games

Taking a Jackbox Zoom Party to the Next Level

A love a good Jackbox Game. There’s nothing quite like sitting around the living room playing Drawful, Champ’d Up, Job Job, Trivia Murder Party, or Patently Stupid. But nowadays getting together in the same place isn’t as easy as it used to be, and as often as not I find my Jackbox gaming with friends or coworkers takes place over Zoom, Around, Google Meet or Discord.

There’s lots of guides to doing this – even an official one! – but they all miss a few pro tips that I think can turn a good party into a great party. Get all of this set up before your guests are due to arrive to make yourself look like a super-prepared digital party master.

1. Use two computers!

Two laptops: one showing a full-screen Zoom chat with Dan and "Jackbox Games"; the second showing a windowed copy of Jackbox Party Pack 8. — You can use more than two, but two should be considered the minimum for the host.

Using one computer for your video call and a second one to host the game (in addition to the device you’re using to play the games, which could be your phone) is really helpful for several reasons:

You can keep your video chat full-screen without the game window getting in the way, letting you spend more time focussed on your friends.
Your view of the main screen can be through the same screen-share that everybody else sees, helping you diagnose problems. It also means you experience similar video lag to everybody else, keeping things fair!
You can shunt the second computer into a breakout room, giving your guests the freedom to hop in and out of a “social” space and a “gaming” space at will. (You can even set up further computers and have multiple different “game rooms” running at the same time!)

2. Check the volume

3.5mm adapter plugged into the headphone port on a laptop. — Plugging an adapter into the headphone port tricks the computer into thinking some headphones are plugged in without actually needing the headphones quietly buzzing away on your desk.

Connect some headphones to the computer that’s running the game (or set up a virtual audio output device if you’re feeling more technical). This means you can still have the game play sounds and transmit them over Zoom, but you’ll only hear the sounds that come through the screen share, not the sounds that come through the second computer too.

That’s helpful, because (a) it means you don’t get feedback or have to put up with an echo at your end, and (b) it means you’ll be hearing the game exactly the same as your guests hear it, allowing you to easily tweak the volume to a level that allows for conversation over it.

3. Optimise the game settings

Jackbox games were designed first and foremost for sofa gaming, and playing with friends over the Internet benefits from a couple of changes to the default settings.

Sometimes the settings can be found in the main menu of a party pack, and sometimes they’re buried in the game itself, so do your research and know your way around before your party starts.

Turn the volume down, especially the volume of the music, so you can have a conversation over the game. I’d also recommend disabling Full-screen Mode: this reduces the resolution of the game, meaning there’s less data for your video-conferencing software to stream, and makes it easier to set up screen sharing without switching back and forth between your applications (see below).

Turning on the Motion Sensitivity or Reduce Background Animations option if your game has it means there’ll be less movement in the background of the game. This can really help with the video compression used in videoconferencing software, meaning players on lower-speed connections are less-likely to experience lag or “blockiness” in busy scenes.

It’s worth considering turning Subtitles on so that guests can work out what word they missed (which for the trivia games can be a big deal). Depending on your group, Extended Timers is worth considering too: the lag introduced by videoconferencing can frustrate players who submit answers at the last second only to discover that – after transmission delays – they missed the window! Extended Timers don’t solve that, but they do mean that such players are less-likely to end up waiting to the last second in the first place.

Finally: unless the vast majority or all of your guests are in the USA, you might like to flip the Filter US-Centric Content switch so that you don’t get a bunch of people scratching their heads over a cultural reference that they just don’t get.

By the way, you can use your cursor keys and enter to operate Jackbox games menus, which is usually easier than fiddling with a mouse.

4. Optimise Zoom’s settings

Whatever videoconferencing platform you’re using, the settings for screen sharing are usually broadly similar. I suggest:

Make sure you’ve ticked “Share sound” or a similar setting that broadcasts the game’s audio: in some games, this is crucial; in others, it’s nice-to-have. Use your other computer to test how it sounds and tweak the volume accordingly.
Check “Optimize for video clip”; this hints to your videoconferencing software that all parts of the content could be moving at once so it can use the same kind of codec it would for sending video of your face. The alternative assumes that most of the screen will stay static (because it’s the desktop, the background of your slides, or whatever), which works better with a different kind of codec.
Use “Portion of Screen” sharing rather than selecting the application. This ensures that you can select just the parts of the application that have content in, and not “black bars”, window chrome and the like, which looks more-professional as well as sending less data over the connection.
If your platform allows it, consider making the mouse cursor invisible in the shared content: this means that you won’t end up with an annoying cursor sitting in the middle of the screen and getting in the way of text, and makes menu operation look slicker if you end up using the mouse instead of the keyboard for some reason.

Don’t forget to shut down any software that might “pop up” notifications: chat applications, your email client, etc.: the last thing you want is somebody to send you a naughty picture over WhatsApp and the desktop client to show it to everybody else in your party!

Tick Tock

Looking for something with an “escape room” vibe for our date night this week, Ruth and I tried Tick Tock: A Tale for Two, a ~~multiplayer~~ simultaneous cooperative play game for two people, produced by Other Tales Interactive. It was amazing and I’d highly recommend it.

The game’s available on a variety of platforms: Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and Nintendo Switch. We opted for the Android version because, thanks to Google Play Family Library, this meant we only had to buy one copy (you need it installed on both devices you’re playing it on, although both devices don’t have to be of the same type: you could use an iPhone and a Nintendo Switch for example).

The really clever bit from a technical perspective is that the two devices don’t communicate with one another. You could put your devices in flight mode and this game would still work just fine! Instead, the gameplay functions by, at any given time, giving you either (a) a puzzle for which the other person’s device will provide the solution, or (b) a puzzle that you both share, but for which each device only gives you half of the clues you need. By working as a team and communicating effectively (think Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes but without the time pressure), you and your partner will solve the puzzles and progress the plot.

(We’re purists for this kind of puzzle game so we didn’t look at one another’s screens, but I can see how it’d be tempting to “cheat” in this way, especially given that even the guys in the trailer do so!)

Nopepad showing handwritten notes including: "Ticket stub 00067", "Clock shop open 18th", and "Set clock 12". — You could probably play successfully without keeping notes, but we opted to grab a pad and pen at one point.

The puzzles start easy enough, to the extent that we were worried that the entire experience might not be challenging for us. But the second of the three acts proved us wrong and we had to step up our communication and coordination, and the final act had one puzzle that had us scratching our heads for some time! Quite an enjoyable difficulty curve, but still balanced to make sure that we got to a solution, together, in the end. That’s a hard thing to achieve in a game, and deserves praise.

The plot is a little abstract at times and it’s hard to work out exactly what role we, the protagonists, play until right at the end. That’s a bit of a shame, but not in itself a reason to reject this wonderful gem of a game. We spent 72 minutes playing it, although that includes a break in the middle to eat a delivery curry.

If you’re looking for something a bit different for a quiet night in with somebody special, it’s well worth a look.

Mow-Rio Kart

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Ian Padgham [origful] (YouTube)

I have this exact same ride-on mower, but mine doesn’t do this. I feel cheated.

Twinebook – Printable Interactive Fiction

Update: I’ve ceased hosting a public version of this project, but you can still check out the source code and run it for yourself.

Twine 2 is a popular tool for making hypertext interactive fiction, but there’s something about physical printed “choose your own adventure”-style gamebooks that isn’t quite replicated when you’re playing on the Web. Maybe it’s the experience of keeping your finger in a page break to facilitate a “save point” for when you inevitably have to backtrack and try again?

Annabe enjoying Choose Your Own (Minecraft) Story books. — These are the first branching novels I’ve introduced her to for which she’s felt the need to *take notes*.

As a medium for interactive adventures, paper isn’t dead! Our 7-year-old is currently tackling the second part of a series of books by John Diary, the latest part of which was only published in December! But I worry that authors of printed interactive fiction might have a harder time than those producing hypertext versions. Keeping track of all of your cross-references and routes is harder than writing linear fiction, and in the hypertext

Hand-written note showing branching path story plan, from John Diary's Twitter. — John Diary tweeted about his process back in 2017 and it looks… more manual than *I’d* want.

Twinebook

So I’ve thrown together Twinebook, an experimental/prototype tool which aims to bring the feature-rich toolset of Twine to authors of paper-based interactive fiction. Simply: you upload your compiled Twine HTML to Twinebook and it gives you a printable PDF file, replacing the hyperlinks with references in the style of “turn to 27” to instruct the player where to go next. By default, the passages are all scrambled to keep it interesting, but with the starting passage in position 1… but it’s possible to override this for specific passages to facilitate puzzles that require flipping to specific numbered passages.

Obviously, it doesn’t work with any kind of “advanced” Twine game – anything that makes use of variables, Javascript, etc., for example! – unless you can think of a way to translate these into the written word… which is certainly possible – see Fighting Fantasy‘s skill, stamina, luck and dice-rolling mechanics, for example! – but whether it’s desirable is up to individual authors.

If this tool is valuable to anybody, that’s great! Naturally I’ve open-sourced the whole thing so others can expand on it if they like. If you find it useful, let me know.

If you’re interested in the possibility of using Twine to streamline the production of printable interactive fiction, give my Twinebook prototype a try and let me know what you think.

The Ballad of John Crawford

Following the success of our last game of Dialect the previous month and once again in a one-week hiatus of our usual Friday Dungeons & Dragons game, I hosted a second remote game of this strange “soft” RPG with linguistics and improv drama elements.

Thieves’ Cant

Our backdrop to this story was Portsmouth in 1834, where we were part of a group – the Gunwharf Ants – who worked as stevedores and made our living (on top of the abysmal wages for manual handling) through the criminal pursuit of “skimming a little off the top” of the bulk-break cargo we moved between ships and onto and off the canal. These stolen goods would be hidden in the basement of nearby pub The Duke of Wellington until they could be safely fenced, and this often-lucrative enterprise made us the envy of many of the docklands’ other criminal gangs.

I played Katie – “Kegs” to her friends – the proprietor of the Duke (since her husband’s death) and matriarch of the group. I was joined by Nuek (Alec), a Scandinavian friend with a wealth of criminal experience, John “Tuck” Crawford (Matt), adoptee of the gang and our aspiring quartermaster, and “Yellow” Mathias Hammond (Simon), a navy deserter who consistently delivers better than he expects to.

Thieves' Cant tableau at the end of a game of Dialect, with cards strewn around the table. — Our second tableau was somehow more-chaotic than the first, even after I accidentally removed several cards before taking this picture!

While each of us had our stories and some beautiful and hilarious moments, I felt that we all quickly converged on the idea that the principal storyline in our isolation was that of young Tuck. The first act was dominated by his efforts to proof himself to the gang, and – with a little snuff – shake off his reputation as the “kid” of the group and gain acceptance amongst his peers. His chance to prove himself with a caper aboard the Queen Anne went proper merry though after she turned up tin-ful and he found himself kept in a second-place position for years longer. Tuck – and Yellow – got proofed eventually, but the extra time spent living hand-to-mouth might have been what first planted the seed of charity in the young man’s head, and kept most of his numbers out of his pocket and into those of the families he supported in the St. Stevens area.

The second act turned political, as Spiky Dave, leader of the competing gang The Barbados Boys, based over Gosport way, offered a truce between the two rivals in exchange for sharing the manpower – and profits – of a big job against a ship from South Africa… with a case of diamonds aboard. Disagreements over the deal undermined Kegs’ authority over the Ants, but despite their March it went ahead anyway and the job was a success. Except… Spiky Dave kept more than his share of the loot, and agreed to share what was promised only in exchange for the surrender of the Ants and their territory to his gang’s rulership.

We returned to interpersonal drama in the third act as Katie – tired of the gang wars and feeling her age – took perhaps more than her fair share of the barrel (the gang’s shared social care fund) and bought herself clearance to leave aboard a ship to a beachside retirement in Jamaica. She gave up her stake in the future of the gang and shrugged off their challenges in exchange for a quiet life, leaving Nuek as the senior remaining leader of the group… but Tuck the owner of the Duke of Wellington. The gang split into those that integrated with their rivals and those that went their separate ways… and their curious pidgin dissolved with them. Well, except for a few terms which hung on in dockside gang chatter, screeched amongst the gulls of Portsmouth without knowing their significance, for years to come.

Playing Out

Despite being fundamentally the same game and a similar setting to when we played The Outpost the previous month, this game felt very different. Dialect is versatile enough that it can be used to write… adventures, coming-of-age tales, rags-to-riches stories, a comedies, horror, romance… and unless the tone is explicitly set out at the start then it’ll (hopefully) settle somewhere mutually-acceptable to all of the players. But with a new game, new setting, and new players, it’s inevitable that a different kind of story will be told.

But more than that, the backdrop itself impacted on the tale we wove. On Mars, we were physically isolated from the rest of humankind and living in an environment in which the necessities of a new lifestyle and society necessitates new language. But the isolation of criminal gangs in Portsmouth docklands in the late Georgian era is a very different kind: it’s a partial isolation, imposed (where it is) by its members and to a lesser extent by the society around them. Which meant that while their language was still a defining aspect of their isolation, it also felt more-artificial; deliberately so, because those who developed it did so specifically in order to communicate surreptitiously… and, we discovered, to encode their group’s identity into their pidgin.

While our first game of Dialect felt like the language lead the story, this second game felt more like the language and the story co-evolved but were mostly unrelated. That’s not necessarily a problem, and I think we all had fun, but it wasn’t what we expected. I’m glad this wasn’t our first experience of Dialect, because if it were I think it might have tainted our understanding of what the game can be.

As with The Outpost, we found that some of the concepts we came up with didn’t see much use: on Mars, the concept of fibs was rooted in a history of of how our medical records were linked to one another (for e.g. transplant compatibility), but aside from our shared understanding of the background of the word this storyline didn’t really come up. Similarly, in Thieves Cant’ we developed a background about the (vegan!) roots of our gang’s ethics, but it barely got used as more than conversational flavour. In both cases I’ve wondered, after the fact, whether a “flashback” scene framed from one of our prompts might have helped solidify the concept. But I’m also not sure whether or not such a thing would be necessary. We seemed to collectively latch onto a story hook – this time around, centred around Matt’s character John Crawford’s life and our influences on it – and it played out fine.

And hey; nobody died before the epilogue, this time!

I’m looking forward to another game next time we’re on a D&D break, or perhaps some other time.

We Are The Martians

This week our usual Dungeons & Dragons group took a week off while our DM recovered from a long and tiring week. As a “filler”, I offered to facilitate a game of Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies, from Thorny Games, who I discovered through a Metafilter post about their latest free print-and-play game, Sign: A Game about Being Understood. Yes, all of their games about about language and communication; what of it?

Dialect

Dialect could be described as a rules-light, GM-less (it has a “facilitator” role, but they have no more authority than any player on anything), narrative-driven/storytelling roleplaying game based on the concept of isolated groups developing their own unique dialect and using the words they develop as a vehicle to tell their stories.

This might not be the kind of RPG that everybody likes to play – if you like your rules more-structured, for example, or you’re not a fan of “one-shot”/”beer and pretzels” gaming – but I was able to grab a subset of our usual roleplayers – Alec, Matt R, Penny, and I – and have a game (with thanks to Google Meet for videoconferencing and Roll20 for the virtual tabletop: I’d have used Foundry but its card support is still pretty terrible!).

The Outpost

A game of Dialect begins with a backdrop – what other games might call a scenario or adventure – to set the scene. We opted for The Outpost, which put the four of us among the first two thousand humans to colonise Mars, landing in 2045. With help from some prompts provided by the backdrop we expanded our situation in order to declare the “aspects” that would underpin our story, and then expand on these to gain a shared understanding of our world and society:

Refugees from plague: Our expedition left Earth to escape from a series of devastating plagues that were ravaging the planet, to try to get a fresh start on another world.
Hostile environment: Life on Mars is dominated by the ongoing struggle for sufficient food and water; we get by, but only thanks to ongoing effort and discipline and we lack some industries that we haven’t been able to bootstrap in the five years we’ve been here (we had originally thought that others would follow).
Functionalist, duty-driven society: The combination of these two factors led us to form a society based on supporting its own needs; somewhat short of a caste system, our culture is one of utilitarianism and unity.

Finished game board from The Outpost backdrop of our game of Dialect. — Our finished game board, or *tableau*.

It soon became apparent that communication with Earth had been severed, at least initially, from our end: radicals, seeing the successes of our new social and economic systems, wanted to cement our differences by severing ties with the old world. And so our society lives in a hub-and-spoke cave system beneath the Martian desert, self-sustaining except for the need to send rovers patrolling the surface to scout for and collect valuable surface minerals.

In this world, and prompted by our cards, we each developed a character. I was Jeramiah, the self-appointed “father” of the expedition and of this unusual new social order, who remembers the last disasters and wars of old Earth and has revolutionary plans for a better world here on Mars, based on controlled growth and a planned economy. Alec played Sandy – “Tyres” to their friends – a rover-driving explorer with one eye always on the horizon and fresh stories for the colony brought back from behind every new crater and mountain. Penny played Susie, acting not only as the senior medic to the expedition but something more: sort-of the “mechanic” of our people-driven underground machine, working to keep alive the genetic records we’d brought from Earth and keep them up-to-date as our society eventually grew, in order to prevent the same kinds of catastrophe happening here. “Picker” Ben was our artist, for even a functionalist society needs somebody to record its stories, celebrate its accomplishments, and inspire its people. It’s possible that the existence of his position was Jeramiah’s doing: the two share a respect for the stark, barren, undeveloped beauty of the Martian surface.

We developed our language using prompt cards, improvised dialogue, and the needs of our society. But the decades that followed brought great change. More probes began to land from Earth, more sophisticated than the ones that had delivered us here. They brought automated terraforming equipment, great machines that began to transform Mars from a barren wasteland into a place for humans to thrive. These changes fractured our society: there were those that saw opportunity in this change – a chance to go above ground and live in the sun, to expand across the planet, to make easier the struggle of our day-to-day lives. But others saw it as a threat: to our way of life, which had been shaped by our challenging environment; to our great social experiment, which could be ruined by the promise of an excessive lifestyle; to our independence, as these probes were clearly the harbingers of the long-promised second wave from Earth.

Even as new colonies were founded, the Martians of the Hub (the true Martians, who’d been here for yams time, lived and defibed here, not these tanning desert-dwellers that followed) resisted the change, but it was always going to be a losing battle. Jeramiah took his last breath in an environment suit atop a dusty Martian mountain a day’s drive from the Hub, watching the last of the nearby deserts that was still untouched by the new green plants that had begun to spread across the surface. He was with his friend Sandy, for despite all of the culture’s efforts to paint them as diametrically opposed leaders with different ideas of the future, they remained friends until the end. As the years went by and more and more colonists arrived, Sandy left for Phobos, always looking for a new horizon to explore. Sick of the growing number of people who couldn’t understand his language or his art, Ben pioneered an expedition to the far side of the planet where he lived alone, running a self-sustaining agri-home and exploring the hills until his dying day. We were never sure where Susie ended up, but it wasn’t Mars: she’d talked about joining humanity’s next big jump, to the moons of Jupiter, so perhaps she’s out there on one of the colonies of Titan or Europa. Maybe, low clicks, she’s even keeping our language alive out there.

Retrospective

The whole event was a lot of fun and I’m keen to repeat it, perhaps with a different group and a different backdrop. The usual folks know who they are, but if you’re not one of those and you want in next time we play, drop me a message of some kind.

Banners Begone!

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

It’s a clicker quest of purging banners from your homepage!

Push through dozens of banners and upgrade various web-tools to grow your ad-blocking power.
Hone your clicking skills – matters are in your own ~~fingers~~ hands!

There’s no time for idling, show these ads their place!

Banners Begone!

I quite enjoyed this progressive game: it’s a little bit different than most, the theming is fun, it lends itself to multiple strategies, and it’s not geared towards making you wait for longer and longer intervals (as is common in this genre): there’s always something you can be doing to get closer to your goal.

You’ll need a mouse with left and right buttons.

SPACEX – ISS Docking Simulator

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

SpaceX

I managed to crack this on my second attempt, but then: I did play an ungodly amount of Kerbal Space Program a few years back. I guess this means I’m now qualified to be an astronaut, right? I’d better update my CV…

The Board Game Remix Kit

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

New rules for old games! The Board Game Remix Kit is a collection of tips, tweaks, reimaginings and completely new games that you can play with the board and pieces from games you might already own: Monopoly, Cluedo, Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit.

The 26 rule tweaks and new games include:

Full Houses: poker, but played with Monopoly properties

Citygrid: a single-player city-building game

Use Your Words: Scrabble with storytelling

Them’s Fightin’ Words: a game of making anagrams, and arguing about which one would win in a fight

Hunt the Lead Piping: hiding and searching for the Cluedo pieces in your actual house

Guess Who Done It: A series of yes/no questions to identify the murderer (contributed by Meg Pickard)

Zombie Mansion: use the lead piping to defend the Cluedo mansion

Judy Garland on the Moon with a Bassoon: a drawing game that uses the answers to trivia questions as prompts

The Board Game Remix Kit was originally released in 2010 by the company Hide&Seek (which closed in 2014). We are releasing it here as a pdf (for phones/computers) and an epub (for ereaders) under a CC-BY-SA license.

If you enjoy the Kit and can afford it, please consider a donation to the World Health Organisation’s COVID-19 Response Fund.

The Board Game Remix Kit / Hide & Seek

Confined to your house? What a great opportunity to play board games with your fellow confinees.

Only got old family classics like Monopoly, Cluedo and Scrabble? Here’s a guide to mixing-them-up into new, fun, and highly-playable alternatives. Monopoly certainly needs it.

Mackerelmedia Fish

Normally this kind of thing would go into the ballooning dump of “things I’ve enjoyed on the Internet” that is my reposts archive. But sometimes something is so perfect that you have to try to help it see the widest audience it can, right? And today, that thing is: Mackerelmedia Fish.

What is Mackerelmedia Fish? I’ve had a thorough and pretty complete experience of it, now, and I’m still not sure. It’s one or more (or none) of these, for sure, maybe:

A point-and-click, text-based, or hypertext adventure?
An homage to the fun and weird Web of yesteryear?
A statement about the fragility of proprietary technologies on the Internet?
An ARG set in a parallel universe in which the 1990s never ended?
A series of surrealist art pieces connected by a loose narrative?

Rock Paper Shotgun’s article about it opens with “I don’t know where to begin with this—literally, figuratively, existentially?” That sounds about right.

I stared into THE VOID and am OK! — This isn’t the reward for “winning” the “game”. But I was proud of it anyway.

What I can tell you with confident is what playing feels like. And what it feels like is the moment when you’ve gotten bored waiting for page 20 of Argon Zark to finish appear so you decide to reread your already-downloaded copy of the 1997 a.r.k bestof book, and for a moment you think to yourself: “Whoah; this must be what living in the future feels like!”

Because back then you didn’t yet have any concept that “living in the future” will involve scavenging for toilet paper while complaining that you can’t stream your favourite shows in 4K on your pocket-sized supercomputer until the weekend.

Dancing... thing? — I was always more of a Bouncing Blocks than a Hamster Dance guy, anyway.

Mackerelmedia Fish is a mess of half-baked puns, retro graphics, outdated browsing paradigms and broken links. And that’s just part of what makes it great.

It’s also “a short story that’s about the loss of digital history”, its creator Nathalie Lawhead says. If that was her goal, I think she managed it admirably.

If I wasn’t already in love with the game already I would have been when I got to the bit where you navigate through the directory indexes of a series of deepening folders, choose-your-own-adventure style. Nathalie writes, of it:

One thing that I think is also unique about it is using an open directory as a choose your own adventure. The directories are branching. You explore them, and there’s text at the bottom (an htaccess header) that describes the folder you’re in, treating each directory as a landscape. You interact with the files that are in each of these folders, and uncover the story that way.

Back in the naughties I experimented with making choose-your-own-adventure games in exactly this way. I was experimenting with different media by which this kind of branching-choice game could be presented. I envisaged a project in which I’d showcase the same (or a set of related) stories through different approaches. One was “print” (or at least “printable”): came up with a Twee1-to-PDF converter to make “printable” gamebooks. A second was Web hypertext. A third – and this is the one which was most-similar to what Nathalie has now so expertly made real – was FTP! My thinking was that this would be an adventure game that could be played in a browser or even from the command line on any (then-contemporary: FTP clients aren’t so commonplace nowadays) computer. And then, like so many of my projects, the half-made version got put aside “for later” and forgotten about. My solution involved abusing the FTP protocol terribly, but it worked.

(I also looked into ways to make Gopher-powered hypertext fiction and toyed with the idea of using YouTube annotations to make an interactive story web [subsequently done amazingly by Wheezy Waiter, though the death of YouTube annotations in 2017 killed it]. And I’ve still got a prototype I’d like to get back to, someday, of a text-based adventure played entirely through your web browser’s debug console…! But time is not my friend… Maybe I ought to collaborate with somebody else to keep me on-course.)

Three virtual frogs. One needs a hug. — My first batch of pet frogs died quite quickly, but these ones did okay.

In any case: Mackerelmedia Fish is fun, weird, nostalgic, inspiring, and surreal, and you should give it a go. You’ll need to be on a Windows or OS X computer to get everything you can out of it, but there’s nothing to stop you starting out on your mobile, I imagine.

Sso long as you’re capable of at least 800 × 600 at 256 colours and have 4MB of RAM, if you know what I mean.

idTech 4 WebAssembly port – Doom 3 Demo

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Continuation Labs

Back in 2011, some folks cross-compiled Doom (the original, not the reboot, obviously) to JavaScript, leveraging the capabilities of the then-relatively-young <canvas> element and APIs. I was really impressed to see that JavaScript had come so far and that performance on desktop devices was so slick. Sure, this was an 18-year-old video game, but it was playable in a browser, which was a long way from the environment for which it was originally developed.

Now Doom 3‘s playable in a browser, and my mind’s blown all over again. This follows almost the same curve – Doom 3’s 16 years old – but it still goes to show that there’s little limit to the power of client-side browser programming. They’ve done this magic with WebAssembly; while WebAssembly goes slightly against my ideas about the open-source nature of the Web, I still respect the power it commands to do heavyweight crunching tasks like this one.

How long until AAA developers start developing with the Web as an additional platform?

Cheating Hangman

A long while ago, inspired by Nick Berry‘s analysis of optimal Hangman strategy, I worked it backwards to find the hardest words to guess when playing Hangman. This week, I showed these to my colleague Grace – who turns out to be a fan of word puzzles – and our conversation inspired me to go a little deeper. Is it possible, I thought, for me to make a Hangman game that cheats by changing the word it’s thinking of based on the guesses you make in order to make it as difficult as possible for you to win?

Play “Cheating Hangman”

The principle is this: every time the player picks a letter, but before declaring whether or not it’s found in the word –

Make a list of all possible words that would fit into the boxes from the current game state.
If there are lots of them, still, that’s fine: let the player’s guess go ahead.
But if the player’s managing to narrow down the possibilities, attempt to change the word that they’re trying to guess! The new word must be:
- Legitimate: it must still be the same length, have correctly-guessed letters in the same places, and contain no letters that have been declared to be incorrect guesses.
- Harder: after resolving the player’s current guess, the number of possible words must be larger than the number of possible words that would have resulted otherwise.

You might think that this strategy would just involve changing the target word so that you can say “nope” to the player’s current guess. That happens a lot, but it’s not always the case: sometimes, it’ll mean changing to a different word in which the guessed letter also appears. Occasionally, it can even involve changing from a word in which the guessed letter didn’t appear to one in which it does: that is, giving the player a “freebie”. This may seem counterintuitive as a strategy, but it sometimes makes sense: if saying “yeah, there’s an E at the end” increases the number of possible words that it might be compared to saying “no, there are no Es” then this is the right move for a cheating hangman.

Playing against a cheating hangman also lends itself to devising new strategies as a player, too, although I haven’t yet looked deeply into this. But logically, it seems that the optimal strategy against a cheating hangman might involve making guesses that force the hangman to bisect the search space: knowing that they’re always going to adapt towards the largest set of candidate words, a perfect player might be able to make guesses to narrow down the possibilities as fast as possible, early on, only making guesses that they actually expect to be in the word later (before their guess limit runs out!).

I also find myself wondering how easily I could adapt this into a “helpful hangman”: a game which would always change the word that you’re trying to guess in order to try to make you win. This raises the possibility of a whole new game, “suicide hangman”, in which the player is trying to get themselves killed and so is trying to pick letters that can’t possibly be in the word and the hangman is trying to pick words in which those letters can be found, except where doing so makes it obvious which letters the player must avoid next. Maybe another day.

In the meantime, you’re welcome to go play the game (and let me know what you think, below!) and, if you’re of such an inclination, read the source code. I’ve used some seriously ugly techniques to make this work, including regular expression metaprogramming (using regular expressions to write regular expressions), but the code should broadly make sense if you want to adapt it. Have fun!

Play “Cheating Hangman”

Update 26 September 2019, 16:23: I’ve now added “helpful mode”, where the computer tries to cheat on your behalf rather than against you, but it’s not as helpful as you’d think because it assumes you’re playing optimally and have already memorised the dictionary!

Update 1 October 2019, 06:40: Now featured on MetaFilter; hi, MeFites!

Shadows Out of Time

You may recall that on Halloween I mentioned that the Bodleian had released a mini choose-your-own-adventure-like adventure game book, available freely online. I decided that this didn’t go quite far enough and I’ve adapted it into a hypertext game, below. (This was also an excuse for me to play with Chapbook, Chris Klimas‘s new under-development story format for Twine.

If the thing you were waiting for before you experienced Shadows Out of Time was it to be playable in your browser, wait no longer: click here to play the game…

Note #11210

Notes from #musetech18 presentations (with a strong “collaboration” theme). Note that these are “live notes” first-and-foremost for my own use and so are probably full of typos. Sorry.

Matt Locke (StoryThings, @matlocke):

Over the last 100 years, proportional total advertising revenue has been stolen from newspapers by radio, then television: scheduled media that is experienced simultaneously. But we see a recent drift in “patterns of attention” towards the Internet. (Schedulers, not producers, hold the power in radio/television.)
The new attention “spectrum” includes things that aren’t “20-60 minutes” (which has historically been dominated by TV) nor “1-3 hours” (which has been film), but now there are shorter and longer forms of popular medium, from tweets and blog posts (very short) to livestreams and binging (very long). To gather the full spectrum of attention, we need to span these spectra.
Rhythm is the traditions and patterns of how work is done in your industry, sector, platforms and supply chains. You need to understand this to be most-effective (but this is hard to see from the inside: newcomers are helpful). In broadcast television as a medium, the schedules dictate the rhythms… in traditional print publishing, the major book festivals and “blockbuster release” cycles dominate the rhythm.
Then how do we collaborate with organisations not in our sector (i.e. with different rhythms)? There are several approaches, but think about the rhythmic impact.

Lizzy Bullock (English Heritage, @lizzybethness):

g.co/englishheritage
Partnered with Google Arts & Heritage; Google’s first single-partner project and also their first project with a multi-site organisation.
This kind of tech can be used to increase access (e.g. street view of closed sites) and also support curatorial/research aims (e.g. ultra-high-resolution photography).
Aside from the tech access, working with a big company like Google provides basically “free” PR. In combination, these benefits boost reach.
Learnings: prepare to work hard and fast, multi-site projects are a logistical nightmare, you will need help, stay organised and get recordkeeping/planning in place early, be aware that there’ll be things you can’t control (e.g. off-brand PR produced by the partner), don’t be afraid to stand your ground where you know your content better.
Decide what successw looks like at the outset and with all relevant stakeholders involved, so that you can stay on course. Make sure the project is integrated into contributors’ work streams.

Daria Cybulska (Wikimedia UK, @DCybulska):

Collaborative work via Wikimedians-in-residence not only provides a boost to open content but involves engagement with staff and opens further partnership opportunities.
Your audience is already using Wikipedia: reaching out via Wikipedia provides new ways to engage with them – see it as a medium as well as a platform.
Wikimedians-in-residence, being “external”, are great motivators to agitate processes and promote healthy change in your organisation.

Creative Collaborations ([1] Kate Noble @kateinoble, Ina Pruegel @3today, [2] Joanna Salter, [3] Michal Cudrnak, Johnathan Prior):

Digital making (learning about technology through making with it) can link museums with “maker culture”. Cambridge museums (Zoology, Fitzwilliam) used a “Maker in Residence” programme and promoted “family workshops” and worked with primary schools. Staff learned-as-they-went and delivered training that they’d just done themselves (which fits maker culture thinking). Unexpected outcomes included interest from staff and discovery of “hidden” resources around the museums, and the provision of valuable role models to participants. Tips: find allies, be ambitious and playful, and take risks.
National Maritime Museum Greenwich/National Maritime Museum – “re.think” aimed to engage public with emotive topics and physically-interactive exhibits. Digital wing allowed leaving of connections/memories, voting on hot issues, etc. This leads to a model in which visitors are actively engaged in shaping the future display (and interpretation) of exhibitions. Stefanie Posavec appointed as a data artist in residence.
SoundWalk Strazky at Slovak National Gallery: audio-geography soundwalks as an immersive experiential exhibition; can be done relatively cheaply, at the basic end. Telling fictional stories (based on reality) can help engage visitors with content (in this case, recreating scenes from artists’ lives). Interlingual challenges. Delivery via Phonegap app which provides map and audio at “spots”; with a simple design that discourages staring-at-the-screen (only use digital to improve access to content!).

Lightning talks:

Maritime Museum Greenwich: wanted to find out how people engage with objects – we added both a museum interpretation and a community message to each object. Highly-observational testing helped see how hundreds of people engage with content. Lesson: curators are not good judges of how their stuff will be received; audience ownership is amazing. Be reactive. Visitors don’t mind being testers of super-rough paper-based designs.
Nordic Museum / Swedish National Heritage Board explored Generous Interfaces: show first, don’t ask, rich overviews, interobject relationships, encourage exploration etc. (Whitelaw, 2012). Open data + open source + design sprints (with coding in between) + lots of testing = a collaborative process. Use testing to decide between sorting OR filtering; not both! As a bonus, generous interfaces encourage finding of data errors. bit.ly/2CNsNna
IWM on the centenary of WWI: thinking about continuing the crowdsourcing begun by the IWM’s original mission. Millions of assets have been created by users. Highly-collaborative mechanism to explore, contribute to, and share a data space.
Lauren Bassam (@lswbassam) on LGBT History and co-opting of Instagram as an archival space: Instagram is an unconventional archival source, but provides a few benefits in collaboration and engagement management, and serves as a viable platform for stories that are hard to tell using the collections in conventional archives. A suitably-engaged community can take pride in their accuracy and their research cred, whether or not you strictly approve of their use of the term “archivist”. With closed stacks, we sometimes forget how important engagement, touch, exploration and play can be.
Owen Gower (@owentg) from Dr. Jenner’s House Museum and Garden: they received EU REVEAL funding to look at VR as an engagement tool. Their game is for PSVR and has a commercial release. The objects that interested the game designers the most weren’t necessarily those which the curators might have chosen. Don’t let your designers get carried away and fill the game with e.g. zombies. But work with them, and your designers can help you find not only new ways to tell stories, but new stories you didn’t know you could tell. Don’t be afraid to use cheap/student developers!
Rebecca Kahm @rebamex from Pelagios Commons (@Pelagiosproject): the problem with linked data is that it’s hard to show its value to end users (or even show museums “what you can do” with it). Coins have great linked data, in collections. Peripleo was used to implement a sort-of “reverse Indiana Jones”: players try to recover information to find where an artefact belongs.
Jon Pratty: There are lots of useful services (Flickr, Storify etc.) and many are free (which is great)… but this produces problems for us in terms of the long-term life of our online content, not to mention the ethical issues with using services whose business model is built on trading personal data of our users. [Editor’s note: everything being talked about here is the stuff that the Indieweb movement have been working on for some time!] We need to de-siloise and de-centralise our content and services. redecentralize.org? responsibledata.io?

In-House Collaboration and the State of the Sector:

Rosie Cardiff @RosieCardiff, Serpentine Galleries on Mobile Tours. Delivered as web application via captive WiFi hotspot. Technical challenges were significant for a relatively small digital team, and there was some apprehension among frontline staff. As a result of these and other problems, the mobile tours were underused. Ideas to overcome barriers: report successes and feedback, reuse content cross-channel, fix bugs ASAP, invite dialogue. Interesting that they’ve gained a print guides off the back of the the digital. Learn lessons and relaunch.
Sarah Younaf @sarahyounas, Tyne & Wear Museums. Digital’s job is to ask the questions the museum wouldn’t normally ask, i.e. experimentation (with a human-centric bias). Digital is quietly, by its nature, “given permission” to take risks. Consider establishing relationships with (and inviting-in) people who will/want to do “mashups” or find alternative uses for your content; get those conversations going about collections access. Experimental Try-New-Things afternoons had value but this didn’t directly translate into ideas-from-the-bottom, perhaps as a result of a lack of confidence, a requirement for fully-formed ideas, or a heavy form in the application process for investment in new initiatives. Remember you can’t change everyone, but find champions and encourage participation!
Kati Price @katiprice on Structuring for Digital Success in GLAM. Study showed that technical leadership and digital management/analysis is rated as vital, yet they’re also underrepresented. Ambitions routinely outstrip budgets. Assumptions about what digital teams “look” like from an org-chart perspective don’t cover the full diversity: digital teams look very different from one another! Forrester Research model of Digital Maturity seems to be the closest measure of digital maturity in GLAM institutions, but has flaws (mostly relating to its focus in the commercial sector): what’s interesting is that digital maturity seems to correlate to structure – decentralised less mature than centralised less mature than hub-and-spoke less mature than holistic.
Jennifer Wexler, Daniel Pett, Chiara Bonacchi on Diversifying Museum Audiences through Participation and stuff. Crowdsourcing boring data entry tasks is sometimes easier than asking staff to do it, amazingly. For success, make sure you get institutional buy-in and get press on board. Also: make sure that the resulting data is open so everybody can explore it. Crowdsourcing is not implicitly democratisating, but it leads to the production of data that can be. 3D prints (made from 3D cutouts generated by crowdsourcing) are a useful accessibility feature for bringing a collection to blind or partially-sighted visitors, for example. Think about your audiences: kids might love your hip VR, but if their parents hate it then you still need a way to engage with them!

Games to Play With Your Child in Which You Barely Have to Move or Talk

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Games to Play With Your Child in Which You Barely Have to Move or Talk by by Raquel D’Apice (The Ugly Volvo)

I see a lot of ideas online for things to do with your child, but most of them are a lot of work. Many of them involve an unnerving amount of craftiness and/or require going out to buy things. Almost all of them involve moving around which, many days, is fine, but some days can be pretty rough. N…

I see a lot of ideas online for things to do with your child, but most of them are a lot of work. Many of them involve an unnerving amount of craftiness and/or require going out to buy things. Almost all of them involve moving around which, many days, is fine, but some days can be pretty rough. Not that I don’t love getting down on the floor and playing with my kid (I love it a great deal) but I’m an adult in my mid-thirties. I can pretend to be a dinosaur for about 90 minutes (something I happily list on my professional resume) but after an hour and a half, all bets are off. And given that many days I’m home with my son for over eight hours, things can get a bit dicey.

I’ve taken the liberty of brainstorming some fun child/parent activities in which your child can be adventurous and creative and you can lie on the sofa reading a book. Here’s my list so far.

…

Raquel d’Apice (The Ugly Volvo)