{"id":282,"date":"2012-11-10T17:00:24","date_gmt":"2012-11-10T22:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/?p=282"},"modified":"2012-11-10T17:00:24","modified_gmt":"2012-11-10T22:00:24","slug":"dead-cats-dead-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/2012\/11\/10\/dead-cats-dead-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Dead Cats, Dead People"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s post is about two things. The first is Peter Molyneaux’s Curiosity<\/em><\/a>, the second – entirely unrelated it would seem – is Tombstone Hold’Em<\/em>. Both are cooperative. One is played on a cell phone. The other is played in a graveyard. Both do something interesting with gaming – namely, asking people to work together on something that is not at all an obvious game.<\/p>\n

Curiosity<\/em> (besides proverbially killing the neighborhood feline) is a game about tapping squares. Each square one taps disappears (shatters) and can earn you virtual gold. Each removal of a square reveals the next layer of a cube. The collective – for everyone<\/strong> playing the game is playing together in a giant collective – has thus far removed a green layer with bubbles and is in the process of removing a maroonish-orange layer to reveal some sort of picture (I’m voting for either cherries or tomatoes) underneath. Now what’s interesting about Curiosity<\/em> is that despite the collective working together, only one person can win. What they win is an interesting question, but Molyneaux has said that this is both a game and a social experiment, so for me the best part is going to be finding out what he was trying to determine at the end of it all.<\/p>\n

Tombstone Hold’Em, on the other hand, is a team game, but one that’s played among a collective that is cross-generational. In short, you need dead people to play along with you. This game has been on my mind recently because the Unorthodox Arts Foundation is hosing a game in Boston at Copps’ Hill Burying Ground<\/a> (so if you happen to live or be in the area on November 17th, head up there… it’s free!).<\/em> I find it fascinating that it takes not only the facilitators and players, but the dead<\/strong> to successfully play the game. Dead people become your literal ace in the hole.<\/p>\n

So why do I think it’s worth posting about these two games together? It’s the collective element. People are playing without actively cooperating (Curiosity<\/em>) and even without being alive (Tombstone<\/em>), but they are nevertheless a part of the game’s collective. That, I think, is what strikes me about both games: they’re encouraging cooperative, collective play, but they do so in a way that creates an unwitting community simply by being played.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s post is about two things. The first is Peter Molyneaux’s Curiosity, the second – entirely unrelated it would seem – is Tombstone Hold’Em. Both are cooperative. One is played on a cell phone. The other is played in a … Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1710,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9138,9139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arg","category-crowd-source-games"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6XN03-4y","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1710"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}