Strange Games

After I had agreed to organise the 2014 Board Game Studies Colloquium at UCS, it dawned on me that I probably ought to contribute a paper to the event.

A version of the paper was accepted for publication in the Board Game Studies Journal and can be found here: Duggan, E. (2015) "Strange Games: Some Iron Age examples of a four-player board game?". Board Game Studies Journal 9. pp 17 - 40

Stuck for a topic and pondering the possibilities, I recalled an odd and interesting display I had seen on a few visits to the British Museum and thought the game-related objects contained therein may merit some further investigation. That thought led me to the original archaeological report: Stead, I. (1967) "A La Tène III Burial at Welwyn Garden City". Archaeologia 101 pp. 1 – 62.

Following a footnote in Stead, I looked at some other archaeological artefacts and cobbled together a presentation for the colloquium: Strange Games: Some Iron Age examples of a four-player board game?. The presentation seemed to go quite well and I was pleased to be able to give the paper again at the “Jeux et Multiculturalitѐ” International Symposium at the Swiss Museum of Games as part of the Veni Vidi Ludique programme in October 2014.

Board Game Studies Colloquium: Swiss Museum of Games

Got up at 04.00 today to travel to the XVIII Board Game Studies Colloquium at the Swiss Museum of Games, where I am giving *two* papers: one is a solo contribution on Pervasive Games and the other is a collaborative undertaking on 3D-printed astragali.

Off the Board: A Brief Definition and History of Pervasive Games

Astragali: some observations on the anatomy of different mammalian species and their performance as 4-sided dice when thrown onto different surfaces in the form of either the original bone or 3-D printed models of them

I used Adobe Slate to create a blog of the trip to colloquium. The blog can be found here:#BGS2015

Game Developer: magazine archive

Game Developer ran from April 1994 to July 2013.  The magazine contains much of interest to game designers, and is the source of material reprinted elsewhere. (For example, Doug Church's "Formal Abstract Design Tools", which started as a talk at GDC, first appeared in printed form in the August 1999 issue of Game Developer; it was re-published as a Game Developer article on Gamasutra and is available in various forms on the web (including a powerpoint presentation by Earle E. Lane of Delta College) and it has also been re-printed in Salen and Zimmerman, eds (2006) The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology).

The entire Game Developer archive is available here:
http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag.

This is great, as is gives access to every issue in PDF format, as well as code examples in zip files. For those who want to download everything (and who wouldn't), the process is made easier with the Download Them All extension for Firefox.

Install the Download Them All extension, restart Firefox (yes, really!) reload the Game Developer archive page and right-click. Select dTa OneClick from the context menu and type ".pdf, .zip" into the Fast Filtering pane. Select a destination with 3Gb storage and the download will chug away in the background.