WELCOME TO THE GRID

"Reservoir" - By Eric Lancon

It's been a long time coming since I've last posted to this blog.  This was initially started as a college assignment four years ago!  I figured one day I might actually want to blog, so I aptly named it something I hoped I would not lose interest in.  Fortunately, that interest is still alive and well, and I still do not see a whole lot by way of blogs, to say this topic has really been covered enough!

I was thinking the other day about what it would take for games to really grab people by the throat and say: "Hey! Play me!!!".  Nowadays, it all seems like the kind of games that get that far are only the so-called: "Triple-A" games with SuperBowl ads.  But of course, truth-be-told, we know that games are increasing in popularity, and slowly taking over the world one cell phone app at-a-time.  

What I'd like to know is why board games haven't quite taken off as well.  They certainly have been around WAY longer, but yet with only a marginal market-share that video games hold, we find board games at the bottom of the list.  And the most popular among them are those with the greatest amounts of advertising (READ: The best board games are NOT the most popular). So, if board games were never-more; say they were instantly banned, would there be a lobby on capital hill to get them back?  -Would enough people even care?  

I want to use this blog to investigate and ramble about what games could achieve socially, psychologically, and technologically.  My 'trained' background is in architecture which stands on it's own as a social 'good' and something with value beyond entertainment.  I wish games were viewed as important a 'good' as architecture is, and explore what it would take to get them off the ground to become that.  

The image above is something I made which depicts a kind of 'fungal' architecture.  In the same way a fungus relies upon a host to survive and mature, so too does 'fungal' architecture thrive upon a host.  In this case, the host is an existing structure, or shell of one, which has been reconstituted by the fungus as something anew.  When we look at architecture this way, we can imagine it reclaiming the old to support to new, and showing that functionality off as something to be appreciated.  As too can games!  Games can take the existing, slap on a new coat of paint and reclaim it as something new.  We can take a whole bag of social situations, wrap it up and build it into a game and all-of-a-sudden, get a new type of social interaction.  

To write about these kinds of topics in-depth, I will hold until future posts to really dig into this stuff individually.  

Hello again internet, I'm finally back!

Regards,
Eric