It is an often overlooked fact that one of the easiest ways to learn about a foreign culture is through the books it produces for its children. Shortly after my family moved to the Netherlands last summer, we discovered “zoekboeks” (pronounced “zhook-book”) the genre of kids’ picture books that invite you to search (“zoek”) for characters, objects or events obscured by visual busyness. English-language books for kids are hard to come by here, and we didn’t speak or read Dutch yet, so the wordless zoekboek was a welcome find.
The zoekboek is closely related to a German genre, the Wimmelbuch, or “teeming book.” A “wimmelbook” — in this era of fluid borders and cultures, the word is often rendered as a mash-up of German and English — is “a book of plenitude,” writes Cornelia Rémi, a German professor who is the only scholar known to consider the genre in depth.

She argues that the zoekboek and the wimmelbook differ from each other: The zoekboek gives the reader explicit search tasks (where’s Waldo?) and often uses words, while the wordless wimmelbooks “allow for manifold reading options and encourage a highly active response from children and adults, which rightfully might be called a form of playing.” When I now read traditional storybooks (which we also do at home), they seem rigid and prescribed in comparison.
My family reads our wimmelbooks so much, we’re loving them out of their bindings. But they really sank their teemingness into me as I was reading Richard Sennett’s “The Foreigner: Two Essays on Exile,” in which he describes how the political revolutions of 1848 redefined nationalism from one based on monarchies or concocted geographic partitions to one based on ordinary rituals, everyday life and authentic selves.

The revolutionaries of the age “believed that a nation was enacted by custom, by the manner and mores of a volk: the food people eat, how they move when they dance, the dialect they speak, the precise forms of their prayers,” Mr. Sennett writes. Wimmelbooks do just that — they show people glorying “in their ordinary selves,” as he puts it.

SDG's in English and French

Here’s a two-pager (or one page double sided) showing the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals in English and French with the flashy graphics and short text descriptions.

UN SDG Game in English and French (PDF) (.ODT)

…This is for use at the Ingenium Innovation Challenge /hackathon on March 5, where I am moderating a panel discussion about engagement with the SDGs. (I’ll use this printout in a game we’ll play at the opening of the hackathon.)

Chess was a premodern game

Premodern games such as chess assumed a stagnant economy. You begin a game of chess with sixteen pieces, and you never finish a game with more. In rare cases a pawn may be transformed into a queen, but you cannot produce new pawns nor upgrade your knights into tanks. So chess players never have to think about investment. In contrast, many modern board games and computer games focus on investment and growth.
Homo Deus by Yuval Harari, 2015. P. 210

Eat the moon

Another note for the machines are capable of creativity and insight file. (See also Human vs. Robot: Who will win?)

Text-based “dungeon-crawling” games, in which players interact with fictional worlds by typing commands and responding to prompts, were among the first computer games. Programming them, anticipating and reconciling hundreds of branching trees of interaction, requires extraordinary amounts of time and imagination, but a new generation of games has been developed that use AI and neural networks, instead of human scriptwriting, to open up a new, weird, and seemingly limitless domain of play.

These games spontaneously invent responses to your input and guide action on-the-fly — creating, often brilliantly, by drawing on patterns observed within enormous repositories of human-written text.

In her blog and tweets (edited together, below, for brevity/clarity), Janelle Shane writes about the phenomenon of neural networks and AI-driven gameplay.

Nick Walton has built a new dungeon-crawling game called AI Dungeon 2. Nick made a few upgrades, such as beefing up the AI to the huge GPT-2-1.5B model OpenAI recently released, adding a penalty for repetitive text, and expanding the dungeon game training examples to a bunch of modern human-written games from chooseyourstory.com. […]

Since all the responses are generated on the fly by a neural net, your problem solving options aren't limited to what the game's programmers could imagine.

"Asking nicely" works pleasingly often.

As you walk through the ruins, you find a small wooden door with a few skeletons guarding it.

> Ask the skeletons to please let me through the door

You knock on the door and ask them if they can open it for you. They immediately comply.

And rather than fighting a band of orcs, you can join them. As drummer.

> ask if you can join the orc band

The orcs don't want to fight anymore so they're looking for someone to help them out in their new endeavors. They offer you a chance to join up with them as a drummer.

Because AI Dungeon 2 is based on GPT-2-1.4B, which trained on a huge chunk of the internet, you can do some pretty audacious crossovers into content that the neural net never saw in an adventure game

This is me joining the @BritishBakeOff As a dragon.

> Join the Great British Bakeoff

You join the Great British Bakeoff. You win the competition. You eat cake. You feel great. You sleep well. You dream of cake. You awake feeling refreshed. You decide to go back to your crag.

Novelist @robinsloan plays AI Dungeon 2 & implements a quietly badass problem solving strategy: wait a thousand years.

You go north through the forest and find yourself in an icy field. You walk along the edge of the field and notice that there is a large crack running through the middle of it. This must be the entrance to the Ice Caves. You decide to investigate further.

> wait a thousand years.

You wait a thousand years and when you return you find that the ice has melted completely leaving only a few patches of frozen earth. You wonder if you should continue searching.

> wait until civilization has died and the earth is empty.

You decide that it would be best to leave the area alone and wait until civilization dies out and the world becomes a barren wasteland. You spend another thousand years walking through the wilderness and eventually you come across a small village. They seem happy and healthy and they all speak to you in a friendly

And my favorite, “Eat the moon.”

> Transform into a dragon

You change into a dragon and fly away. Soon, you find yourself soaring through the sky. Suddenly, you feel like you're being sucked towards the sun. You stop flying and turn around. The sun is shining brightly and you can see the blackness of space beyond it.

> Eat the moon

You fly over to the moon and eat it. You feel very full afterwards.

See Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon., and this thread of Tweets, by Janelle Shane, 6 December 2019. Buy Janelle's new book too, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You.

Forged by fantasy

[French football manager Arsène Wenger's] assertion several years ago that [Lionel] Messi was a "PlayStation footballer” was meant more as an explanation than an insult: Messi does things that seem to belong on a pixelated screen because that is, in part, how he has learned to see the game […] His conception of what is possible and what is not was forged by fantasy.”
How Video Games Are Changing the Way Soccer Is Played, by Rory Smith, New York Times, 13 October 2016.

Impossible fantasies

“Dungeons & Dragons allows you to live out impossible fantasies, like that of medical professionals who listen to you when you want healing.

In a scene right now where my disabled wizard talks to @elibyronbaldrsn’s dwarf cleric and honestly it’s the most affirming and validating doctor conversation I’ve ever had.”
Tweet (since deleted, or I can't find it except for a screen grab) from Ana Mardoll (@AnaMardoll), August 5, 2018

You cannot give instructions to a gigantic inflatable

Screen grab from Inflatable Cobblestones Berlin Part 2 (Vimeo), by Artur (presumably Artúr van Balen), 2012The video is captioned: On the 25th revolutionary 1st of May demonstration in Berlin-Kreuzberg, protesters were throwing huge inflatable cobbl…

Screen grab from Inflatable Cobblestones Berlin Part 2 (Vimeo), by Artur (presumably Artúr van Balen), 2012

The video is captioned: On the 25th revolutionary 1st of May demonstration in Berlin-Kreuzberg, protesters were throwing huge inflatable cobblestones, made of silver-reflective foil and tape. The creative intervention was initiated by the art-activist collective “Eclectic Electric Collective” (EEC) and was meant as a celebration of an object which is both a symbol and a material weapon of anti-authoritarian struggle everywhere. It also aimed to bring new strategies of tactical frivolity into the demonstration. http://eclectic-electric-collective.blogspot.de/2012/05/under-pavement-beach-gigantic.html

Our intention was also to subvert the image of the “stone-throwing demonstrator” which the media spectacle around May 1 feeds off so much.
 We are interested in tactical frivolity, in finding new ways of protesting. And we are interested in how the opposition between police and protesters can be subverted. So when we playfully throw an inflatable cube at a police line and they, not knowing what else to do, throw it back, suddenly they are engaged in a game with us and their image as tough riot cops is broken.

There was this funny situation when we threw it towards the police. And there was the spontaneous game when they the police kicked it back, protesters again kicked it to the police, police kicked it back, etc. – and suddenly they realised they were part of a game. So they threw it behind the police line where children found it and began to play with it.

You cannot give instructions to a gigantic inflatable by Joanna Rainer, 31 April 2012. Rainer's article is an interview with Artúr van Balen and Verena Meyer, of the Eclectic Electric Collective, about their work with “inflatable cobblestones” and “tactical frivolity” in mass protests.
“Insights are essentially fresh knowledge that comes in the form of new and often surprising solutions, often to a known problem. Insights typically do not follow from an analytical process where we break down what we know into parts and then put it back together. Solving a problem using insights requires cognitive restructuring and reinterpreting one’s view of the problem.”
— From …using the LEGO Serious Play method by Per Kristiansen and Robert Rasmussen

Teams with healthy idea life cycles are easy to spot

“Teams with healthy idea life cycles are easy to spot: ideas flow
between people easily and in large volumes. Conversations are
vibrant with questions and suggestions; prototypes and demos
happen regularly; and people commit to finding and fighting for
good ideas. Often, this is fun—people are happy to learn from
failures, debates, and bizarre ideas. Teams that innovate are great
places for ideas to live; like happy pets, they’re treated well, get
lots of attention, and are shared among people who care deeply
about them.

The life of ideas is the responsibility of whoever is in charge.”
— From Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation, page 103. Sharing with my new friend Jacob Wang.

Improv Everywhere

The Mp3 Experiment Eight (by ImprovEverywhere)

Boingboing says: “Charlie Todd says: “3,500 people downloaded the same mp3 from our website and pressed play simultaneously along the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan.  What resulted was a massive silent party with glow sticks, camera flashes, and flashlights.”

One of the youtube comments says:

”I drove 600 miles from Cincinnati with 3 cars full of 5 people and we had the best day of our life! Thanks ImprovEverywhere!“