So you wanna be a Boxr?

Quick first-liner: Alice is Lost! has been updated with a second "intro-chapter", and accompanying hidden puzzle. Onwards...



An interesting game concept comes flying out of London's Hackday at the weekend: Boxr. (Shouldn't that be "Boxer?" "No." - web2.0 ed) The idea is basically a "capture the zone" run where teams compete to "tag" an area and then hold on to it (along with as many others as they can) for as long as possible. Each minute an area is owned, you get a point - simple. The fun bit is that each "zone" is a telephone box within a specific area, so running from phone to phone is the order of the day. Get to a phone, ring a number and dial in your ID to Pwn Dat Box!



Fun must ensue when you realise someone's making a call on the box you really need in order to win the game. Can violence be too far away? ("Peg off, Granny. Team 1337ZR needs to make a phone call...") And the game should progress faster and faster as players become increasingly less encumbered by carrying round a huge bag of 10 pence pieces in their pocket/on their back/in a trolley. (Do they still sell phone cards?)



Maybe something like the Payphone Directory could help in terms of getting a list of numbers together... Or maybe you actually only need, say, 5 phone boxes so long as other goals are introduced which force you away from the boxes regularly. Or something.



I guess it'd be easy enough to port the game over to other places - perhaps once the rain clears up, a match in Brighton should be arranged (although satellite images, on Google Maps at least, are a little poor).



(Via Vex Appeal.)

Games/Puzzles vs the "Real World"?

So a post over on 'The Frontal Context' on Puzzles, Mysteries and the nature of Science explores the link between information, discovery and the unknown. But (for me) it also sparks another question: what links are there between puzzles/games, and the 'wider world'? How applicable are gaming aand puzzling skills to real, every day life?



There's a lot of discussion, for instance, over the effectiveness of 'Brain Training" style games, especially for the young, the old and, um, Carol Vorderman. But the more sceptical of us are wary of such a "straightforward" link between simple mental "exercises", and how quickly/deeply one's brain may be able to think. (I must admit here that while I'm sure there may be plenty of research into the area, I haven't had the time (or, indeed, inclination) to look any of it up.)



Experience suggests to me that puzzles offer a drastically diverse range of mental "exercise". Many Japanese logic puzzles, for example, are attractive because this logic offers us an extremely linear solution. "If A, then B. If B, then C." - There is little need to choose anything subjectively, or for guesswork. At any stage, you should know if you are right or wrong. This is one, very specific kind of exercise.



Other types of puzzle - random sums, and timed puzzles, for example - naturally lead to slightly different skills. But the issue of everyday applicability is still questionable.



By contrast, I offer an anecdote. Go is considered by many to be the greatest game around - greater than Chess, due to its simplicity, and the complexity that arises from this. Still, the same principle applies to Chess, nonetheless. After heading home from my 4th or 5th session of getting into Go, something clicked in my head and I realised that of the various traits needed to get off the ground, the ability to sacrifice was a hugely important one. The complexity of Go led to very important, but equally very basic strategy such as this, and the basicness of it, I find, makes it also very "transferable" into real life situations - sacrifice and compromise need to be considered at all times, whatever the aim.



This is, perhaps, an extreme, but it hopefully highlights the very real role that games and puzzles can have within a much wider existence. If life is one big puzzle/mystery, then what ideas and revelations can we take forth from "trivial" pursuits? What types of game and riddle do you find to have a much bigger impact on your train of thought than you ever expected? Do you notice the difference that games like Brain Training make in other activities at all? Do you even find that experience in life changes how you play games or solve puzzles?



TINAG.