Exemplify: An oral word game for friends and family

For some years now, my big kids and I have occasionally played a game we call Exemplify. It works great for three people on a walk. The basic idea is that we each contribute an adjective (e.g., “slurping”, “slimy” and “absurd”, or “chunky”, “soft” and “stinky”), then we each contribute a substantive that goes nicely with all three (or as many as one can) of the adjectives (e.g., “Jabba at DQ” or “cheese”), ideally in a funny and creative way, and then we each vote which of the others’ contributions is best, with the winner being the one that has the most votes. It’s fun.

When I was inventing the game, I was influenced by Dixit and Apples to Apples.

Rules (version 1.01)

The following rules are for three or four players.

Each round goes as follows:

1. Each player independently thinks of an adjective and announces when they have thought of it. The adjective must be a single unhyphenated word of English.

2. Once each player has an adjective, all adjectives are disclosed. No player is allowed to change their adjective once the disclosures have begun.

3. Each player independently thinks of a substantive and announces once they have it. The substantive can be one to three words of English, with hyphenation counting as a word break (“horse-shaped” is two words). Proper names and acronyms that are normally usable in speech (e.g., “USA”) are allowed.

4. Once each player has a substantive, all substantives are announced. No player is allowed to change their substantive once the disclosures have begun.

5. If two or more players have the same substantive, they automatically lose the round.

6. Each player independently thinks of a vote for a substantive by one of the other players (not a duplicate that resulted in an automatic loss) and announces once they have it. The voters are recommended to use these criteria: humor, creativity, distance from the actual world (more realistic is better) or from the actual world’s works of fiction, number of adjectives matched, and brevity. There are at least two ways the substantive can go with the adjectives: either the adjectives can be expected to apply to the thing described by the substantive (Jabba at DQ can be expected to be slurping, slimy and absurd) or else the adjectives and the substantive can form a fairly natural unit (“chunky, soft and stinky cheese” seems a natural unit).

7. Once each player has a vote, all votes are announced. No player is allowed to change their vote once the disclosures have begun.

8. If one player has more votes than any other player, they get two points. In that case, the player or players in second place in the voting each get one point. If no player has more votes than any other player, then the players tied for first place in the voting each get one point. But players who have lost by dint of duplication get no points.

The game continues to a set number of points, by default 10. Each player keeps track of their scores.

Additional required rules:

1. No substantive discussion of the adjectives, substantives or votes, respectively, is permitted prior to all the players having made their decisions.

2. The adjectives and substantives cannot be disambiguated or clarified except by their spelling.

3. Players may request for repeats of adjectives and substantives as many times as they wish.

Variations:

1. If the players are not fully trusting, or in a serious competition, the adjectives, substantives or votes are secretly written out and then revealed to prevent changes in response to others. Scores are written down.

2. With two players, scoring is not possible, but one can still have some fun.

3. With four players, one can either play according to the above rules (and thus have the challenge of four adjectives), or have one of the four players omit an adjective each round, rotating which player that is in a fixed order (by default, alphabetically by bibliographic order—last name and first name). One can similarly extended to more than four players, by omitting enough players each time to reduce the number of adjectives to three or four, using a more complex rotation rule if need be.

4. For simpler score-keeping, one can award one point only to the player who got the most points (if there is such a player; otherwise, no points are awarded).

Driving Roombas and other IR vehicles over WiFi

I've lately been having fun trying to get lots of the devices in the house to talk to each other. There is something gratifying in using an infrared transmitter from a broken helicopter, an old phone and a laptop to control a Roomba. :-) Here are instructions.

Blowguns and their darts

In case this heated discussion has made you desire a blowgun, here are my instructions for blowgun and dart making. :-) Stay safe! (Here's a good safety tip!)

The fun proper to science

I was with the kids at a large and obviously well-funded science museum today (I am not talking of the excellent Mayborn Museum in Waco), a place of much noise, flashing lights, and so on, all designed, presumably, to make science fun to kids. It was great fun for the kids. But it didn't make science fun for the kids. The kids had fun while doing things that might have had value for a scientific education had the excitement of noise, flashing lights and too many other kids not been distracting them. Or, as one might somewhat unfairly put it, they had fun doing things that would have had a value for a scientific education had the fun not distracted them from it.

There are two little points here, one for science education and one for both science education and for philosophy. First, to do something flashy—pressing a button and getting a result—is only science if it is done in the appropriate context of theory and/or careful observation. To learn to enjoy doing something flashy like that is not at all to learn to enjoy science. There is no correlation between doing flashy things and doing science. Some scientific experiments are flashy, involving booms and sparks, and some involve noting how varying x correlates with a weak but statistically significant variation starting with the third decimal place of y in a sufficiently large population.

Second, even if what the kids did were science, to have fun while doing science is not the same as to have fun doing science. One can have fun while doing science by listening to enjoyable music on one's iPod while doing an experiment, but that is not having fun doing science. For the doing of science to be fun to one, the fun must come from the doing of science, and must do so, as Aristotle would say, non-accidentally. It must be the fun proper to science, and must come from science in the right way. The fun of getting flashy effects is not one of the main forms of fun proper to science. The fun proper to science is the fun of observing patterns emerging from careful observations, of making and/or testing bold hypotheses, of seeing the mystery of the ordinary, and generally the excitement of the intellectual life.

Now, granted, one can often make a child (or even an adult) come to experience the fun of an activity A by having her engage in A while enjoying B. Thus, I guess, to enjoy certain kinds of music, one needs to hear a lot of it, and hear it in a positive mood. So one might feed someone chocolates while they listen to that music, both to make her stick around and to create a pleasant association. So making kids have fun while they're doing science, even if the fun they have is not proper to the science, is in principle a viable strategy. But that requires that the kids be actually doing science while having fun, and that one be aware of the distinction between having fun doing science and having fun while doing science, so that one does not congratulate oneself on "having made science fun" when one has merely had the kids have fun while having science.

Part of the point here parallels Peter Geach's point about the good. One cannot simply define "good" and "baseball player", and then conjoin the definitions to get the definition of "good basketball player" (if one could, the inference from "x is a good basketball player" and "x is a baseball player" to "x is a good baseball player" would be valid). The same is true of "fun" and "science". An activity isn't an instance of "fun science" just because it is fun and science.