What is it that makes a game? There are people who define themselves amongst themselves as ‘players’.And there are ‘rules’ which the players agree upon obeying. These two elements create a number a variables which through interaction create a game.

Many variables of games are taken for granted, and as we approach a more digital way of life and ‘old’ physical games are becoming digitized, these variables are not created by the players but now hard coded into the game itself.

The example being: Chess. ‘Old’ Physical Chess has only a board and sixteen pieces. The variables of how the pieces move, where they begin on the board, and others like ‘in passing’, castling, promotion etc. are purely at the mercy of interaction between the players.

Digital Chess has hard coded these variables into the game itself and thus taken the argument of them out of the equation. Such that the game of digital chess is not up of argument or modification.

What is lost from the digital game is the creative discussion. There becomes no way to set the pieces in odd arraignments and move them in odd directions. What is lost is the ability to challenge the variables and modify the game on the fly (as it were).

The Activist:

It become entirely necessary in this day and age to demand a creative discussion in all forms of digital culture. If the populace take for granted the rules of the game and thus the rules are hard coded in the system, then the next generation will never know or have the notion that these rules were a malleable, dynamic, evolving system. If we lock the rules into place were lock ourselves into a creative jail, which if we are not quick to act will become a stagnate unchanging status quo and the end of our creative evolution.

The Digitalist:

As the age of complete digital immersion approaches were become faced with issues of accessibility and interaction. The menu systems (a menu being a digital link to the physical world) that are set in place to navigate the digital earth are the systems that define the digital earth. With this in mind an digital realm without a menu, in effect does not exist. For example the menu systems of DVD’s make the movie accessible (brought into reality) , the menus of television is the remote, the menu of the internet is a browser, all of which define, shape, and create the experience and the reality.

The point of this is that any digital space needs a menu, which in effect is a “rule”, to bring it into existence before a creative discussion can begin to occur

The challenge, then, for the Digitalists, is to create a beginning set of “rules” which at least give access to a majority of possible arrangements of data. Thus satiating the Activists. However this set must also include the prior assumed “or for granted” variables in an arrangement which the normal populace can digest. Thus satiating the Sociologist.

IN CONCLUSION

Digital games must give the players the ability to argue and change the rules in creative discussion. Traditional games translated into digital media, without the consideration of creative discusion, face an end to thier evolution. For these reasons I have created 3D-Chess in its design.