When 21-year old Mahdi Bahrami took the stage at this year’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop, the audience was entranced by his game Engare. Projected onto a large screen to a crowd of hundreds of people, Bahrami showed solutions to his geometric, ancient Iranian art-influenced puzzle game. “So you have an object on a table,” he said to the audience, pointing to a screen where a rectangle sat on the edge of a desk. “Now if you draw a point somewhere on that object, what kind of line would it make if it fell?” He placed a dot on the corner of the rectangle. He hit “play.” The rectangle tumbled off the table, leaving behind a squiggly line.
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