Lateral thinking with Hipbone games

For the last year or so, I’ve been an occasional lurker and infrequent contributor to an online community called Brainstorms. Howard Rheingold started it, but it’s taken on a life of it’s own in recent years. The reason I mention Brainstorms is that there’s a regular contributor there named Charles Cameron. He’s one of those people who are really smart in a whole bunch of disciplines and you can’t imagine how they got that way. Here’s his bio (pdf).

Anyway, Charles keeps a couple of blogs going. He calls them “DoubleQuotes” and each post is essentially a contrast between two quotes pointed at a single topic. Really interesting stuff. Here’s the original DoubleQuotes blog and here’s his New Orleans DoubleQuotes blog.

Even more interesting, to me at least, is his “HipBone” games site (older site here). Now, I’m not much of a gamer. I don’t even like playing standard board games. But this stuff is pretty cool. His game, in it’s essence, is just a formalized way of playing one idea off of another. He provides a way to earn points, but really downplays it. Rather he emphasizes the gameplay itself–just the fun and intellectual stimulation of jumping from one idea/concept/thought to another.

There’s an archive of an older public game here. Kinda hard to follow if you don’t already know what’s going on and what to expect. All in all, the games promote brainstorming and new thinking. Good stuff.