WARNING: What follows is a game only a Geek can truly appreciate.

A while ago, I posted a design for a chess variant, that eventually became known as Eigen Chess, aka Schrödinger’s Pawn.  It turns out to have been a very popular idea, that has generated much comment.

The success of Eigen Chess has prompted my to ponder more mashups of common games and exotic physics concepts. It is from this proud line that springs forth today’s design: Einstein-Rosen Bridge. For those who need a refresher, the Einstein-Rosen Bridge is a theoretical construct predicted by the general theory of relativity. Einstein you know, Nathan Rosen was collaborator with the Big E, and they published a paper in 1935, outlining the eponymous Bridge.

Those without a strong grounding in general relativity, or worse, without access to Wikipedia, will probably be familiar with the more common popular conception of the ERB, a science fiction trope called the wormhole.

A wormhole  is a twist in the shorts of space-time that allows instantaneous travel between two points in our universe, or more likely, two points in parallel universes.

Bridge is a card game for four players, played with one or two standard decks, and it’s rules are more difficult to comprehend than the 1935 Einstein-Rosen paper that spawned this post.

Let’s get on with it, after the jump.
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WARNING: What follows is a game only a Geek could love.

Today’s design is a twist on the venerable game of chess, via quantum mechanics (See…I warned you).

If you’re the kind of savvy reader that hangs out at the Chrome Cow, you doubtless are familiar with a certain theoretical feline belonging to one Erwin Schrödinger. This cat has the misfortune to be confined in a box with a deadly device that has a 50-50 chance of triggering with an hour. At the end of the hour, goes the thought experiment, the cat, sealed from observation inside the box, is neither dead or alive, but is in superposition, a combination of these possible states. The cat does not live or die until the box is opened by an observer, who through the act of observation collapses the possible dead/alive states of the cat into one or the other state.

So what’s that got to do with Chess? What, indeed!

Enter Superpositional Chess (Super Chess? EigenChess? Quantum Chess? Schrödinger’s Pawn?).
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Ok. I owe you a Lazarus and the Time Machine Part 2, but I can’t resist the chance to post a quite nearly timely World Cup inspired design.

I’ve consulted with experts in the field, and the consensus is that the World Cup involves Soccer.

In my mind this is quite nearly the same thing as Foosball, except that in Soccer the games are much longer and harder schedule.

I admit it. I’m not really an organized sports guy, and today’s design is less inspired by the World Cup and more by Rockstar’s latest table tennis opus.

The idea is simple:

Foosball + Wii = Awesome.
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Look up at the top of the main page and you’ll see a new addition.

The Design-A-Tron Lite. Rewritten, a mere 20k, not counting the text for the database. I think it’s up to about 890+ billion potential combinations.

The new version of the full implementation is in the works. It has…more.

My little Flash learning project, eRadiRace was in need of a soundtrack, so I dusted off my ancient copy of of Acid and laid down some phat beats* to help keep the gameplay (what there is of it) moving along.

You can groove to it on the eRadiRace page, and remember the late nineties. It has a certain Wipeout PSX thing going for it.

Aside: Wipeout XL. Best video-game soundtrack ever. I have a the original game disk lying around here somewhere, and in a move that would be utterly foreign to the DRM-crazy Sony of today, the songs from the game are encoded on the disk as regular old CD audio.

I was going to link to Amazon, and point to a preview clip, but I realized the song I like best from the game isn’t on the official soundtrack album. Perhaps someone out there can help me identify the artist and song name of this clip:

Some day real soon now I’m going to write up what I have learned in these Flash projects, and how I see it applying to prototyping in a production environment.

* Beats certified phat by and independent panel of beatologists.

If you have been following the (increasingly misnamed) Design-a-Day posts (and a few of you have), you will know I have made some bold assertions regarding the roadmap for future games development.

It was therefore gratifying to see some of the movers and shakers in the industry make announcements this week that amount to first steps toward the Chrome Cow’s mad, glorious vision for the future.

I direct you first to the lads in Redmond, as Microsoft introduces their Live Anywhere strategy. To quote the Gamasutra article,

One of the biggest announcements at E3 was that Microsoft is developing Live Anywhere, a network infrastructure that will allow players to communicate and interact seamlessly with the Xbox 360, Windows Vista PCs, and Windows Mobile and Java-based mobile phones.

Combine this with John Carmack’s latest announcement about Massively Multiplayer Cellphone Games (via CNN),

"We’re probably going to have a sequel to ‘Orcs and Elves’ but I’m really into the idea of a massively multiplayer cell phone title," he said. "I have absolutely no interest in going and competing with Blizzard in the high end of that market, but a cell phone version might be interesting." John Carmack

Now we are getting very close to the kind of persistent, cross platform and multi-game shared universe that I have proposed in various guises in Towards a Better World, Cross Dressing: AR Across Platforms and Open.World.

One Universe, many games, many platforms. You heard it here first.

The Unspoken Superpowers of the Average Player Character

Though Lazarus and the Time Machine sounds like a pairing straight from the Design-a-Tron, the next few Design-A-Days will be focused on two main metaphors: Time travel and resurrection.

And metaphors they are…most of the time. I’m not an academic, so you’ll have to live with my conjecture and the occasional link to Wikipedia to back up the loose history that comes next.

The Continue

I think it is a safe bet to assume that the original notion of the Continue was a simple revenue calculation. A player is more likely to pay another quarter to continue playing a game they have already invested time in rather than starting over from scratch. My quick search of the interweb hints at this, though I have found no direct confirmation.

Further, he conjectured, certain limitations inherent to the original arcade machine architecture would have limited the options for allowing the player to continue a game. Due primarily to the small amounts of RAM, if any, available (he pulled out of his assumptions) you would have been limited to either restarting the player from the point of death (no RAM, simply continuing in-situ), or restarting the player at the beginning of a level (saving only the level-start score, all other state restored from ROM).

But how do we continue a game from the point the player died? They’re dead, after all. Just drop their avatar back in the game, and let them go. Who’s going to question?

What about starting them back at the beginning of the level? Won’t that transition be jarring? Will they recognize that they have moved backwards in the game? It’s not that different than the jump-cut discontinuities of French New Wave Cinema; players will adapt.

And it was from these completely plausible and humble beginings that the two most powerful and successful metaphors of video game history were born: Resurrection and Time Travel.
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