GG: Gambit

Greetings, Salutations,

Today I give you a dearth of games, some good, some bad, but I'll tell you what I can. Gambit is a research initiative between Singapore and MIT focusing on problems game developers face and works on designing games for difficult and uncomfortable concepts. These include such themes as distrust, depression, loneliness, addiction, etc. and while they are fairly accurate to a degree, it is only a picture into these feelings.

Yet One Word is a typing platformer game. You type the words shown on each platform and if your character is in range then you jump to them. As you go through, there are special platforms that you must answer questions when you get to. I think the first question is: "what would you consider to be your biggest failure." It cannot check to see if you are right, it deletes your answers when you leave, and nobody ever sees anything, so you could potentially just breeze through the game typing nothing in particular. But these are thought provoking and sometimes really uncomfortable questions and it really can help to just sit and think, one minute per question. Is what I just wrote true? Do I? Is there more? [Play Here]

The Bridge is described as being both obvious and very open to interpretation. There are meanings everywhere, and it's up to you to see them and understand them.... in your own specific way. It's a very simple game, as far as I've discovered, and perhaps I'm missing something, but even the way I played it has gotten me to interpret things, without even going anywhere. It causes you to look at the way you are living your life, and once you finish playing it, if you want you can read the artistic statement Here. [Play Here]

The Snowfield is a very.... interesting.... game. It's a game not designed by developers, but designed by the audience. The developers simply asked them what they liked best, FPS? Check. Snow terrain? Check. Few weapons? Check. Then they built what they were asked to and kept giving it to an audience who informed them of what they wanted changed. Until this. You play a soldier in the aftermath of a battle. The temperature is so cold that if you wander too far away from the fire you'll freeze to death. Etc. Play it for a bit, fiddle around. See what you can do. Come back and share with me your own stories. (may require Unity plug-in to play) [Play Here]

Elude is a game I play fairly often, not because it's particularly fun, but because it helps me understand to a degree what some of my friends have been through. It's a game about depression, a hard subject to deal with, especially in a game, which are supposed to be all about fun, right? (wrong!) You control a person jumping through the trees to get to the sunlight, and then getting to the eventual plummet to earth. (give it a bit of time to load, it takes a while and has no loading bar) [Play Here]

GumBeat Gold is a fairly simple game. It's nice and fun, gather followers who like blowing bubbles and avoid those that don't like bubbles. Until you consider that the people who don't like them are under orders from the state to assault any breakers of what is apparently marshal law. And blowing bubbles? Yes, that's against the law. So instead of being the nice game you thought it was, and that it looks like, it's actually a game about political oppression, marshal law, and the fight against unfairness of those above us. [Play Here]

Many of the other games are download only, and I have not checked them personally, if you would like to see more but are afraid they'll be bad, or that you'll get a virus, please let me know and I'll check them for you. I hope some of you give these a try, despite their not sounding that "fun", but remember: if you're willing to go see the Schindler's List then you should be willing to play a game with differentiating emotions.

Farewells and Valedictions,
Eoin Anndra Davis

A Treatise on Magic

Greetings and Salutations,

you have all heard the word magic before, I'm assuming, and you have a general idea what the word means, but to what depths? When we say magic we can be talking about many different things, whether it's trickery, astounding facts, just an overall feeling of happiness or goodness, etc. Before we go on this journey together, let me tell you that because of its appeal to people, it is often used as a name for things; the list can go on for a very long time from computer products, games, music, books, etc. So I will avoid referring to those as much as possible.

Let's start with the boring version and slip right into the rest:

Magic in the real world is confined to illusory acts, sleight of hand, prestidigitation. A magician performs incredible acts that appear to be impossible or at the very least improbable, and calls them magic. By calling them magic he refers to being bestowed paranormal powers, making himself appear to be more powerful than others. This paranormal power is a common theme in many works of fiction, appearing in several overarching forms. The first is power granted to a person via a supernatural being, i.e. "the gods". By asking them and showing your devotion to their majesty and desires they give you access to a portion of their powers. This is why many religious people take a stand against magic, because it is power that a person yields for their own will, and because they are obviously asking other gods for this. The second is power granted to a person via knowledge, i.e. science. Through one's knowledge of how the world works, one can manipulate it do incredible things; it is often pointed to by a quote such as "Through [the person in question]'s understanding and close contact with nature, [X]".

This is cool, but where did magic come from?

I'm no historian, but I have studied a lot of early history and I can postulate two hypotheses, one for each of the basic forms. For the first, I think we can safely say that it comes from the beliefs of early religions. In the majority of old religions priesthood enabled a person to ask for magical or in this case, divine, intercession in life. The second I can imagine might have occured something like this:

"Get back, you scum!" yelled a man as he shoved someone back with lots of menace evident in his force.
"I didn't do it! Don't hurt an innocent man!" cried the man as he stumbled backwards and fell on his back.
"We'll see about you being innoc..." began the first man as he approached the man on the ground after stooping to pick up a large rock.
As he began to speak a bolt of lightning struck the ground in front of him, shattering shards of rock in all directions.

Granted, I do have a fairly good imagination, and we don't exactly have many sources from the dawn of humanity, but I feel this is a fairly logical explanation of what happened.

Regardless of its history, the word magic is here to stay and will be used in countless ways. I myself have used it before to explain something that I didn't want to spend a long time explaining. How does X work? Magic!

I hope you all have a magical and long life,

Farewells and Valedictions,
Eoin Anndra Davis