in church chairs, it was a game was a game that showed a large amount of thinking with a large amount of pieces ,choice and movement though out the game which meant to keep the king alive whilst being overwhelmed, the games almost seem like a form of story telling or even a way of teaching young knights strategist and commands which would be used in wars.

Hazard, A game of devils and dice (as I will subtitle it); is a game that shows no more then gambling in it's strongest sense as you build up the total and the overall winning or losing of the game, the game was imported from east and is guessed to came from Crusaders. The church also condemned the games of dice as it was too trivial and god's powers as they called it was being put towards money, thus being seen as a bad intention act towards god and the church.

So from Hazard, and dice to cards; Namely Faro, which is best described as a danger betting game from London, the rules in which you would bet on a card, and the dealer would then have a card you loss money and a card you win from, left and right, if you place a card which is in the lose pile, you lose your money, however if in the win you build up the money that is earned on the pile and winning was just as dangerous as losing in this game as it would build to dealings, loans and dept that would cause people to lose homes and more, even the case of gambling taking peoples lives.

The show also talked about Royal game of Goose, and how it was to give penalties as a early race game, which was copied by many others to ride the success of the game mechanics and how it was strongly designed.

The games Snakes and ladders was inspired by more complex version called, "Gyan Chapoor"
which was a game about ascending beyond being nothing to becoming enlightened and having classes to the spots of the game and rooms or boxes, but the game was not of a competitive nature and thus the elements in snakes and ladders are the simplest form of this game.

The first part of the show was very interesting and the whole start to a three part show put a good light to watch the rest, if not at least read up more and try to pin point what in modem gaming comes from this or the elements shown in this game.