Battleship Reduced

battleship.md

Homework

• Read Martin Heidegger's 'Age of the World Picture'
  • MANDATORY. I'll have to cancel the session if this is insufficiently read...
• Do Features Assignment: Deadline Friday 18:00
• Do Coding Assignment: Deadline Monday 15:00

Features Assignment

BACKGROUND: Although I really like the idea of building Battleship, it's not entirely clear to me how this is related to (humanities) research. Last week we talked about linking our project to online and/or offline collections. This now completely disappeared. I want to see both aspects back in to our project.

In order to do so, I want you to do the following assignment: think of an exhibition or collection that we can link this to. Translate this into a concrete feature of the game. To give you an example:

Feature: Puzzle Pieces

• The pieces in our version of battleship are not ships but puzzle pieces. Together they tell a story, for instance about a particular painting (Rijksmuseum API) or group of Zombies (Allee). By playing the game, players gradually uncover each other's narratives.

DISCLAIMER: This is just an example. There are million directions that we can take this. Don't copy mine. Think of something else.

Coding Assignment

NOTE: I don't expect you to do all the steps. Just see how far you can get.

1. Make a React Component: GameBoardCell that displays a simple empty cell.

• Add a click event to the cell. It should display a message telling the player that it was a 'miss'
• Add state to your component. Your cell can now either be on or off.
• Update the click event accordingly. On now means: 'hit', off is 'miss'
• BONUS: use setInterval to change that state every second

2. Make a Game Component

• Have the GameCell as a Child Component
• Move the state here

3. Make a SwitchBoardCell Component

• Put this inside your game component
• Add a click event that controls the on/off behavior of the other cell

4. Make two Container Components (GameBoard, Switchboard)

• Move the two children into their respective components
• Link everything up

4. Scale Up

• Scale up to 4 squares each.
• Display them in a grid
• Scale up to a custom sized-grid.

When thinking about the features assignment that combines the exiting factores of a board game with the Humanities I thought of a game that combines these two elements in the literal sense.
In my board game, the grid is made out of the Humanities as a whole. The players of the game impersonate certain philosophers and find out about his/her influence over time. The players use their pawn to travel through time and find out more about certain philosophers, quotes and sayings, the evolution in thinking, periods in time and locations that were important during these developments. The goal isn’t to finish the path on the grid as fastest, but to gain the most knowledge while playing. Perhaps there is a philosophy-API out there somewhere we can use to extract the data.

Think of the online catalogue of the University of Amsterdam as a collection, a collection of knowledge. In 1960 Ted Nelson founded Project Xanadu, the first hypertext project. Let's take the online library API to make knowledge responsive and to create interactive hypertext in a gaming context. Instead of ships, in this game knowledge travels from A to B. But B is not the endpoint, the texts and ideas, theories and concepts (such as Heidegger's) are interlinked and interlocked (as with hypertext) like an academic Tetris game allowing its users to become a more eloquent and intellectual selves. Instead of a tile-matching puzzle like Tetris, players have to fit theories/text together. Users then literally build on knowledge and play with the general idea of academics.

Considering that 'game studies' critically analyses the relationship between games and society, we could focus our research on the interaction between Battleship and the students. We did suggest in class last week about using students as characters for the ships, therefore we could analyse how the rules, design and players interact between themselves and how they follow some behaviour patterns throughout the game. Meaning that, do people follow the rules, cheat, only are interested in winning, what drives people to play such a game?
In the Heidegger's 'the age of world picture', he suggests that truth and its representation changes from age to age, which he then draws multiple times the major concepts of what our modern age defines as “modernity"

These are all sooooo awesome! Wish we could do them all... then again, maybe we can.