Are you game?

This one is cool.  The graduating class of 2011 from the Atlanta campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design’s ITGM department wants a class ring.

We’ve all seen college rings before.  They’re fairly distinct in an old-school kind of way.  They work for some people but I’ve always thought they look like you’re wearing a gold easter basket on your finger.   They also look the same.  All of them.  You can be  a doctor, a lawyer, an architect, an artist, or a general studies major (aka I have no idea what I want to do for a living) and your rings will look identical.

So Daniel, my liaison to these graduates, wants something specific to ITGM, which basically translates to Interactive Design and Game Development.  Yeah, that’s game design.  Before you get excited, its not as fun as it sounds.  Well, actually it is, but its a hell of a lot harder than you think.  These cats are hard-core intellectuals about game design.  That means everything from cards to dice to video games to social media apps.  They study the game, the math behind the game, and the complex systems of play that yadda yadda blagity blar so let’s make a ring.

What you’re looking at here ^^^ is basically the ring.  Yeah it sucks right now, but its going to be great when I’m done.  That blue thing is a D-20, which is game-speak for  20 sided dice.  That D-20 is solid wax, which means I can work it into a ring design for casting.  Pretty appropriate since a good chunk of their work deals with dice and for most of them, the D-20 is kind of the workhorse of game design and prototyping.  Any asshole knows what a pair of dice looks like and most of them have them laying around somewhere.

see?

But only hard-core gamers and designers know what a D-20 is.  For that reason, it will serve as kind of the gemstone of the ring.  The shank is going to be carved from that block of green wax.  A skull – also appropriate for intellectuals (if you don’t understand why, visit my website at www.mtmaloney.com and read through.)

So stay tuned for updates on this.  This one is going to take  some time, but it’ll be worth it.   I’m a big-time arcade rat, so I’m also going to find a way to incorporate something Donkey Kong, Digdug, or Pacman into this.