All of this code below I have written in the Arduino environment for Open Columns, a project headed up by Omar Khan, a professor in the School of Architecture at the University at Buffalo. This piece had its opening on 9/15 for Beyond|In Western New York at Buffalo Art Studios in the Tri-Main Building, and it will be there for 3 months. I strongly feel that since I wrote 100% of this code, I have the right to do what I want with it. So here in this blog, I will put it into the public domain. Use it for reference, copy it, do what ever. It is open source.

So here it is.

Posted: September 17th, 2007 under Code.
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Rules:
Each player controls three boys. Whoever has one boy successfully upgrading to Pope wins the game.
There are four stages in this game, altar boy, priest, bishop and pope.

Players roll the dice to progress. Altar boy can only go forward. However, priest, bishop and pope are allowed to go any directions they want.

There are two upgrading zones on the board. But players can only upgrade alternatively in the two zones. You can not upgrade in the same zone consecutively.

There are two confession zones on the board. If a player lands on the zones, he is sent to the confession room on the side. The player loses a turn and has to answer the other players’ question honestly.
There are two pray zones on the board. If a player lands on the zones, he has to roll the dice again. If the dice shows six in number, his prayer comes true. He can move himself to wherever he wants except the upgrading zone. Otherwise, the player loses a turn.

When opponent players land in the same grid. Priest and bishop can put altar boys to confession room. Bishop can put priest back to altar boy. If they are in the same level, both go to confession room.

The Secret Society Rule: There is an entry to the choir schools. Only altar boys can enter choir schools. After enter choir schools, they have to go through the purple zone before leaving. A choir boy gets upgraded when landing in the same grid twice with a priest or a bishop. Upgraded choir boys can kick a priest or bishop that has helped him upgrade out of the game if he is now in a higher level than them.

Posted: September 11th, 2007 under Designed Play.
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According to Huizinga play is:
Free. Play is voluntary. Players involved are never obligated to play a game have the freedom to remove themselves from it at their own will.

Not Real. Play as a system occurs outside the domain of the real world.

Repetitive. The rules involved with play are repetitive and can be replicated not only within the play itself, but as a function to repeat the play.

Limited. The ‘playing field’ in which games take place is closed, not only in the context of space, but in other contexts such as time.

Ordered. All play has an order to it. Often time this order is embodied in rules. These rules, regardless of their complexities, must be mutually understood by the participants.

Huizinga made a relationship between play and feast, and more broadly play and ritual. In his analysis of this relationship, Huizinga makes the observation that ritual complies with a definition of play. However he points out that play and ritual fundamentally differs if look at the consciousness of the participants. In other words, in ritual the participants are not required to realize it is not real. If is often the case in ritual where the participants mistake ritual for reality. It is here where Huizinga starts to imply the importance of play’s role in real life ritual practices, namely religion. Play in his words “leads us deep into the problem of the nature and origin of religious concepts (Huizinga, 25).”

I think Huizinga has a point here. On the surface religious practice seems to have its methodological roots sunk into play. Thinking about this religious ritual whose operational rules are practiced by its participants seem to also act upon an unknown set constituative rules. Looking at religion, play methodology seems to best fit well with its practices which fall outside of reason and evidence. Religious practice emphasizes blind acceptance and discourages the attempt to understand constituative rules. It is here where the study and understanding of play demonstrates a potential strategy to understand the practice of religious ritual.

To explain how the constituative rules and operational rules intersect beyond the formal rules to create a unique game identity, it is first important to define both terms:

Constituative rules are the rules that make up the fundamental logical and mathematical structure of a game. Compared to operational rules, constituative rules are abstract and can be thought as the back-end structure of a game.

Operational rules are the rules that the participants enact in order to play the game. It is essential that the players are aware of these rules to successfully play the game. Because of this, these rule often have a written version which accompanies the game.

Together, these two sets of rules help compose the formal identity of a game. Even though the (implicit) constituative structure of a game does not always mirror the (explicit) operational rules, the operational rules must somehow be mapped onto the constituative rules for the game to make sense. In my understanding of this relationship, the constituative rules behave much like the source code of a website, and the operational rules behave like the user interface. Because of the consistency of web page interfaces, the user readily knows how to navigate (operate) from one web page to another. Often the user does not know of or understand the underlying source code behind a web page, which is not usually important to web site navigation.

In the game Rock-Paper-Scissors, both the constituative and operational rules are pretty straight forward…and closely mirror each other. The operational rules in this game can be understood as:

The players substitute the three elements of Rock, Paper and Scissors with representative hand signals. These hand signals are delivered simultaneously by the players.

The Outcome of play is determined by the following:
Rock wins against Scissors
Scissors wins against Paper
Paper wins against Rock

Write the previous set of statements as a computer programmer would write it and figure out the probabilities of each of the actions and you quickly have your constituative rules.

Chess on the other hand, is a very complex game with very different constituative and operational rules. Even today in the game of chess we have computer scientists whose supercomputers are still trying to determine a more accurate set of constituative rules. In recent years, the machine has eclipsed top chess human in the understanding of these rules. This is demonstrated as computers such as Deep Blue have consistently defeated masters such as Garry Kasparov. Meanwhile the operational rules of chess are simple enough to be understood a 5-year-old. For example, pawn pieces can only behave in certain explicit ways while bishops behave in another way.

Checkers, a game whose constituative rules has been recently ’solved’ also has a much simpler set of operational rules.

Posted: September 4th, 2007 under Designed Play.
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