story

Unleash your creativity with Story Cubes

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Cubes and fantasy map Unleash your creativity with Story Cubes

If you follow me on Twitter, it is unlikely that you will have missed the fact that I love a toy called Rory’s Story Cubes.

For those who don’t know, Story Cubes are sets of dice with unique icons on each face. The basic idea is to roll a set of 9 dice (made up from the various core packs and expansion packs) and then use the sequence of icons to create a story. It can be played alone or as a group and to be honest it is absolutely wonderful!

I have used them as a tool for helping my own creativity, I have used them as part of workshops to loosen up a few minds and of course I have used them for fun and play. Read More ...

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Learning about playfulness from Toca Boca

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Photo 06 03 2015 10 27 52 Learning about playfulness from Toca Boca

Continuing my investigations into play, I wanted to talk about a few things my kids have been teaching me about just letting go and giving in to the fantasy and the lack of imaginative boundaries that real play demands. It is not as easy as it would first seem either.

There are lots of views of play out there. I offered some of my thoughts in a recent post, that play is a free form activity that is undertaken almost just because it can be and it brings fun and joy. In this sort of description, play is an activity – it follows a similar line of thought to  that proposed by Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens. It was also Huizinga who gave us the concept of the Magic Circle – the boundary between reality and play. Read More ...

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Randomness, Serendipity and Gamification

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Random 1415617109 Randomness Serendipity and Gamification

Recently I have been trying to write a few games, just for fun, with my daughter. There area  couple of card games and I am trying to make a single player board game.

Making a game with a 7 year old is an interesting experience. I got asked to go into her room as she had a new game she wanted to play. She had made a game board with LEGO. You had to get from one end to the other, with certain bricks having modifier effects on the game (move faster, move slower etc). She said I could go first, so I asked “how do we decide how many spaces to move?”. I expected a dice or something, but no. Her answer was “just pick a number between one and ten”! Read More ...

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Narrative, story and gamification

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853405 26871780 Narrative story and gamification

Whenever I speak to people in the circles within which I hang out, one of the things I keep hearing is story and narrative. “You have to tell your story”, “What is the narrative?”, what is the companies story”. To be honest it drives me a little nuts, but that’s by the by. The fact is, these are important things to consider. One of the things that has got me thinking, is what is the difference between story and narrative?

Story seems to have quite a few definitions. According to the Oxford dictionary it is: Read More ...

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