Derivative of Leonard’s first lonely mechanic. It’s trivial to generate a random book result, using a bag of letter tiles, a few d10s and the Library of Congress classification system (which most college libraries use). I’m not thinking here of any serious game, more like a meme-style thing you could do with your friends in a big library. What can you do with completely random, very specific book results? (Assuming you just take the closest neighbor to whatever number you rolled, not the exact number itself.)
Lonely Mechanic #3
April 9th, 2005 10:35 am
What can you do with completely random, very specific book results?
Walk up to a library assistant and give them the call number and tell them you couldn’t find it. One point for each minute they spend helping you look for it, minus five if a book with the number exists and they find it.
(No, doesn’t sound like it’d be all that much fun to me either, but experience suggests that some library patrons would disagree.)
You could have a scavenger hunt game, where everyone rolls a random list of numbers (ten? Less if it’s a short game) and is tasked with finding as many books as possible from their personal list (in a given time limit, if you want to make it tough) The player who finds the most books in their list wins (in the event of a tie, use the time taken) Round 2! Each book pile (or maybe re-work them into the average pile size if the range of sizes is >5, say) is then given to a different player who must re-shelve the books. Fastest shelver wins!
Overall score would be determined according to a set of rules that took into account both the number of books found (and returned? I can’t decide if that’s necessary, considering how they were found to exist. How hard, then, can it be to return them? But then again, I am unfamiliar with your united-static book classification systems), and the time taken to complete rounds 1 and 2.
Is this needlessly complex? Probably!
It occurs to me that you could also play War (like in Lonely Mechanic 1) with the the book that has the most pages winning.
Or! Generate a call number. Everyone peers at the call number and writes a word on a piece of paper. Then you rush off to the shelves, find the nearest book to the generated number, and everyone reveals their written-down words. If any of the written-down words appear on the first page of the book (the first “proper” page; not sure whether prefaces or introductions should count, but title pages shouldn’t), then the person whose word is rarest (as assessed by number-of-Google-results, I suppose) gets a point. First to some-number-or-other wins.
So for, eg, 891.73 G613d, you could go “eh, ‘the’; it’s bound to be on the page somewhere, so I’ll just hope nobody else’s wilder guess comes up” or “800s are literature, aren’t they? I don’t know. ‘Thou’. Just in case.” or “It’ll be a novel, so I’ll try ‘chapter’” or “Ooh, that’ll be something Russian. ‘Vladimir’. Everything Russian has someone named Vladimir in it, doesn’t it?”.
Could get double-points if the word appears in the title, perhaps.
Note: This game would probably have a spectacularly limited audience.
I dunno, I’d play it. Once.
Leonard
It shouldn’t be difficult to generate random ISBNs, too. You can look up ISBNs online, and probably you can do the same with LOC call numbers, so these games wouldn’t have to be played in a library.
Hm, I thought that, but that it seemed a bit soulless in comparison to actually running around a library. Are ISBNs definitely sequential, then, such that every number - up to the latest one - corresponds to a book? (There was something about them having to add another digit, recently, wasn’t there?)
I like the idea of War with the most pages. Or a simple “weight” heuristic, and seeing how well your opponent can physically defend themselves.
But the scavenger thing sounds most promising. Alternatively giving everyone the same arbitrarily-chosen word, then scavenging out to randomly-generated aisles. (Although, eh, that’d work just as well without rolling any dice. Give everyone a list of ten obscure words to find anywhere they like, and ban them from the encyclopaedia section.)
Alternatively - and this would work just as well with soulless Amazon queries as library raiding - generate or collect a pile of ten or so books, then take turns to arrange them into two or three equally-sized categories of your own devising (swapping a couple of books out and in, each time).
A cross between the QI bookshop and Edward de Bono’s categorisation exercise. (And a proto-word-game Holly and I came up with, last year, which had a name too ridiculous to repeat.)
Leonard
ISBNs aren’t definitely sequential; the space is divvied up kind of like the space of IP addresses. You can generate a valid ISBN pretty easily, but making sure it actually corresponds to a book requires looking it up.
(And tsch, I suggested the weight-attack heuristic before I’d read this, I wasn’t just lazily rifling my short-term memory.)