Explorable Explanations - Nicky Case's Blog

The Explorables Jam!

Note: the following was originally posted on my Patreon, in two parts. Part I: (posted Aug 12) Hi all! Sorry I didn't update in a while – I forgot to mention

Explorable Explanations

Nicky's Next Explorable: Survey Results!

For the past few years, I made games that teach ideas – but, I wondered, can I make games that teach skills? Apparently, I don't have the skill of making my

Explorable Explanations

Explorable Explanations: 4 More Design Patterns

Four years ago (wow, already four?), we had the first-ever Explorable Explanations meetup, to talk about teaching through play. We had no idea what we were doing. Still don't. But,

Explorable Explanations

ENVIRONMENT ⇆ ECONOMY

A lot of people – on all ends of the political spectrum – believe it's the environment versus the economy. Climate versus capitalism. Mother Nature versus markets. I've run out of alliterations,

Behind The Scenes

LOOPY: A Post-Mortem

Loops changed my life. Three years ago, I picked up a copy of Donella Meadows' Thinking In Systems. The core idea of her book is this: we humans tend to

Talks

How To Simulate The Universe, In 134 Easy Steps

Here's the text version of a talk I gave a few days ago! My talk was about systems and simulations – and how they can make us more empathetic, more empowered,

Explorable Explanations

Why Simulate?

When most people hear the word “simulation”, they probably think about The Matrix, and whether we're all living in a simulation or something. But real simulations are made for a

Explorable Explanations

First Draft - I'd Like To Be A Machine

Back when I was a Computer Science student, stuck in my stress & sadness... I just wished I could kill my emotions, represented here as a fat gecko named Sticky.

Explorable Explanations

First Draft - Parable of the Polygons

The following is the very first draft of Parable of the Polygons, originally posted to a semi-secret Github Gist. I sketched it up shortly after meeting Vi Hart at the

Explorable Explanations

Explorable Explanations: The Plan

Okay, wow. The Explorable Explanations movement has been gaining a lot of traction in the last few months. Between my & Vi's Parable of the Polygons becoming a Games For

Game Design

I Do And I Understand

Okay, Confucius probably wasn't talking about videogames. Still, you don't learn how to ride a bike from a lecture. You get on that bike, fall down, and learn from your

Explorable Explanations

Pop-Up Textbooks

The first pop-up books were not for children. They were meant for scholarly and academic audiences. The first question is... why would they do that? The first known book with

Explorable Explanations

Explorable Explanations. Interactive non-fiction. Active essays. Glogs. We never came up with a name for what we're doing, but at least we know we're not going to use "glogs", which is like blogs and vlogs, except it's glogs. This weekend, I attended