Re:Xbox creator Seamus Blackley baked a 4,500-year-old Egypt...
by cableshaft on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @06:39AM
(#24917247)
It would be nice to pursue interesting and useful things like this, where someone bakes bread from 4,500 year old dormant yeast, but coming up with these ideas isn't usually very easy, even with a decadent lifestyle.
Not a whole lot of low hanging fruit these days, a lot of it has been picked. The amount of things we 'know' now is staggering, and has built up some boundaries on what's possible or not. Those boundaries might actually be wrong, but the more you learn the more boxed in your mind can get.
Sometimes it takes an outsider that's ignorant of those boundaries to break through them, try the thing that other people just think would be impossible and it works. I wouldn't be surprised if these people didn't even consider it a possibility that you could bake bread from ancient dormant yeast until this amateur Blackley claimed he did it the first time (and was mistaken).
I had no idea yeast could survive in a dormant state for 4,500 years in ceramic pots. I have yeast that doesn't always reactivate that's only a few years old, let alone 4,500 years. It would never even occur to me to even try, as I had a now clearly false belief that yeast doesn't last that long in my head.
I've probably spent most of my life thinking about games in one way or another, and coming up with new game ideas, but even still I never really come up with something truly genre-breaking. And yet board games have done that a few times in recent years, with someone coming up with deckbuilders, another person coming up with the idea of legacy board games, another a hidden traitor mechanic, etc, and creating a whole new genre out of it.
But even then, it's not super common. Most board games coming out now are a mix of established things, with a bit of a twist or an unconventional theme.
Not a whole lot of low hanging fruit these days, a lot of it has been picked. The amount of things we 'know' now is staggering, and has built up some boundaries on what's possible or not. Those boundaries might actually be wrong, but the more you learn the more boxed in your mind can get.
Sometimes it takes an outsider that's ignorant of those boundaries to break through them, try the thing that other people just think would be impossible and it works. I wouldn't be surprised if these people didn't even consider it a possibility that you could bake bread from ancient dormant yeast until this amateur Blackley claimed he did it the first time (and was mistaken).
I had no idea yeast could survive in a dormant state for 4,500 years in ceramic pots. I have yeast that doesn't always reactivate that's only a few years old, let alone 4,500 years. It would never even occur to me to even try, as I had a now clearly false belief that yeast doesn't last that long in my head.
I've probably spent most of my life thinking about games in one way or another, and coming up with new game ideas, but even still I never really come up with something truly genre-breaking. And yet board games have done that a few times in recent years, with someone coming up with deckbuilders, another person coming up with the idea of legacy board games, another a hidden traitor mechanic, etc, and creating a whole new genre out of it.
But even then, it's not super common. Most board games coming out now are a mix of established things, with a bit of a twist or an unconventional theme.