PlayableVariant - Glass Bead Game Wiki

1. Glass Bead Game playable variants

"GlassBeadGame PlayableVariant" is ?Charles Cameron's term for an attempt to realise the GlassBeadGame in the real world in a playable way. One might think of a playable variant as "a glass bead game" (or gbg) rather than "the Glass Bead Game" (or GBG, which depending on viewpoint is either a fictional construct from TheNovel or an unattainable ideal or both).

Here are some PlayableVariants accessible on the Internet:

DigitalBeadGame: A recent, computer-mediated playable variant.
GlassPlateGame: One of the earliest known playable variants, designed by ?Dunbar Aitkens -- "a conversation in the trappings of a board game".
HipBone: ?Charles Cameron's HipBone Games are probably the most popular gbg on the Internet.
Intrachange: A gbg by ?William Horden based on correspondences between the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching and the 64 squares of a chessboard.
Kennexions: designed by Ron Hale-Evans, Kennexions is based on the Norse poetic form called the ?Kenning, among other things.
LudusSollemnis: A gbg by ?Terence MacNamee based on liturgical drama.
Toward the Glass Bead Game: Fascinating gbg by Joshua Fost that uses XML and the ?SemanticWeb (also an ambition of Kennexions).
WaldzellGbg: The Waldzell GlassBeadGame, designed by ?Mark Line, takes an analytical approach.

See also BambooGarden for Seattle's original gbg design community.

1.1. Related Projects

DominoBeadGame: A competitive domino game by ?Sid Sackson, inspired by TheNovel.
OrganicPoetry: Like Scrabble, with words, not letters, and associations linking them.

1.2. Discussion

I'm not a GBG person, so I don't know how to interpret this. But, I recently saw this link to something calling itself a DigitalBeadGame. It appears to be a PlayableVariant to me. If it is, someone could include it in this list. -- LionKimbro 2004-05-24 05:25:33

Done. Thanks. -- Ron Hale-Evans 2004-05-25 10:34:58

Not sure if the link to ?OrganicPoetry is really appropiate or not, but it seemed like GBG to my untrained eye. -- LionKimbro 2004-11-06 19:00:39