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parasitic games
Game designer Eric Zimmerman's personal site is currently under reconstruction, but it's worth browsing the version stored in the Internet Archive.
I like the games he designed to be played in the space of an art gallery, but I'm particularly intrigued by Suspicion, a game "for 12-24 players designed to be played in an office environment over a week of real time. ... a social game in which players all belong to secret groups. To win the game, you must find the other players in your groups using code words and code gestures. Then you work with your allies to sabotage other groups and 'steal' their Suspicion cards through clever gameplay."
More on Suspicion here:
"Traditionally, games take place in artificial environments. Football players, for example, operate within strictly delimited boundaries of time and space when they play football. Football games take place in a field. The games have a beginning and an end. There is normally no question as to whether or not the players are actually playing the game. Suspicion, on the other hand, does not create a separate environment for play. It has a parasitic relationship to the already existing physical, psychological, and social work environment. Suspicion operates in this environment in curious ways.
For example, by randomly placing the players in groups, the normal hierarchies and power relationships of the office are restructured into the more perverse and arbitrary ordering of the game."
Love it!
I learned about Suspicion when reading this writeup of the "What Is A Game?" conference in Utrecht, which contains other interesting tidbits such as the rules for how to play a massively multiplayer rock-paper-scissors game.
Eric Zimmerman's game company, GameLab.
Labels: game_commentary |
Friday, December 12, 2003
9:02 AM
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