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queenluaso the other day at work my team played this really cute programming game!
the game works like so: take some basic-ish, well-understood program that most coders could reasonably implement in an hour or two (e.g., Conway's Game of Life).
you are to write a test for some very basic unit of functionality for the program. say, a test for the GenerateBoard method, or CheckNeighbors, or whatever. "assert GenerateBoard(3,3) == [some three-dimensional-array]", that sort of deal.
then, pass your partner the keyboard.
your partner is now the "lazy, evil" programmer. and/or a government contractor programmer. (zing!) they write some lazy, stupid, wrong code that will still manage to pass your test.
you go back and fix your test, partner tries to do something evil again, continue until your test is bulletproof, then switch roles.
this is pretty transparently an exercise in The Holy Gospel of Test-Driven Development. and while that is a good gospel and a good thing to learn, it can also be delightfully and hilariously subversive little exercise in Programmers Trolling Each Other For No Reason In Particular. python attributes that modify themselves in insidious ways each time they're called! subtly dicking with stack frames! evil c macros! like, i think this would legit make a kind of fun party game with a few tipsy hackers. it's reactive; it's partner-y; it's fun; and if you can't win the "honest" way (by finding a gap in your partner's test cases) there are plentiful opportunities for mischievous hacking. i love it.
anyway, it got me thinking. programming, visual art, writing, music: all are art forms or crafts of some sort. and i like my games to have a bit of craft in them. it lets you practice; it lets you delight the other players in unexpected ways; it's fun because art is fun.
unfortunately, most games are not particularly craft-driven in and of themselves—board games mostly lie on an axis between "randomness" and "skill/strategy," most video games are based on mastery of the game's particular combat system, and so on. and, to be fair, it's super-hard to design engaging experiences that are just based on "everyone does an artsy thing," since everyone's skill levels vary. (for instance, as a classically-trained pianist, i'm really weak on improv/freeform type stuff, and thus could only handle the basics of jazz sessions, which often consist of a lot of this sort of play. similarly, you have to be at least an okay programmer to do the programming game i described, and you'll have far more fun with it if you've done a bit of mischievous programming before.)
but. i want to collect a list of such craft/art-based games. because they are fun, and because maybe they will help me generate ideas for moreand then i can badger all my friends into playing with me yaaaay.
i can name a few off the top of my head:
i am actually quite curious if anyone else knows of such games! if so, please share them :)
the game works like so: take some basic-ish, well-understood program that most coders could reasonably implement in an hour or two (e.g., Conway's Game of Life).
you are to write a test for some very basic unit of functionality for the program. say, a test for the GenerateBoard method, or CheckNeighbors, or whatever. "assert GenerateBoard(3,3) == [some three-dimensional-array]", that sort of deal.
then, pass your partner the keyboard.
your partner is now the "lazy, evil" programmer. and/or a government contractor programmer. (zing!) they write some lazy, stupid, wrong code that will still manage to pass your test.
you go back and fix your test, partner tries to do something evil again, continue until your test is bulletproof, then switch roles.
this is pretty transparently an exercise in The Holy Gospel of Test-Driven Development. and while that is a good gospel and a good thing to learn, it can also be delightfully and hilariously subversive little exercise in Programmers Trolling Each Other For No Reason In Particular. python attributes that modify themselves in insidious ways each time they're called! subtly dicking with stack frames! evil c macros! like, i think this would legit make a kind of fun party game with a few tipsy hackers. it's reactive; it's partner-y; it's fun; and if you can't win the "honest" way (by finding a gap in your partner's test cases) there are plentiful opportunities for mischievous hacking. i love it.
anyway, it got me thinking. programming, visual art, writing, music: all are art forms or crafts of some sort. and i like my games to have a bit of craft in them. it lets you practice; it lets you delight the other players in unexpected ways; it's fun because art is fun.
unfortunately, most games are not particularly craft-driven in and of themselves—board games mostly lie on an axis between "randomness" and "skill/strategy," most video games are based on mastery of the game's particular combat system, and so on. and, to be fair, it's super-hard to design engaging experiences that are just based on "everyone does an artsy thing," since everyone's skill levels vary. (for instance, as a classically-trained pianist, i'm really weak on improv/freeform type stuff, and thus could only handle the basics of jazz sessions, which often consist of a lot of this sort of play. similarly, you have to be at least an okay programmer to do the programming game i described, and you'll have far more fun with it if you've done a bit of mischievous programming before.)
but. i want to collect a list of such craft/art-based games. because they are fun, and because maybe they will help me generate ideas for more
i can name a few off the top of my head:
- i don't have a name for it, but i saw it described online the other day, and it's basically "telephone with art." first person in the circle writes a sentence describing a funny scene. second person has to draw it. third person has to write a sentence describing the picture... without looking at the original description. continue alternating through the circle until the pictures and their descriptions are thoroughly hilarious and removed from the original intent
- play-by-post rpgs. i know, i know, i go on about these all the time, but i can't help it. they're such a lovely hybrid of game-y aspects and legit art/storytelling/character stuff. i always favored the ones that were really light on game-y aspects, but, some games had tons of gamey relics to collect and achievements to unlock, and those were neat in their own way.
- popcorn stories! (i... thought the phrase was commonplace, but google was confused, so! a popcorn story is when, i start telling some silly fictional story, tell about a paragraph of it, then "pass" to the next person in the circle. they then have to tell at least one sentence of the story, usually more, and pass again. keep going until someone gets around to coming up with a proper ending.) anyway, we used to do these all the time at girl scout camp and on long car trips, but it tapered out around high school, and i kind of wonder why. i guess it's a lot of pressure—it's performance, everyone's listening to you, you have to come up with some way to continue the story all by yourself!—but man i'd kind of like to bring that back. the stories were never good but that wasn't the point; they were wild and silly and full of inside jokes and backtracking and in the end you had to find some way to wrangle all that into a proper story-ending.
i am actually quite curious if anyone else knows of such games! if so, please share them :)
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Date: 2015-07-18 04:39 am (UTC)it's funny you mention the DS one, actually, because it made me think of the little DS image-chat program, which then reminded me of a cute game i'd forgotten about over Twitter, magic missle, in which you duel with your opponent by "casting" spells (i.e. linking stock images) and explaining what your spell does. super-freeform and cutesy, and seems like DS picochat could take advantage of similar things, hm
and oh my god that OTC tournament stuff is kind of amazing. i. i had no idea this was a thing, and wow the technical quality of some of those is obscene, and i just think it's kind of amazing there was this big community game in some corner of dA that i have never encountered in my years of casually browsing the site. how delightful. (i actually read a book once, where storytellers competed in an OTC tournament-ish game, except with spoken word storytelling rather than visual telling... though, it wasn't scored by audience votes, the two competitors "just knew" when they were beaten, and they respectfully refrained from things considered godmoding, or, something. it was also set within a utopian society, which i think is the only reason it kind of worked :P)