Week 162

After last week’s mega-wee­knotes I’ll keep these short. Not in the least because they effec­tive­ly cov­er two, maybe three days, if I include Sat­ur­day.

To start with the lat­ter: I hand­ed the stu­dents that I have been coach­ing the past half year at the Utrecht School of the Arts their MA degrees. There were short speech­es and proud par­ents, and lots of excel­lent work on dis­play at the grad­u­ate exhi­bi­tion. I am now going to take a break from teach­ing, but I am sure I will return to it soon enough.

On Thurs­day I met with Jeroen van Mas­trigt, Valen­ti­jn Byvanck, Tem­peest and Monoban­da to pre­pare for our ses­sion at an event on her­itage and games, which will hap­pen next week on Tues­day. We talked about the ill-fat­ed Muse­um of Nation­al His­to­ry, of which Valen­ti­jn was one of the ini­tia­tors, and the ideas they had devel­oped there around his­tor­i­cal edu­ca­tion and play.

And on Fri­day, I sat down with Joris Dor­mans for a crash-course in his fas­ci­nat­ing Machi­na­tions tool. We used the oppor­tu­ni­ty to explore some of the design issues I’ve been hav­ing with Sake. In two hours, we’d worked through some poten­tial solu­tions and had found some promis­ing new approach­es. Sake is an online game with a play­er base of unpre­dictable scale. Machi­na­tions allowed us to run many quick sim­u­la­tions of the impact that vary­ing amounts of play­ers might have on the game’s core mechan­ics. I’d rec­om­mend pick­ing up the book Joris has writ­ten on the sub­ject togeth­er with Ernest Adams and div­ing in.