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Benjuka

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What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Auriga ---What do we know about the game of benjuka, obviously meant as the Eärwan counterpart to chess, other than its lack of rules? What are the benjuka pieces (or do you make up their meanings as you go along)? How does one even play a strategy game without any fixed rules?

Also, I'm challenging Madness to an internet-deathmatch of benjuka.


--- Quote ---The cunning of benjuka lay in the absence of this fixed framework. Rather than providing an immutable
ground, the rules of benjuka were yet another move within the game, yet another piece to be played. And this
made benjuka the very image of life, a game of baffling complexities and near-poetic subtleties. Other games
could be chronicled as shifting patterns of pieces and number-stick results, but benjuka gave rise to histories,
and whatever possessed history possessed the very structure of the world.
--- End quote ---
- The Darkness That Comes Before, page 141.
--- End quote ---

What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Madness ---But Auriga...

We've always been playing.

I used think Chess as an analogy to Benjuka but now I think Chess is much more closely related to Delavagus' sidereas.

Personally, I'd hazard GO as the better analogy to Benjuka.

I'll take this opportunity now to suggest that not only do you take up GO, Chess, and Jenga... but you should probably check out Khet & the Tower of Kadesh.

EDIT: And everyone should read the Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse.
--- End quote ---

What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Auriga ---
--- Quote ---But Auriga...

We've always been playing.
--- End quote ---

Yes, the world is our benjuka plate. And there are as many battlefields as there are moments...


--- Quote ---I used think Chess as an analogy to Benjuka but now I think Chess is much more closely related to Delavagus' sidereas.
--- End quote ---

Delavagus' what? I must have missed this bit of world-building.


--- Quote ---Personally, I'd hazard GO as the better analogy to Benjuka.
--- End quote ---

Possibly. My comparison of benjuka and chess is probably because it seems to have the same social function, as a strategy game the Three Seas noblemen play with eachother. We even see benjuka in the flashbacks of Seswatha and Celmomas. 

But, really, benjuka has more in common with that game in Calvin and Hobbes that he makes up as a goes along.


--- Quote ---I'll take this opportunity now to suggest that not only do you take up GO, Chess, and Jenga... but you should probably check out Khet & the Tower of Kadesh.
--- End quote ---

Will do.

Haven't heard of them yet, but I'll check them out if I find the time.
--- End quote ---

What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Madness ---No missed worldbuilding, homie. Don't suffer self-doubt on my account.

Clearly, you have a penchant for games... you really should read Delavagus' except from Three Roses[/b].

He's Bakker friend, Roger, who has been a semi-regular guest blogger on TPB - one of two - and who also came up in some online writing workshops with Bakker.

Really good stuff. I only wish there was more than the prologue and three chapters ;)... like a book, if you are reading, Delavagus.

Thankfully, you could probably read the prologue repeatedly... superb.
--- End quote ---

What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Callan S. ---D&D

Man, I tracked a roleplay design theory forum for years. The perceptual blind spots, biases and hiccups would just come thick and fast. Ie, what the game hinges on is hidden, yet its fruits are all too present.

Here's an example of it in regard to task resolution and conflict resolution. Note the posts from Ron Edwards. In particular relation to Benjuka is the attempt to grasp what the hell are we playing for? To keep rolling lock pick rolls, will that really resolve in the princess paying attention to you and perhaps falling in love? Or will getting through lock after lock, toward her chamber, float in abstract non connection, just locks, doors, climb checks, simply a rubble of semantics in a pile, leading to nowhere?

We believe (or might believe) in every lock pick roll leading somewhere. But are we promised?

Never mind the actual ambiguities of conflict resolution (or atleast the problems I think I see in the description in that thread).

It's one of the things I noticed about TDTCB - I could sense in the writing someone who had been 'role-touched'. Not necessarily as good as it sounds, as it's like someone who's had their shoulder dislocated before. Here it's semantic dislocation. Not that great, but ala many action movies, good for getting out of being handcuffed.

And that's my rant!
--- End quote ---

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