Hi! I'm Bart Bonte, a Belgian independent game designer and bontegames.com is where I blog about new interesting browser and mobile games. My own games are all in the left column (or at the bottom of this page on mobile). More info about me and my games on bartbonte.com.
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December 09, 2014

parable of the polygons

Parable of the polygons: a playable blogpost/puzzles about how small biases lead to a divided world by Vi Hart and Nicky Case.

16 comments:

  1. Anonymous9 December 2014 at 17:58

    Umm.... What? There's no game on the page. What am I supposed to do?

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  2. Gentlecat9 December 2014 at 19:06

    @Anon at 17:58 you scroll down silly -_-

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  3. VI HART!!!10 December 2014 at 01:39

    Vi HART!!!!

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  4. Anonymous10 December 2014 at 02:07

    I don't get it. I can't click on anything. I tried scrolling down and nothing was there. What am I doing wrong? :(

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  5. tam10 December 2014 at 03:35

    wow

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  6. Anonymous10 December 2014 at 14:20

    This is not a game, it's a heavy-handed message about diversity where the creator had to cheat to get their desired result. The only reason you end up with segregation instead of a uniformly happy, diverse society is the arbitrary rule that shapes can't be moved if they're in their "meh" state. This completely ruined what could otherwise have been a nice puzzle with a philosophical twist.

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  7. Jana10 December 2014 at 22:21

    This is so important! Love it. I really hope that it will reach it's purpose to draw more peoples' attention to the dyamics of racism.

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  8. G11 December 2014 at 00:50

    What a cool way to demonstrate human dynamics!

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  9. Jade Green11 December 2014 at 03:23

    I loved this completely. Not really a game but such an important message delivered via cute pastel shapes and logical presentation. I really glad this was posted, thanks Bart.

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  10. Anonymous11 December 2014 at 06:21

    Of course, the one option never explored would be to judge each shape on its merits rather than being totally focused on the number of angles it has. That doesn't fit nicely into a mathematical simulation, but it works wonders in the real world. True diversity comes from individualism, not from seeing everyone as an interchangeable member of a minority or majority group.

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  11. Randomness11 December 2014 at 22:30

    There's a secret third race of pentagon though it's only referenced to once, where is it? At the very bottom of the page a single pentagon lies among squares and triangles on the right side! What could it mean? Maybe the child of a square and a triangle...

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  12. Randomness11 December 2014 at 22:35

    Or the pentagon is an addition to the game thru the Other Stuff Based Off This Thing: Polygons with Pentagons section right above either way works!

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  13. Anonymous17 December 2014 at 00:51

    @ VI HART!!!


    VI HAAAAAARTTT!!!!

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  14. Elsie N.17 December 2014 at 00:54

    @ Anon 14:20

    I disagree. This is modeling what societies do on their own. The immobility of the "meh" shapes isn't the construct, it is having one central person moving shapes to begin with. In actual society, people move themselves, and if someone is "meh" about their current situation, they are unlikely to move.

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  15. Anonymous18 December 2014 at 01:13

    So how do the Japanese feel about this? Just asking.
    They've been more of a monolithic society for eons.
    Anyways - money dictates where you live or how mobile you are more than how much your neighbors resemble you or not.

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  16. Cak10 January 2015 at 01:38

    I'm absolutely with Anonymous from
    10 December 2014 at 14:20. It was not a sensation to me how polygons segragated caused by the arbitrary rule.

    But the animation (I don't like to call it a simulation, because it isn't IMHO - it is just an algorithm or a automat / machine) helps to think about diversity and stuff like that. If needed, it's a simple and not the worst "model" of human behavior.

    Yes, it's a little bit to simple to only depend on accepting neighbours beeing "similar" or not. What is similar?

    And what happens if the polygon doesn't know, that there is another group of polygons being more similar to itself and to each other (and believes that neighbours were similar)? Would it then start to move?

    But maybe you can see it more in an abstract way for modelling decision finding for moving or living with other people (or for other human decisions).

    And I would prefer to use different / equal shapes of the polygons for the degree of satisfaction (wich is in my opinion an important reason for moving or not moving). If the polygons were satisfied enough, it wouldn't count that much whether the "shape" (which might stand for interests, favorite color, music, political opinion ...) is the same or not.

    So in my op bias and satisfaction are not independent from each other.

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