This article about a person is a draft. You can help by editing it or discussing in the comments
| Bruno Bollaert, "with Acoustic Masada, 2006", CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 |
John Zorn (b. September 2, 1953) is an American composer and saxophonist. Making music in many different genres he is also notable for being the pioneer of very open, improvisation-based brand of music games.
John Zorn doesn't describe rules of his games in writing and it's his purposeful decision which we are going to respect. We will follow that as long as the games are still restricted to oral tradition, but there is much to be said from the perspective of game design about approaches displayed in these famous game pieces.
Constellation — A line-up for a single performance of improvised music.
Skill floor — Minimum skill required to play the game. See: Learning curve
| William Verbeek, "John Zorn Cobra, North Sea Jazz, Rotterdam / NL, 2009" CC BY-NC 2.0 |
For now, let's have an overview of John Zorn's games in one place. (Links don't have to feature John Zorn involved in the performance). First games were often simple ones, based mostly on constellations. According to interviews [citation needed] in some later games there is an intentional high skill floor.
Klarina (1974) —
Baseball (1976) —
Lacrosse (1976) —
Dominoes (1977) —
Curling (1977) —
Golf (1977) —
Cricket (1978) —
Fencing (1978) —
Hockey (1978) — youtu.be/5Zi_TMGBMZI
Pool (1979) —
Tennis (1979) —
Archery (1979) —
Track and Field (1980) —
Jai Alai (1980) —
Goi (1981) —
Croquet (1981) —
Locus Salus (1982) — ?
Sebastopol (1983) —
Cobra (1984) — the most famous game piece ever?
Xu Feng (1985) —
Hu Die (1986) —
Ruan Lingyu (1987) —
Hwang Chin-ee (1988) —
Bezique (1989) — roulette.org/event/john-zorn/
Que Tran (1990) —
Most of the list is from Notes in Audio Culture (Cox and Warner 2004, 200), where you can find also an interesting interview.
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