Ask Lemmy

I'm sure there's probably someone out there, but I'm really interested in cool border crossings and how they represent nations on each side. As much as I am no nationalist, I find those projections of strength, friendship, security, etc. all super interesting.

Oh, and fake/fantasy transit maps. Those are always fun to draw up in my spare time.

One of the very first mud games, mud2 by Richard Bartle.

http://www.mudii.co.uk/

How to use game design for education around political and social issues and complexity science

Edit since a few people asked: I don't have good answers for this yet, but some thoughts:

• According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
  • Some excellent examples include Wintergreen and Bloc by Bloc. Basically any storygame can, if you want it to.
• Games are basically a voluntary and temporary acceptance of an arbitrary set of rules, with an arbitrary goal that you strive to overcome. They often include metrics that tell you how well you are doing. To some degree, the same can be said about modern bureaucracies (albeit less voluntary and temporary), where the metrics might be KPIs or money.
  • Games can satirise this in educational ways, e.g. this was the purpose of The Landlord's Game (the precursor to monopoly)
  • This is another C. Thi Nguyen thing - really worth listening to his podcast episode on the Ezra Klein show.
• Some games show amazing emergent complexity. That is, complexity that isn't due to underlying complexity of the system parts, but emerges as a result of their many interactions, like turbulent eddies, or bird murmurations.
  • Go/Baduk is an extreme example of this. 2 rules that have produced 3000 years of culture surrounding one of the most difficult and engaging games I know.
  • Tak is another example that's a lot easier to learn (because it doesn't require building up a bank of pattern recognition)
• TTRPGs are also super interesting to me, because narrative is one of the tools that the human brain has developed to help understand complexity. I don't think they exhibit emergent complexity so much, but they bring in a lot of complexity via the players' life experience, and via the setting/world.
• Different game mechanics and story tropes provide different affordances - that is, they allow or encourage some behaviours, and disallow others.
  • No one ever forments a revolution in monopoly, right? Why not?
  • Affordances is an excellent frame for understanding how agency relates to systems, because all systems have attributes with affordances (and constraints). What are the affordances of a capitalist democracy? I think games are an ideal vehicle for explaining affordances easily.

There are probably plenty more links. I've been playing some of those games for years, but am still relatively new to some e.g. story games. And I'm just starting out looking in to game design..

edit 2: also, a plug for !complexity@lemmy.world

The design and building of authorization policy systems. And crypto (as in cryptography as the word originally meant) but that one tends to be slightly more common.

Pure math, finite automata, math rock, analog synthesis, knitting (in my demographic), video games from before we knew modern UI and game design... to be fair, none of these communities are non-existent, but they're pretty niche even among my weirdo friends.

Maybe ambient funk, a sub genre of São Paulo's funk bruxaria that is a sub genre of Brazilian funk.

Bet all the views on this song are mine putting it on repeat

https://youtube.com/watch?v=G1UoyoFBb0o

There are like only 3 producers of this genre of music.

I tried to find an in-person calligraphy meetup around my area and mind you, I live in one of the bigger metro areas in the country. Couldn't find squat. Don't know if my Google Fu was weak or I just don't know what to actually look up but there's nothing specifically for calligraphy as far as I can tell. Also, I don't count online spaces.

Slinging. Like David and Goliath, but I’m better with the over the shoulder method than the spin it in circles method. Based on discord and other sites, there are dozens of slingers worldwide.

I still love Garry’s Mod animations. Basically using stop-motion-style tools to make low-effort animations with familiar characters on Source engine maps.

They don’t fit the YouTube algorithm now though; creators can’t just put up a new animation every few weeks. It was at its best when the whole community was just posting stuff in leapfrog formation, rather than competing for their audience every day.

When watching incest porn, I try to figure out how everybody can be in a step-relationship with everybody else there. How is it possible for step-mom, step-dad, step-bro and step-sis to all live in the same house with no one else?

I really like the souped up versions of mom cars that they make before there's a model year redesign.

My dream car is Mercedes R 63 AMG.

Also a big fan of Station Wagons, but that's not that rare among enthusiasts.

I'm not into gaming. I think I'm the only adult male I know of comparable age that isn't. I don't really know why. I think it's a mental block. I was big into 16-bit Atari/Amiga games in the early 90s. Then I just hit like 16/17 and got into music and drinking to fit in. The gaming scene at the time (pre-internet) was social kryptonite, and I lived in rural Scotland so I left it all behind.

Oddly, I returned to general computing in my early 20s as the internet was blowing up and now work in the IT sector.

But still not a gamer, which ironically is quite isolating.

I strap GoPros on to hand built FPV Freestyle quadcopters and make videos out of it. When I lived in Orlando there were a few of us doing it. Lately I know of 0 in my area.

In real life, I know all couple people who are also interested in watches, but mostly nobody wears a watch at all anymore, let alone is interested in them as a hobby.

Also, fountain pens. I love pens. I love finding them at antique stores and restoring them. There's a little bit of a community here, not like there was on reddit though.

Calculators. I think I'm alone there. Vintage TI, HP, and modern Casio.

Staplers. Especially Ace.

As for games, probably Battlezone II. Such fun multi-player, now I have nobody to play with. So many good mods, and I can't get any of them to work in Mint. One reason I still have an XP machine.

I am the only person I know IRL that plays soulslikes and rougelikes. Even online, it seems like it's not a lot of people compared to other genres and series. Especially so on smaller places such as here.

There was a very short lived time when I was the top ranked player of Shootmania in the entire US, tho. Because I was the ONLY US player at the time lol

I code Csound. It's still sort-of being maintained, but otherwise the community is super dead. It's a shame because it's very versatile and fun, but realistically there are quite a few more modern alternatives for coding sound synthesis these days.

I'm into making a blog about tech and art. The tech side being about teaching normies how to circumvent censorship and be anonymous or private, how to escape algorithms, and a personalized resource wiki and archive.

The art side is about the intersection between tech and art, AI art appropriation, raves and social justice, and some light electronica blogging.

I know of no one else irl that is fascinated by this stuff, let alone both simultaneously. None of my artsy friends are into the tech stuff, and the one tech friend I have knows nothing about this stuff. It gets lonely as both a tech and art nerd but I'm so filled with passion making this from scratch. Also the landing page will pull from a collection of liminal spaces, political cartoons, Y2K imagery and have the logo rotating back and forth. I think its pretty cool, very rigorous and time consuming to build though.

it will be called zoracle.life

This is a great topic! I have more than one kinda odd hobby.

I got a bunch of old newspaper comic strips of Mary Worth from 1947 and 1951 (almost two full years’ worth) that I’m putting into ~3”x12” poly bags so I can read them more easily. I need to put them into a book of some sort.

I also got some color Sunday strips from 1951 but they’re a crazy size so I may need to put those in a separate book.

I think they’re so cool though! The strips have ads on the back from the time period.

I make games that are a mix of physical and digital mediums. I found some other people doing similar stuff but nothing exactly the same. A lot of escape room creators use similar technologies though so I find myself talking to those people a lot.

I'm building a decentralised file system.

It works, is FOSS and all.

I've been trying to find cool stuff on PeerTube. Sometimes it feels like wandering in the wilderness. I guess people really only do post cool stuff to YouTube for the money. I found this, though it was pretty cool. https://video.mycrowd.ca/w/8wu8fRidkbjQ1FK3zqo1Mp

I'm back engineering an old UART to replace the lightbulb on a projector with a UV bulb so I can use it to print images in gelatin Carbon transfer photography. LOL even the normies using transparencies are a few.

I have a fair amount of things that are not exactly popular but its not like zero people are into it.