TABLE OF CONTENTS

Analysis
The Playing Card Platform – Nathan Altice

Documentation
A Nighttime Tale of Xiros – R. Adam Lazaroff

Experimentation and Design
Storium‘s Analog Heritage – Lillian Cohen-Moore

What fictions, fantasies, opportunities, and design modalities do the mechanics of games spark? This issue of Analog Game Studies considers the ways that games and their mechanics  are productive of a space of creativity that breeds excitement in players and designers, alike. Here we hail the sense of wonder engendered by games, and follow it down roads hitherto unforeseen.

Nathan Altice‘s essay, “The Playing Card Platform“, considers the technological affordances of playing cards. Specifically, Altice considers the ways in which playing cards can be read through the lens of Platform Studies and in so doing connects the digital to the digits which cradle a hand of cards. While “The Playing Card Platform” allows us to understand how small design innovations such as the uniformity of playing cards opens up a design space for motifs such as secrecy, R. Adam Lazaroff‘s piece, “A Nighttime Tale of Xiros”, shows us how larp produces fiction on a narrative level. Like Jorge Luis Borges, Lazaroff guides readers through his very own Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius which highlights the ways in which micro-fictions are produced through meta-techniques and narratives. Finally, in “Storium’s Analog Heritage“, Lillian Cohen-Moore offers an inventory of design practices explaining how the popular, online, collaborative storytelling game Storium works and how it differs from other story game systems. Importantly, Cohen-Moore illustrates how the design motifs of story games could be imported and integrated into digital products as well.

-The Editors
November 3, 2014

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Featured image “CHECKMATE,” by siliaFX CC BY-NC-ND.