Ryan Somma's Blog

A hungry intergalactic space whale has wandered upon planet WOW! It has vacuumed up all the animals from the Zoo for Endangered Alien Animals. In this co-op game, our young players will assemble a team of superdupers to venture into the whale’s bowels and rescue the animals by matching various, age-appropriate patterns between alien cards.

My kids love co-op games, but with a pre-schooler, kindergartner, 3rd-grader, and their friends, we find that complex games bore the young players and...

Boys with Advent Calendars

My mother took my siblings and I through a Christmas Advent calendar one year. A new-ager raised Christian, she held a positive view of the Bible I would be disabused of when I actually read the thing. Unsurprisingly, I can’t recall any of the biblical stories from those sessions preceding the chocolates each night (since there was nothing to anchor them to our daily lives), but I do have a fond nostalgic memories of the familial fellowship.

So last year, I thoug...

Robert McCall’s “The Prologue and the Promise”

I was unfamiliar with the name Robert McCall when I first stumbled upon “The Prologue and the Promise,” the mural he painted for Disney Epicot’s Horizons attraction in 1983, but I was very familiar with his visionary artwork. His imaginative futuristic designs feature in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and numerous NASA conceptual artworks envisioning future habitats for humanity.

His mythic painting of human past, prese...

Dice Dice and More Dice

Games are played in the contexts of rules, play, and culture. A game of chess played a century and a half ago would have a very different context and meaning between players than a game played today. Those players would be more likely to see one color of abstract playing pieces as Napoleon’s army. While I can imagine players today taking a more generic view of the pieces as something less meaningful to our historical context. The thread connecting the g...

Chutes and Ladders Actions and Consequences

My young kids hate Chutes and Ladders. They hate the complete randomness of spinning that stupid wheel. They hate the complete lack of player agency as there are zero choices to be made. In fact, the game has its origins in teaching children about karma and accepting one’s fate. The modern theming of the board, with artwork of children making good/bad choices before the experiencing the consequences of going up a ladder or down a slide, is comple...

Daisyworld Simulation

I’ve previously written about James Lovelock’s Daisyworld, a thought-experiment meant to support the Gaia Hypothesis. This is the idea that complex ecosystems create a self-regulating environment conducive to perpetuating life. Examples of this include increased plant growth reducing CO2 in the atmosphere or bacteria drawing salt out of the oceans stabilizing salinity levels.

Ten years ago, I was enamored with the hypothesis, but am much more skeptical now seeing it t...

Magic Square Tic Tac Toe

Adding to my expanding collection of Explorable Explanations (EEs), I’ve been interested in isomorphs of various board games. For example, the game Snakes and Ladders / Chutes and Ladders (a game with zero player agency originally intended to teach Hindu children the concepts of karma and destiny), can be played with just a six-sided dice and some rules:

In 2016, I was notified by a friend of a new partnership between Google and The Black List to give grants to screenplays promoting diversity and challenging nerd stereotypes in film. There were articles about it referencing the Computer Science Education in Media program run by Julie Ann Crommett at Google.

So I spent a month writing up something I was excited about. Makers is a family-friendly sitcom that follows the Glasper’s, a family comprised of two geeky, parents who work as software de...

CC-Licensed Artwork by Posthuman Studios:
“Neo-Porpoise Morph” by Jessada Sutthi
“Salamander Morph” by Silver Saaramael
“Infomorph Mercurial Investigator” by Daniel Clarke
“Flying Squid” by Joe Wilson
“Basic Pod” by James Mosingo
“Crasher Morph” by Jose Cabrera
“Menton Morph Brinker Genehacker” by Daniel Clarke

At this moment 7.5 billion human neocortexes are experiencing a world filled with technologies not even imagined just a century ago. Airplanes, roads, and the Internet make our worl...

Tower of Board Games

An online friend started a board gaming club at his elementary school. Occassionally, he posts pictures of the free games companies send him. Other times he posts photos of his students engaged in play. I asked him about the games and what it was like teaching children so young board games.

“We have good and bad days, but we stick to it and try different things,” he told me. “It’s all about the long-con.”

In a world of easy entertainment like movies and dazzling entert...