Alfred Wallace: Exercises in Non-Futility

Sometimes it’s hard to tell if something is, or is not, really a game.  Over on Boardgame Geek, periodically there’s a to-do about whether such-and such is an RPG or a boardgame, but that’s not quite what I’m talking about here.  I’ve gotten into a couple of things that aren’t games, but scratch the same kind of itch that games do.

I am an inveterate fiddler.  Not violins—necessarily—but pens, paper clips, little pieces of paper, small branches, loaded firearms, you name it.  I’m one of those people who always needs to do something with their hands, usually something essentially useless.  One of the great things about gaming is that I can channel these energies into moving pieces, sorting cards, or what-have-you. 

In the graduate student office, there’s a little doodad sitting around that has attracted most of my attention.  The trouble is that it isn’t exactly designed to hold up to the fidgeting a world-class master like myself can dish out.  I started casting around for a substitute, and came upon the Ball of Whacks.

The Ball of Whacks is the latest product from creativity guru Roger von Oech, known for his “Whacks on the Side of the Headâ€? series of books, lectures, cards, etc etc over the past twenty years or more.  The Ball of Whacks is bright red, about the size of a baseball (or an orange…a red orange).  It’s a rhombic triacontahedron—in Gamer, that means it’s a D30.  Each side is really a pyramid with a rhombic base, making a solid D30.  Each pyramid has a nice, powerful magnet in it that holds the ball together.

The point of the thing…is that there kind of is no point.  It is a Thing, something to play with.  You can take it apart, fool around with it, make new shapes out of it, lay out the pieces on your fridge like a zen garden—whatever.  It has a good weight to it; tossing it from hand to hand (when it’s in ball form) has a nice feel.  There are pictures in the booklet it comes with showing how you can make it look like a cat, a scorpion, a flying squirrel…you name it.  There are also fifteen specific exercises included that make a kind of “Creativity Workshop,â€? to encourage people to look at ideas in a new way.  Von Oech’s basic point is that when our creativity dries up, it’s because we’ve been in a rut and need to come at things from a new perspective, one that can be partially induced by a more playful attitude towards our challenges.

And if that doesn’t grab you, he sells a neat-o ball of magnets to play with.  Which is always good.  One thing I did last night, fooling around with it, is stand over a table and drop each little magnetic pyramid into a pile, letting them adhere to each other as circumstances and physics allowed.  The magnets are pretty sturdy, so they made a tangle of pyramids that looked like a clutch of mussels right after they’re brought up to the surface.  As I turned my “found sculptureâ€? around, it shifted slightly but stayed basically together.  It was neat to watch it change; it wasn’t “pureâ€? like the symmetrical geometric shapes I usually make when I design something, but it had kind of its own logic.  Almost in spite of myself, I started thinking about the research and writing I do in my history work.  How a problem, a source, looks different depending on when I look at it, how many times I’ve looked at it, and what kind of mindset I have when I look at it.  It doesn’t obey any particular will of mine—however much I might like it to—but it has its own rules it obeys that I understand only partially.  (My little exercise, I learned later reading the booklet, closely resembled von Oech’s Exercise 10.)

The other thing I’m looking forward to is the second season of Perplex City, which is starting up on March 1, I believe.  If you haven’t heard of Perplex City (PXC, as the cognoscenti call it), it’s a huge puzzle.  There are umpteen cards, each of which has a puzzle of some kind on it.  It can be trivia, logic, a math problem, a sudoku, you name it.  Some are easy, some are hard.  (One “puzzle,â€? last year, asked you to solve the Riemann Hypothesis.  Another had a picture of a guy, with the caption “Find Me.â€?  Nobody has yet.) Anyway, solving the card puzzles (and logging them on the website) gets you points, which in the first season earned you little lapel pins…and glory, of course.

That’s all well and good—I like the puzzles; they’re usually pretty good and always have good art.  The real challenge, though, is the metapuzzle.  Last season, there was a small cube hidden somewhere on Earth.  Find it, and you get $200,000.  The clues to finding it came from a myriad of sources.  Clues were in the backgrounds of the puzzles, on the backs of the puzzle cards (that made a large map of Perplex City), revealed in big meetings of PXC aficionados, and in the nooks and crannies of an enormous virtual world of websites, podcasts, and much else.  Theoretically, you didn’t need to solve a single puzzle card puzzle to find the cube.  A spontaneous community of solvers sprung up, sharing ideas about the puzzles and the metapuzzle.  Finally, earlier this month, the cube was found, and a new season could begin.

I got into Season One waaay late in the game; catching up with the metapuzzle was beyond me.  This time, I hope to be more in the game.

Both the Ball of Whacks and Perplex City come highly recommended.  Even though they’re not strictly games, they should appeal to gamers in a big way.

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