[032] Making Games Every Day for a Month, Day 22 of 31: Beyblades (Analog Demake)

"The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action." - John Dewey

⭐⭐⭐

You know what a demake is, yes? Remaking video games on older, more primitive hardware? For example: Halo for Atari 2600 , No Man's Sky for pico8 , Guitar Hero for the NES .

I love demakes. What an engaging idea! Simplifying a complex game experience is a compelling creative constraint. What do you keep? What do you ignore? Which mechanics are necessary to the game experience? Which aesthetic elements recall the original game most precisely?

Let's regress even further! Why not demake a video game all the way back to pen and paper ? Which essential elements of a game experience can be regressed all the way back to analog materials?

Demaking games, as far as I know, exists exclusively within the medium of video games. Why couldn't we demake analog games, too?

This is very similar to the idea of folkification, which I've written about before . To summarize: folkification is the act of making something more accessible and less industrialized. Cooking your own meals rather than buying frozen food is folkification. Learning to mend your clothes rather than buying new is folkification. Folkification is a resistance against planned obsolescence, consumerism, and unskilled dependence on the product economy.

To folkify a game would mean to remake a game using your own skills and materials. A board game like Tic-Tac-Toe is already completely folkified. Anyone can play it on a napkin. Nobody owns the intellectual property of Tic-Tac-Toe. People have made Tic-Tac-Toe game sets from every material imaginable from wood to wool. In contrast, a board game like Settlers of Catan is not very folkified. You couldn't sketch out a quick Catan board on a napkin. Making your own Catan set from scratch would require printing cards, stamping dice, cutting map pieces, etc. However, and this is important, everything is vulnerable to folkification.

Settlers of Catan actually does have a strong folkification community. People have made their own sets using laser cutters , 3D printers , and min wax wood stains , to name a few. What would it mean to engage the process of folkification towards a game like Monopoly, or Pokémon, or... Beyblades? These intellectual properties have weird lore and complex game systems and detailed parts and pieces.

Well, I'd start by making my own tops. Then maybe I'd start bashing them against each other to see who wins. Then I might teach my friends to make tops, too, and start to tell legends of the mightiest centrifugal warriors...

You get the idea. What will you folkify?

⭐⭐⭐

"All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate." - John Dewey