Switching Codes is a book that brings together various thinkers to explore the ways that digital technology is changing our lives.

One of these thinkers is Eric Zimmerman, famed author and game designer who straddles both the computer and analog gaming world. Eric’s contribution to this book on the impact of digital technology is a cut and play game called Figment. Not an essay about games, or a game-like activity; you literally cut his pages in the book into cards and play an actual game with them (you can download a print and play version for free from the above link). The cards consist of language tokens from the other essays in the book; your job is to play cards into connected sensible sentences and then explain how the sentences mean something important.

Playing an analog game about digital technology is entirely ironic. The game makes a statement about the mixing and matching of digital terms and ideas, much like we do in our modern digital landscape. Yet we need nothing more than paper and scissors to fully appreciate the message.