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Why I’m Not Grouping By Scientific Field
Posted on | January 29, 2009 | 1 Comment
One thing I specifically wanted to avoid for the card grouping was to group them by scientific field. There are couple of reasons why I didn’t want to have Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Genomics, etc.
First, let me share an experience from the Rebooting Computing conference I attended a couple weeks ago. Many of the attendees were in CS education (both University and K-12) and the rest were people who loved computig, so it was no surprise that they wanted CS to be taught in high school and possible younger. The main problem that even the starry eyed dreamers admitted was that school time is a finite resource and to make computing a required class would mean displacing something else. Similarly, if I start out with 5 (or 10, or whatever) fields, then adding another one means restructuring the game completely, something that would be impossible after it has been released. I wouldn’t want to exclude nanotechnology, regenerative medicine, or whatever just because I didn’t think of it in the beginning.
Second, since I’m taking a 21st century, post-industrial approach to education (creating intrinsic motivation rather than harnessing extrinsic motivation), I might as well take a 21st century approach to science. Each field has advanced so deeply and specialized so much that the real eye-catching advances in science are in interdisciplinary fields. I don’t even know the names of all of them – maybe they don’t even have names. But knowledge and experience from every field is expanding the vision of others, and computing is a prime example. There’s not a field of science out there that isn’t benefiting from computing changing the speed and nature of how they work. Just as Magic has put out dozens of expansion sets that probe the design space of the game, the interactions in the color theme, and the mythology of the worlds they create, GeekStack has the potential to have an expasion for each new field, sub-field, cross-field, or whatever I can find.
Science is the depth I’d like to explore, not the structure with which to explore. I’m trying to build a framework that can support the endless torrent of innovation that mankind is producing.
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July 13th, 2010 @ 11:00 am
I really don’t think you would need to reconstruct the game to implement a new “archetype” as I will call it. It just needs to be done with cards added either a lot at a time, or done in small increments. I will take a page out of another card games book to give an example, Yugioh. for 12 years, Yu-gi-oh was dong fine, and they spontaneously created a new card type, Synchro Monsters. It went extremely well, became staples of most decks, and they didn’t need to reconstruct the entire game. They just had to add new cards, with more cards added over time for progress. My point, it can be done, it just has to be done right.
As an added note, I think the game will lose its whole scientific theme if all archetypes are blended, and decks will become less about science and ideas, and more about just putting the cards together in a deck that does extremely well, but scientifically doesn’t make sense.
Like putting cards that obviously are meant to be biology related, but adding them to a mostly physics deck because they pull off an epic OTK combo.
Thats my view of things.