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John Holder
United States
Centennial
Colorado
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I think nomography in gaming could be one of the 'next big things' as a tool for games and game designers.
They are an excellent way of linking things mathematically without requiring players to 'do math', we can just 'see' the results. While many, including myself, love math, the visual ease they can lend games while making the effects of changing variables (resources / spell energies / strength / etc etc etc ) much more clear than equations can.
But what is nomography?
"Nomography ... is the graphical representation of mathematical relationships or laws (the Greek word for law is nomos) These graphs are variously called nomograms (the term used here), nomographs, alignment charts, and abacs. This area of practical and theoretical mathematics was invented in 1880 by Philbert Maurice d’Ocagne (1862-1938) and used extensively for many years to provide engineers with fast graphical calculations of complicated formulas to a practical precision."(From "The Lost Art of Nomography" by Ron Doerfler)
Here is an example from the open source PyNomo project showing a nomogram used for computing BMI (body mass index):
Nomographs are also often used in things like airplane manuals and the like -- when your engine dies, you still want to be able to calculate your range based on things like speed and altitude -- and under conditions where cranking through the math might not be fast enough.
Not fast enough... nomographs will allow us to add depth and complexity of relationships between in-game resources, power levels, etc without requiring anyone to crunch numbers!
Nomography in Gaming
The first time I saw these used in connection with gaming (wargaming in specific in his case) was at Winchell Chung's "Project Rho", an example of his is seen here:
Some pretty amazing stuff Winch has done.
It recently occurred to me that nomographs could be decoupled from the purely mathematical (i.e., no specific formula used to derive the graph) and used to image all sorts of in-game relationships -- sort of an ad-hoc application.
Game designer and artist Todd Sanders and I got to talking about their application to games in the Design forum, and he posted an exciting nomograph for a work-in-progress that you can see here:
Without even knowing how to use the thing, I find it super cool and compelling, and I want to play that game. What is also cool about Todd's graph is that he is producing it primarily as an artist to visualize relationships he knows should occur... and hasn't explicitly created a system of formulas to use to generate the nomograph.
I figured it could be applied as well to CRTs in games like WarpWar (fittingly, Winchell Chung was an artist for this one) which don't appear to be from any strict mathematical formula and then created a nomograph to suit:
Original CRT:
Nomograph (soon to be in 'files' section):
This both may be more useful and less useful, depending on the kind of gamer a person is -- but it sure looks cool!
Now, I'm excited to continue game relationships that could result in a useful nomograph. I'd love to see this mechanism used more in games.
Would you? Is this a thing that people would use, or would it just be a hassle?
Personally, I think this would allow for a game to put in some super-mathy relationships, and remain completely playable, which would add another degree of freedom for game design.
--John
EDIT: Other games that have come up in the comments that have nomographs:
1) Birds of Prey: Air Combat in the Jet Age
2) Attack Vector: Tactical
Tue Sep 27, 2011 10:37 pm
