The Playing Card Platform

This essay considers how both analog and digital characteristics overlap and intercede and what types of play cards encourage or discourage. Playing cards’ shift to digital platforms similarly raises new design questions.There are at least five interleaved platform characteristics that structure card game design: planar, uniform, ordinal, spatial, and textural. These five characteristics appear consistently in the centuries-long history of card games and define the playing card platform’s formal contours. This article explores these five characteristics while remaining aware of the physical design limitations and encouragement of ordinality focused gameplay inherent in playing cards.