Sean Bouchard

(For a CTIN541 assignment.)

Undertow! is a mod of the popular family board game Up the River, with a grim slant. Instead of merrily rowing boats up the river, each player is responsible for a group of swimmers who are being pulled out to sea. We were aiming, in our design, to hit a particular emotional note: hopeless desperation, waxing panic. I believe we hit that mark.

(For a CTCS505 assignment... uh, a while ago.)

(Note: I highly recommend that you play Photopia, and that you do so before reading this, as the following will contain some spoilers for the game. Photopia is one of the defining works of interactive fiction and, in addition to that, it is relatively short (around forty minutes) and accessible to newcomers to the medium. If you haven't yet played the game, you can find an online version here, or download the script and interpreter from here.)

(For a CTCS505 assignment.)

The concept of boundaries is fundamental to the design of games. Traditionally, games have explicit and unequivocal demarcations that separate the space of the game-world from the larger world around it. The spacial boundaries of a game like tennis are clearly marked by the court; games like chess and go are likewise bounded by the edges of the game board. But even more important than spacial boundaries are the ideal conditions that determine when a game is being played and who is a participant in it. Participants are always clearly differentiated from non-participants, even when the two groups occupy the same space.

The act of participation, which extends from the moment of invitation to play until the conclusion of the game, is an implicit social agreement between parties that a game is taking place within the agreed-upon spacial, temporal and conceptual boundaries, and that the actions they take within the context of that agreed-upon game have a different meaning than they would have outside the game. In Rules of Play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman say that within the boundaries of the game, "special meanings accrue and cluster around objects and behaviors. In effect, a new reality is created, defined by the rules of the game and inhabited by its players."1