The Game of Books

This is a game that lets you catalogue your reading habits.  The Game of Books achieved its goal of $102k in funding through Kickstarter. “The money is going to be used to finish the game and develop the game kits, mobile app, and other components.

TGoB is the work of BookLamp, and it draws from their earlier Book Genome Project. If you follow ebook news then you may have heard of BookLamp. This startup got a lot of attention last fall with their unique way to analyze a book and make scene-by-scene measurements of elements such as pacing, density, action, dialog, description, perspective, and genre, and more.

The Game of Books takes all this data and uses it to build a game which consists of a system of badges, XP, skills, and  not unlike Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. You play the game by entering the books you’ve read to get points based on each book’s major themes.

Here’s more from the Kickstarter project page:

The Main Points of The Game of Books:

• Readers earn points and badges for the books you read.
• Play The Game by yourself, or with friends locally or on social media.
• Each book in The Game has its own unique digital game card.  There are more than 100,000 game cards in the Game of Books today.
• Open Access: The Game of Books is intended to be easily connected to existing reading communities, such as Goodreads.com.  Play The Game in the places you already read.

TGoB won’t be ready until late Spring or early summer at the earliest, so it’s going to be some time before you can play the complete game. But if you like you can go try out a demo version of the game over on TGoB website.

The demo will let you build a character card. All you need to do is enter the books you’ve read, and the game will calculate your skill level based on the scores of each book.” Here’s Nate’s:

The Game of Books

http://gameofbooks.com/level_up

Stephen