Train

Brenda Brathwaite's Train is a tabletop game, one of six that the veteran designer is pursuing in a series on difficult subjects.

Train's game surface is a window, some panes broken, with additional broken glass scattered atop the surface of the play area. Three railway tracks extend at oblique angles across the width of the window.

The object of the game is to load yellow people tokens into boxcars and to move them from one end of the track to the other. Players roll dice to add passengers and move trains forward, and they draw cards to execute other actions, such as switching tracks, damaging a train, and derailing. Terminus cards on each track reveal each train's destination at the end of the game: Auschwitz, or another Nazi concentration camp. (Gamasutra/Ian Bogost)

[This game was played at Indiecade -- I missed it but word has it the experience was quite intense...]

Procedural Rhetoric

w/r/t our upcoming discussions of Galloway's Protocol, Golumbia's The Cultural Logic of Computation, and Drucker's Speclab, anyone interested in the relationship between code, representation and rhetoric could do worse than to check out Ian Bogost's book, Persuasive Games, in which he introduces the notion of "procedural rhetoric":

...[procedural rhetoric is] an argument made by means of a computer model. A procedural rhetoric makes a claim about how something works by modeling its processes in the process-native environment of the computer rather than using description (writing) or depiction (images). (gamasutra)

Earlier this year, Bogost posted an excellent summary of some of the key ideas from Persuasive Games (and his later book on Object-Oriented Programming and Videogame Criticism, Unit Operations) on Gamasutra: Persuasive Games: The Proceduralist Style.