“Scrabble meets Bananagrams”Ī few months ago the social media team for our publisher posted a photo of Rewordable to their Instagram and this was the caption: “Need something to pass the time this holiday weekend? Grab a copy of to play with the fam! It’s Scrabble meets Bananagrams meets a whole lotta fun!” So this talk is about the practice of game design, both in the sense of how I helped to design this particular game, but also about how game design is, for me, a part of a larger artistic practice. In other words I just really want to use a computer to ugh punch language in the face. I do love games, but my real interest is language-in how language is turned into systems, especially computational systems, and how the process and artifacts of such systems can be challenged and repurposed for creative and poetic ends. I have co-designed and published a game I am speaking at a game design conference I guess I must be a game designer.

are usually sort of aspirational, like “I am introducing myself to you in this way so that you will understand me as belonging to the aforementioned category.” I put “game designer” in my bio, but in this case it’s less of an aspiration that it is an empirical observation about myself. The words you use in your bio to describe yourself-like “Allison Parrish is a poet and programmer” etc. This talk is going to be about my contribution to the design process-in particular, I’m going to walk you through the computational analysis I did and some of the tools I made to make Rewordable possible, and how that process fed into playtesting to produce the game that you all know and love.īut the talk is also a bit about me trying to contextualize the work I did on Rewordable as part of a larger set of concerns that I have as a poet and artist. Clarkson Potter, an imprint of Penguin Random House, published the game last August. We were in the NYU Game Center’s Incubator program in 2016 and were funded on Kickstarter that same year. There are also reward tokens that you can earn from the words that you make each turn. On each turn, you form a word from cards currently in play or in your hand. Rewordable is a word-building card game, where each card has a sequence of one, two, or three letters. I’m going to be talking about Rewordable, which is a game I co-designed with Adam Simon and Tim Szetela. Introduction Rewordable promotional image (I also gave it a new title, to better reflect the talk’s contents.) Some portions of this talk are derived from a different talk I gave at the Independent Games Summit at GDC 2018, which itself was based on a Medium post from 2016. This version has been lightly updated with clarifications and references. This post is adapted from my notes for a talk I gave at Practice 2018 called “Word Breakers: Rewordable and the raw material of word games”. Rewordable versus the alphabet fetish Rewordable versus the alphabet fetish

Alphabet blocks spelling the word one