Entries by Cath

Cousin Metamaps

Toiling away on a project like Sembl can be lonely, so I was chuffed this week to make an acquaintance with Metamaps – or more particularly, Ishan Shapiro, one of its founders – and to discover some shared heritage. Sembl is a descendant of the Glass Bead Game, and its purpose – or one of them – is to […]

Peace is a bridge

Crafting an entry for the Peace App competition, I came to see the extent to which peace depends on stereophonic thinking – or dialogue in the radical sense deployed by Paulo Freire, David Bohm and so on. It didn’t surprise me – Charles (Sembl’s progenitor) is a kind of peace activist, intervening as he does in the realm of religious violence and global conflict. […]

A game for 12

This post falls into the category of should-have-blogged-earlier. I designed a board for 12 players. It’s not one for the faint-hearted. This game has four rounds rather than the usual three, and rating all the sembls would be a four-part marathon – note that in Round 1 you only fill one node, and you never rate […]

Cultivating conceptual propinquity

Dialogic thinking doesn’t only mean taking into account two different perspectives; it also means recognising the common ground between entities – what it is that makes them one. This post is a note about game mechanics to cultivate conceptual propinquity. In Sembl games, players form associations between pairs of objects or concepts. Evaluating others’ moves […]

Torus and lotus

Last year I posted about the gameboard designs we’re using in the Museum form of Sembl. On those boards, each team starts with their own seed node – so on the hex board there are a whopping six nodes not created by players. I wanted less space to be taken up on the board by […]