Month: September 2017

Playfully Minded: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell
Writer Rob Walker looks at some of the works on view in the PlayTime exhibition and finds wonder in the mundane and restlessness in constraint.

As a kid, I wasn’t big on playing traditional sports, but I quite enjoyed video games. This was a long-ago era, and my experiences involved arcade “quarter games” (as my peers and I called them) and a TV-connected console called Intellivision—a rival to the more iconic Atari. I liked playing against friends, even against the machine itself. But I also liked playing with the games.

One vivid example involved an auto-racing game—you’d use the controller to maneuver a car around a twisting track, as quickly as possible, and avoiding a crash with aggressive rivals. But somehow, at some point, I figured out that if you drove off the track, at just the right spot, the car would keep motoring out into no-man’s land, among digital trees and what seemed like odd patches of abandoned track. Crashing ended the game of course, but it was possible to go so far into these virtual woods that you would eventually arrive back at the original course. Perhaps the idea was that you’d driven all the way around the world; perhaps it was just a glitch. But it was completely delightful, and is easily the most distinct memory I have left of many hundreds of hours of game play.

We think of games as a form of distraction or escape—something that removes us from the serious and important, perhaps from reality itself. But is that really the case? The works gathered for PlayTime, as irreverent and fun and even funny as they may be, suggest almost the opposite. If you’re looking for serious insight into what’s important and real, you’d do well to adopt the cunningly playful mindset that these artists display. Over and over, the artists here reveal how games and play can focus our attention on the telltale details and hidden truths that underpin our day-to-day. Play turns out to depend on, and reveal, a subversive way of perceiving and engaging with the world. As with my little car-game adventure, play gets most interesting when it lights to discovery, surprise, mystery, even wonder.

Take, as a simple example of subversive perception, Cory Arcangel’s 2003 Totally Fucked. To make the piece, the technically adept Arcangel, whose work consistently displays a kind of hyper-fluency with digital culture, modified the code of the cartridge game Mario Bros. Normally, the protagonist Mario, controlled by the player, moves from left to right across a digital landscape, trying to avoid or conquer enemies and reach an end point that takes him to the game’s next level. On the way, he interacts with floating cubes that may contain helpful items.

With a gesture of elimination, Arcangel makes us think about whether permanent stasis might be even worse than ‘losing.’

Totally Fucked eliminates almost all of this, placing Mario atop one of the cubes, floating mid-air, in an infinite loop, with no ground, opponents, or allies. This scenario is surely nothing the game’s designers wanted players to imagine, and of course it reduces Mario’s epic journey to a standstill. But with this gesture of elimination, Arcangel makes us think not only about what to make of a game environment absent of obstacles or even movement, but about whether permanent stasis might be even worse than “losing.” There is no challenge or competition left; just a hopeless predicament, a character uncomfortably alone in a blue-sky void. Maybe this is what happens when you playfully degamify a game. Certainly it makes the viewer look closely at something she was never really meant to see.

This spirit recurs throughout PlayTime. Maybe the most extreme example of a work that playfully draws our attention to something we take for granted seldom actively consider is Martin Creed’s Work No. 329. It is, in short, a room half-full of cheerful, pink party balloons. Creed has made a number of variations on the piece with different-colored balloons, but in all cases the impact is immediate and clear—and, I would say, pretty funny. And fun: the piece is designed to be walked into and experienced from within itself, by anyone who’s game.

The artist is known for a deadpan sensibility guided by intentional, rule-like constraints, frequently designed to draw as much meaning as possible from the most mundane objects or gestures. The resulting works—confounding to some, no doubt—have included a balled sheet of paper, and an empty room illuminated by timed lights. Work No. 329 is an almost child-like means of raising some pretty serious questions about the nature of art. Is the raw material here the balloons or, more compellingly, air itself? (But only the half in the balloons; the rest of the air presumably remains non-art.)

Wurm has been doing this since the late 1990s, and on some level the series amounts to a constant reinvention of rules.

To take this process of playfully challenging our usual habits of perception in another direction, Erwin Wurm’s long-running One Minute Sculpture series converts the artwork from a thing that you look at to a thing that you do. In short, Wurm presents a set of written or drawn instructions, proscribing a particular interaction with a specific object or object at hand; you are meant to follow the instruction, and hold the pose for a sixty seconds. You might be instructed to lay on your back in a chair, feet pointed skyward. Or stick your legs through a modified table. Or take off a shoe and listen to it. This is the sculpture. Wurm has been doing this since the late 1990s, and on some level the series amounts to a constant reinvention of rules: making the “sculpture” as much a game as a collaborative and ephemeral performance.

Artists surely know as much as athletes about the pros and cons of playing by rules. Mark Bradford’s remarkable 2003 video Practice offers a particularly poetic example. It shows the artist, a six-foot-seven-inch African-American man, moving around a basketball court, trying to dribble and make shots … while wearing an antebellum hoop skirt four feet in diameter, made out of a Los Angeles Lakers uniform.

The practice of using play to reveal rather than to escape can be taken out of the realm of actual game mechanics.

The combination of symbols is both jarring and absurd: Something about this particular set of constraints makes it hard to decide whether to laugh or wince, as Bradford struggles to control the ball, loses his balance, crashes to the hard ground. But on he persists. When he finally manages to overcome the constraints and hit a shot, you want to cheer—maybe for the triumph, or maybe just out of relief.

The practice of using play to reveal, rather than to escape or distract, can be taken well outside the realm of actual game mechanics. Roman Signer’s work, sometimes described as “action sculptures,” is marked by an almost adolescent delight in misusing materials in revelatory ways. Often this entails juxtapositions that feel like the daydreams of a genius juvenile delinquent.

In the video Office Chair, a definitive symbol of stultifying work is transformed into a splendid toy, thanks to the use of handheld rockets. In Kayak, a nature sport crashes the built environment, with Signer dragged in a boat along a road by a truck. Punkt finds the artist pacifically arranged before a canvas in a field, the natural beauty interrupted by the unexpected arrival of an explosive. There’s an air of the successful prank around each piece, leaving the viewer with the definite sense of having watched somebody get away with something—but left to make the final decision about just what that something is.

Revising forgotten toys into beautiful objects, Woodgate plays a quietly subversive game.

Agustina Woodgate’s collection of rug-like wall hangings constructed from the “skins” of stuffed animal toys offer such a different tone that they seem to occupy another world altogether: silent, sweet, beautiful, and oddly comforting. But really her game is not so different.

While open to various interpretations, the pieces remind me first of the familiar bearskin rug: the grotesque (to me) trophy of a sporting hunter. Woodgate has described the series as evolving from her relationship with a childhood toy, a teddy bear she had named Pepe. The object had outlived its intended use, but she was reluctant to throw it out. Buying up other neglected stuffed animals from thrift stores, she began repurposing their “skins” into complicated and colorful mosaic rugs (often in a more Eastern aesthetic far removed from the cringe-worthy kitsch of the pelt-as-décor). Revising forgotten toys into the raw material of freshly beautiful objects, Woodgate plays a quietly subversive game.

I invoked video games at the beginning of this essay because the digital realms we access through consoles, computers, smartphones, and smart watches have collectively become perhaps our most pervasive space for play. They may also be our most contested. These are places where we indulge in private fun—and where others do the same thing in ways that sometimes worry us: When, we wonder, does diversion become detachment?

Cao Fei made her name through explorations of digital play spaces.

Chinese artist Cao Fei made her name in part through incredibly adventurous and original explorations of digital play spaces, with a particular focus on the personal-identity games that attach to the virtual-world avatar. In doing so she demonstrated a remarkable fluency in everything from “cosplay” to Second Life, practices and realms that allow participants to blur lines among reality, aspiration and fantasy in ways that seem distinct to our era.

She’s carried that fluency into an increasingly far-flung and ambitious territory. In PlayTime, examples pop up, tellingly, in two distinct sections within the show. The installation Rumba 01 & 02 repurposes the popular vacuum robot as artworks—an amusing gesture, to be sure. But it’s the video Shadow Life that, despite or really because of its own aesthetic charms, takes her game to another level.

Reportedly inspired by an official state broadcast of a Chinese Spring Festival Gala from the artist’s childhood, the video unfolds in the form of a remarkable shadow puppet sequence, backed by propagandistic martial music. A silly dog shadow emerges from a demagogue’s shouty face; clutches of mindlessly applauding hands morph into a childish dance; fists dissolve into animals; accusatory fingers chase a rabbit into a sweet embrace. But the visual gags often get dark: the rabbit held in a threatening grip, a swan shadow puppet suddenly gripped by the throat. It’s ultimately a grim story that plays out in two dimensions, black and white. When does this game subvert terror, and when does it simply disguise it? Can we still tell the difference? The answer surely matters.

Way back in the quarter-game era of my adolescence, the phrase “game over” made the leap from the final screen of any given play session into daily parlance, signifying a definitive end, any decisive victory or defeat. The artists in PlayTime offer a collective rebuke to the idea that a game ends, or that it’s always possible to identify its beginning. Play simply persists, or it certainly ought to, all the time and everywhere. Not because we need it to escape, but because it helps us find different ways to engage. We need to play. Game ongoing. ♦

 

(Image credits: Courtesy of the artist, photo by Bob Packert/PEM. Courtesy of the artist, © Cory Arcangel. Courtesy of the artist, photo by Bob Packert/PEM. Photo by Bob Packert/PEM. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Courtesy of Spinello Projects, photo by Joshua Aronson. Courtesy of the artist, photo by Allison White/PEM.)

Ball Games and War Games: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Writer Carlo Rotella looks back on the board games and basketball games he grew up playing on the South Side of Chicago. Here, in his third and final installment for PlayTime, Rotella ponders how both kinds of play have evolved—for better or worse—over generations.

When I was a kid, the paths I took to the two sorts of game-world were stark opposites. I played war games in an icy aesthetic fugue state entered in rigorous solitude, while basketball entailed a hot engagement with self-interested others that was equal parts political and anthropological. Looking back from the perspective afforded by middle age, I can see that my experience of pickup ball and war games has to some extent switched social polarities over time. My root desire in both kinds of play has always been to enter the world of the game and dwell there, soaking up the nourishing feng shui. But technological change, the shifting character of childhood and leisure, and other usual suspects have muddied the distinction between them over the nearly half a century that has elapsed since my childhood.

As a general rule, digitization produces more loneliness, not less, but this case is an exception: I no longer have to outsmart myself in heroic isolation when I play these games.

It had to happen sooner or later that somebody would think to digitize the old military board games. A Scottish outfit called HexWar has finally gotten around to doing that. Its design partners have replaced the square unit-counters with little clusters of troops and substituted a 3D swell of hills and valleys for the flat abstract landscape of the game board, but HexWar has not tried to turn these games into first-person shooters. They still play like board games, and the hexagonal map grid has been preserved as a nostalgic curio. As a general rule, digitization produces more loneliness, not less, but this case is an exception: I no longer have to outsmart myself in heroic isolation when I play these games. I can play online against other Avalon Hill/SPI veterans, or I can play against the built-in opponent that comes with the game. I prefer the latter, mostly because it’s always ready to play, always up for a game. Even on the Hard setting, this algorithmic foe tends to lack decisive boldness, a stolidity that makes it chronically susceptible to being outflanked and outhustled, but it’s a recognizable intelligence―a purposeful presence other than my own―and its shortcomings make it seem more, not less, human. As Napoleon at Waterloo, this intelligence throws D’Erlon’s formidable I Corps against La Haye Sainte and my shaky left; as Scipio Africanus at Zama, it screens its advancing legions with light infantry in textbook fashion. When I repel D’Erlon with massed cannon and Uxbridge’s horse guards, when I scatter the Roman velites with my elephants, I feel a little like Patton in the movie after he defeats the Afrika Korps in battle. He yells, “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!” at what he believes to be his illustrious opponent’s fleeing tank, only to find out later that Rommel wasn’t in the tank, and was in fact away on leave.

It’s part of a generational swing toward adult supervision and away from open-ended, self-governed free play, but the education in practical politics and social dynamics available to me in the 1970s has grown increasingly old-school, even esoteric.

If my experience of war games has warmed over time, pickup basketball has cooled for me. I still have to negotiate with strangers to get into the game, but it’s all very low-key. I usually show up alone at the court in the local park, which makes things simpler, and almost everybody’s grown-up enough to determine fair order and wait his turn, just as we do at the nearby supermarket’s meat counter. Something similar typically happens when I play farther from home―and now there are pickup-basketball apps that let you know where to find a game in a strange city, which seems efficient but also resembles buying a used TV on eBay. And if it doesn’t work out and I don’t get to play, my much-sprained ankles and much-jammed fingers appreciate being spared the wear and tear. My own aging explains this cooler experience of the pickup game, but it’s also framed by larger changes. Over the years pickup ball has become a more preponderantly adult game as a result of a great transformation of how kids, small and large, play. Especially for the most intensely ball game-inclined boys and girls, there’s a lot less free play these days, and a lot more play organized and supervised by adults―more travel teams and AAU teams overseen by grown-ups with whistles, more official practices and scheduled games and less hanging out and jockeying for position for hours on end at the local court. It’s part of a generational swing toward adult supervision and away from open-ended, self-governed free play, and it means that, while young people still do play pickup ball, the education in practical politics and social dynamics available to me as a ball-playing kid on the South Side of Chicago in the 1970s has grown increasingly old-school, even esoteric.

When I was a kid I frequently paged through my copy of Cyril Falls’s Great Military Battles, an oversize book full of maps showing the movements of cavalry and infantry and artillery, and of paintings in which mounted generals made Buddha-like gestures with plump white hands amid their retinues and rolling clouds of gun smoke. I returned often to the chapter on Waterloo, which seemed to make the definitive case on offense and defense. Offense was Napoleon, whose genius for the coup de main was expressed in constant attack, demanding courage and enterprise and grotesquely buoyant optimism from his men. These were marquee virtues, yes, but, especially when exercised in the service of misguided principles, they curdled into blind, force-drunk aggression for its own sake. Defense, by contrast, might be frequently drab and unpleasant, but it was how you stopped offense. Defense was the Duke of Wellington, whose greatest achievement was to deny Napoleon the victory at Waterloo, and whose schemes featured the absolute minimum of moving parts and decisive strokes because he assumed that orders would go astray, subordinates would screw up, and the troops who served under him were “the scum of the earth.” My beat-up original copy of Great Military Battles went missing in the early 1980s, when I went off to college, but I recently acquired an equally well-used copy via Amazon. Looking through it now, revisiting long-lost but intensely familiar images and passages and the lessons they taught, I begin to appreciate the depth of the imprint left on me by war games and ball games. They taught―they teach―offense and defense, strategy and tactics, force and finesse, technique and persuasion, how to be alone and how to engage with others. ♦

Return to the first and second installments of “Ball Games and War Games.”

(Image credit: Louis-François Lejeune, Battle of Moscow, 7th September 1812, 1822, Château de Versailles, via Wikipedia Commons.)

Vocal Blind Man’s Bluff: A Story

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz
The latest in Albert Mobilio’s series of fictional stories based on old-time games continues to illustrate how the characteristics of play are the essence of our inner lives.

Music—loud, insistent, and dissonant—makes remaining calm difficult. Clanging bells, penny whistles, and what is probably a toy piano ride treble-high over a honking bass saxophone playing “Yakety Sax” at half-speed. It’s a funeral march for a suicidal clown, or that’s what Sandy surmises. She observes Bean at the kitchen table fiddling with his laptop, jumping from one noisy video to another and judges the probable success of hitting him from across the hall with the mug she squeezes with increased annoyance. Just thump him in the back. Divert his attention from playing whatever he’s playing. As this only slightly violent thought discharges its modest current, she’s conscious of the weight and hardness of the mug. An empathy too finely tuned allows her to absorb the sensation of being hit with it and there, in the big armchair, she flinches.
“Bean, please,” Sandy says. To herself, though. Louder then, “Bean, please turn it down.”
“Yeah, turn that shit off,” Jack shouts as he descends the stairs. He holds his hands out, palms up. “Who took the towel out of the bathroom?” “We need it for Blind Man’s,” Bean declares as he brandishes the purloined hand towel and calls the group to form a circle.

People from Jack’s office are here; some college friends of Jess’s, too. No matter the increased numbers, he chooses Sandy—she knew he would as if in retribution for those angry thoughts—and soon her face from forehead to the tip of her nose is draped in a towel held in place with a binder clip that catches a hunk of her hair.
“Hey,” she says. The towel smells like sink.

She sits in the big chair while they dance around her—yes, dance; it’s not a pretty sight—until she gives a signal. She could clap, or shout “Stop.” When everyone halts Sandy will point to one of the players and that person will have to make a vocal sound that’s been determined in advance. They may have to imitate the sound of an animal named by the blind man, sing a song, speak in tongues, or impersonate Lucille Ball discovering a bat in her bedroom. Tonight, Sandy asked that those she selects cry like an eight-year-old who has been sent to their room for backtalk. She has one shot at identifying the player; if she succeeds, the two trade places. If she fails, she will continue drawing breath through what increasingly stinks of drainpipe.

The circular cavorting begins; the floor’s vibrations make their way through the chair to Sandy. It’s a pleasant sensation, like she’s in a drink being stirred. She can’t see anyone and they can’t quite see her but she is at the center of things. She tightens a bit and calls out “Stop,” and the vibration recedes. People laugh. Someone trips, it seems, into someone else and there’s more laughing. Sandy stands, slowly turns, and with a regal flourish points into the darkness. She’s pointing out there, out past the circle, to the living room. Out there.

It’s a friend of Jess’s, the woman with chipped fingernail polish who has been popping out all evening to smoke on the stoop. She begins with tiny moans, more sexual than sad, but then pushes them higher, allowing a raggedness to creep in around their edges. It’s throaty and wet and everyone is quiet. They build quickly. Soon there’s something undeniably genuine; the choking catch begins to spark some small alarm. She is wailing and heads turn away or down because there is fear that this woman’s face will be streaked with tears. And then, as if a needle jumped its groove, the sound ceases and is replaced by her panting— healthy exerciser’s panting—as if she’d done a steep stretch on the elliptical trainer. Slack faced, smiling, she covers her mouth to cough. The room temperature drops a few degrees as the flush of embarrassment ebbs.

Sandy knows that crying; she hears all of its parts and pieces. In the dark, she can see it. Jagged streaks of chalk across a blackboard crisscrossing and swirling over and over until the blackness is almost hidden behind a veil of white dust and grit. And when it stops, she knows who is crying, too—the cough is the clue. She thinks about the fingernail polish, chewed away or just neglected. You would have to disown that cry wouldn’t you? Sandy is about to say her name but doesn’t. There’s someone else here who could cry like that. There’s someone whose name she says out loud with a little glee, with a little accusation.

Photo credit: Detail of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Blind Man’s Bluff, oil on canvas, 1755–56, Toledo Museum of Art, from Wikicommons.

Performing the Real: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Lizzie Stark closes her three-part essay demystifying larping by looking at it as a form of theater—really, as an art form. Here she participates in a life and death experience. Return to parts 1 and 2.

Audience is the key difference between any kind of theater and larp. In a play, the audience watches the actors perform, and the actors perform for the entertainment and edification of the audience. In larp, there are no outside observers, only participants; the roles of performer and audience are collapsed into what researchers such as Dr. Markus Montola have called the “first person audience.” Each participant is the author of their own performance, and the audience for their own emotions as well as the performances of their co-players. And, in fact, reactions to their co-players’ performances often occur through the lens of the character they are currently playing.

The emphasis on participants over audience also shifts the physical experience of the performer. Traditional theater prioritizes what the audience sees and hears and their staging reflects that. Set and costuming must look real, but needn’t necessarily be made of, say, real leather or plate mail. The directors arrange the actors strategically, in groupings that would feel unnatural in regular life but make the performers visible to a wide number of seats. If the actors do a good job, the audience may take the emotions of the plot and characters onto themselves, crying during a death scene, for example, or longing for intimacy during a romantic scene. In theater, the actors enjoy the lion’s share of the alibi to behave differently, while the dark room quietly gives some alibi to the audience to feel emotions more visibly than they might in everyday life.

Larp also manipulates elements such as set, costuming, and physical interactions, but it does so with a different aim in mind. The emphasis is not on how it looks and sounds to an external party, but on how it feels to the participants who simultaneously perform and absorb the larp. How the scenery looks is only important insofar as it helps the participants to feel. Wearing girdles and a long-line bra might help a participant feel that she or he is a 1950s housewife, even though such garments may remain hidden to co-players.

Since larps rely on improvisation, pre-planning every fight or kiss is usually not possible.

Likewise, how a tender moment appears to onlookers is less important than how it feels to a participant. Instead of asking participants to kiss, a larp might call for a tender touching of hands while co-players gaze into each others’ eyes, simulating the feeling of intimacy. This also dovetails with safety concerns in larp—often designers do not want players and characters to have identical experiences of say, lust and violence, for safety reasons. When one character stabs another, we don’t want the players to use real knives. Characters might have sex, but their players shouldn’t feel obligated to. In a play, of course, these moments are scripted and practiced before performance—the actors work together to become comfortable, and choreograph their smooches or rapier fights. Since larps rely on improvisation, pre-planning every fight or kiss is usually not possible. The solution is to produce a set of actions that stands in for another—different larp communities may call these “mechanics,” “techniques,” or even “metatechniques.” Player-characters might touch hands and make eye contact instead of making out, or use a ritualized exchange of phrases to play through a sex scene. Throwing a punch in super slow-motion and permitting the victim of violence to choose its effect can allow both parties some measure of control. Many larps also use techniques that allow participants to briefly step out of game and negotiate with one another about scene elements such as violence or intimacy before undertaking sensitive scenes.

Larp and theater also differ in other key respects: theater uses trained and rehearsed performers, while larp relies on the improvisation of larpers—a group that can include complete newcomers as well as experienced hands. While theater relies on convention—the actors do stuff on stage, the audience watches passively and applauds at pre-selected intervals—each larp must teach participants how to engage. Larp, therefore, is an art form that revolves around social engineering—the practice of manipulating and subverting social structures in order to generate enough alibi to produce an interesting, thought-provoking, or entertaining experience for participants. A common method larpers use for this is a pre-game workshop. These workshops can take many forms and accomplish many different objectives, depending on the game. Most importantly, the workshop allows larpers to meet and get to know each other before playing, permitting them to establish a base level of trust with one another as people before assuming their roles. During workshops, facilitators might explain information about the game world or act structure, assign characters, let participants practice story techniques and mechanics, reinforce the larp’s theme with sharing exercises, or present a series of activities designed to help players flesh out their characters and social groups. Sometimes, workshops even include scenes that happen before the larp officially starts, as a way of helping players get the jitters out.

One larp heavily influenced by theater techniques is White Death by Nina Rune Essendrop and Simon Steen Hansen. These two designers were steeped in the traditions Denmark’s highly mannered freeform scene which typically includes games with pre-written characters, discrete pre-written scenes, a strong and very active facilitator, and typically take place in unadorned classrooms. Although influenced by that design tradition, Essendrop and Hansen wrote this larp for Black Box Copenhagen, a festival devoted to larps designed for black box theater settings. At the time, they were both studying for a masters’ in theater and performance studies at the University of Copenhagen. White Death broke the traditional mold of both freeform and black box larp in the way it drew on these disciplines, relentlessly insisting on physicality. The productions of experimental stage director Robert Wilson and French avant-garde director Antonin Artaud, the Danish dancing company Granhøj Dans, Balinese dance, and Laban movement analysis inspired the duo. The resulting larp used simple props such as white balloons, white sugar, white paper, white ribbons, and sheets; lit areas; and evocative music.

The lack of language and the extreme physical restrictions transformed each participant’s body into a game piece.

White Death revolves around a group of settlers who venture into the mountains to form a better society. But when winter comes, in a very Nordic twist, they all die and turn into Transparent Ones. The workshop transforms untrained participants into skilled players through extensive workshops around movement. The life of the humans is hard, heavy, sudden, violent, and isolated. In contrast, the Transparent Ones move lightly and freely, and like to be together and laugh. Although sounds are permitted, no language is allowed in the game. Participants create a character out of a physical restriction. When I played, the slip of paper I drew from the hat decreed that my character had fingers that always pointed at the ground, and a head that lolled to one side, never in the middle. One character could only move in jumping jack motions. Others have imaginary sticks connecting bodyparts such as wrists and knees. The lack of language and the extreme physical restrictions transformed each participant’s body into a game piece; the experience of playing White Death is insistently physical, and uses that physicality to evoke feeling in participants.

Over the course of the first act, the facilitators introduce three symbolic props: white balloons representing dreams, white cups of sugar representing survival, and white paper representing faith. As the participants interact with the props, balloons—and thus dreams—pop; participants fight over sugar, and get covered in it as their physically restricted selves try to drink it; and meaner characters rip faith to shreds while a few desperately cling to the scraps.

During the second act of the larp, the storms begin. During each storm, the barrier between humans and Transparent Ones thins, allowing Transparent Ones to reach into the circle of light where humans dwell and pull them to the dark peaceful half of the playing space. Gently, the Transparent Ones usher humans into their new existence, massaging out their physical restrictions and gracing them with a white ribbon. By the end of the larp, all the humans have been transformed, and the Transparent Ones are happy and together in the darkness.

This larp is aesthetically beautiful to facilitate and play. Set to a soundtrack of folk rock, participants in black clothes play out their grunting relationship dramas and endow bright white props with the deepest of meanings. At one point, I looked up from my narrative and took stock of the room. In corners, a man showed balloon shreds to a woman and wept. One character writhed on the floor, unable to rise due to her physical restriction and shrieking her displeasure. Shambling bullies chased someone who had a few shreds of faith left. I thought to myself, “whoa, this is some artsy fartsy shit.” But I had been so deep inside the head of my own character, that it hadn’t occurred to me at all how bizarre my behavior would be considered in the outside world. As a participant, after playing one act in the hard, heavy, sudden and violent life of the humans, I felt transformed when a Transparent One removed my physical restriction. It’s a little bit hard to explain how in words. The closest I can get is that I felt suddenly capable of happiness; I felt light; I felt loved.

The alibi of the production freed us from ordinary mindsets and our ordinary physicality.

Essendrop and Hansen got the most out of both theatrical and larp mediums. They used theatrical techniques—lights, music, and graphic props—to set an emotional tone that fit the story, and to demarcate the space and time of the larp as a heightened and abstracted setting. They used movement workshops inspired by theater and dance to transform the motions of their average players into something that looked and felt significant and meaningful. But in the end, the performance was true larp. The alibi of the production freed us from ordinary mindsets and our ordinary physicality. We improvised relationships, struggles, and their resolutions on the spot. The larp’s restrictions palpably located the ensuing emotions and connections within our own bodies. We weren’t witnessing and sympathizing with someone else’s epiphany. We could feel the sugar melting on our skin, the desperate longing for the last sad, half-deflated white balloon, the savage glory of ripping someone else’s faith to shreds.

The larp delivered the primacy of these things into our bones, making tangible the fierce desire to survive. As the experience progressed, we felt an abstract, aestheticized longing for death, not as an end, but as the freedom from humanity’s sometimes inane struggles. And at last, to the strains of Nick Cave’s “Into My Arms,” we entered the transcendental world—happy, light, and together—beyond the grave. ♦

(Image credit: All photographs of the White Death larp being performed in 2014 by Xin Li via Flickr.)

Kit That Fits: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell
Writer Anne Miltenburg examines the controversial and ever-changing world of women’s sportswear in a two-part essay. Here, we resume her discussion of the lack of proper professional gear for women. Check out part 1 here.
 

Why don’t female soccer players amp up the sex appeal to increase enthusiasm for women’s sports? “If sports was only about long legs, then women’s beach volleyball would be the biggest sport in the world,” remarks Shammy Jacob, former Director of Sustainable Ventures at Nike. “Of course performance should come first. Only then is it about looking great as an athlete. But looking great does not equal looking sexy.” To prove her point, Jacob offers an historic example. In the 1990s, Nike had been working with the American women’s national soccer team to design their outfits for the upcoming world championships. One of the things the women asked for was a better bra, one designed for sports. “To all of our amazement, Brandi Chastain scores the winning goal of the tournament, and celebrates by sliding onto her knees and taking her shirt off, revealing her sports bra.” The moment was captured in a photo that made the cover of Sports Illustrated and became a landmark image in the history of women’s sports. Jacob rejects the idea that the image was iconic because it was revealing. “What the shot showed was an athlete at the top of her game. To have everyone see a woman so fit, so strong, so victorious, and to receive so much attention, that made a world of difference for women’s sports at that time. Nike focused on performance but made sure the styling was also relevant and tasteful.”

Of course performance should come first. Only then is it about looking great as an athlete.

Despite the fact that more women are playing and watching sports, and that general viewership for women’s sports is increasing, women’s sports uniforms in most parts of the world remain stuck in a vicious circle. Without evidence of demand, sports brands won’t invest in creating professional gear for women. Without high-quality gear, fewer women play and fewer still play at their best, making games less exciting for spectators and less interesting for sponsors and sports brands, closing the circle of low demand.

One brand that is looking to break the circle is Liona, a new sports brand from the Netherlands, founded by former professional soccer player Leonne Stentler. Seeing that no brand was taking up the challenge of providing high-quality gear for women, Stentler decided to jump into the gaping hole in the market. Launched in 2015, Liona is already supplying professional league teams across the country with uniforms. Growing up as a child playing and during her entire professional career, Stentler took the absence of women’s kit as a given. “There is no women’s clothing available all the way to the top of the league. It is a huge investment for brands to produce a “second line” for women . . . . It is a men’s game; we are not a priority.”

The better the professional gear, the better the player. The better the player, the bigger the audience. With bigger audiences comes more sponsorship, allowing more women to have a career in sports.

Together with a fashion designer, Stentler started to redesign women’s uniforms. Most innovations came naturally to Stentler, who had seen firsthand what was needed. “All girls wear tights underneath their shorts for when they make slides. So our Liona shorts have built-in tights. Their waistbands are wider for more comfort. Shirts are longer than those for men and wider at the hips.” The response to Liona has been overwhelmingly positive. Luckily, it is not just praise that is rolling in, but orders as well. Liona has just supplied FC Twente with its women’s team uniform and the team is raving. “This is what is needed in the long run to create more confidence, to attract sponsors, and to lift the sport to a higher level,” says Stentler.

Stentler is not alone in seeing massive opportunities for women’s sports uniforms. With the availability of great sports gear, the vicious circle female athletes have found themselves in can become an upward spiral: the better the professional gear, the better the player. The better the player, the bigger the audience. With bigger audiences comes more sponsorship, allowing more women to have a career in sports.

Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al Saud, Vice President of Women’s Affairs at the General Sports Authority, Saudi Arabia, is one of the players looking forward to joining Stentler’s cause while focusing on the needs of Muslim women. “The market is not just girls in the Middle East. There is a pan-Islamic diaspora. Imagine a young girl in Birmingham who wants to compete. Why would you exclude her from the game?” Anne Skovrider of Hummel agrees. At the end of the day, access to the sport is what it should be all about: “Let these girls go out, play, get fit, learn teamwork, get confidence, feel good about themselves. That is what we want to support.” ♦

Return to the first installment of “Kit That Fits.”

Photo credit: Khalida Popal, former captain of the Afghan national women’s soccer team. Courtesy of Hummel.

Performing the Real: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Live action role-playing—or larping—has garnered thousands of fans and soared in popularity over the last decade. Larp expert Lizzie Stark demystifies this deeply expressive form of storytelling.

I have many personas. Like most people, I select particular social masks for different occasions. Among my personas are those of business woman, granddaughter, and friend. All of these social roles are distinct, and they come with distinct modes of conversation and costuming. I make ribald jokes with my friends, but never my grandmother or editor; I watch movies in my pajamas with my grandmother and friends, but dress appropriately for that networking coffee. In other words, I calibrate my appearance and behavior—my persona—as best I can, according to the situation. Everyone does. I can channel any one of more than a dozen social masks—taskmistress, loving wife, or zany artist—during the day as needed.

The stories larp tells are quite diverse. You might play hobbits trying to save Middle-earth; members of a rural Oklahoma community locked in a bomb shelter after the Cuban Missile Crisis goes awry; or fairy tale creatures at a union board meeting. The only limits are the imaginations of the game designer and her player.

The essence of larp is experiential. Participants meet up in real time and space, guided by a facilitator and constrained by the world the designers have built, take on the role of a character, and play out their own character arcs. Sometimes the relationship between the game world and the real world is direct, and sometimes it is symbolic. You can assemble a beautiful costume and play a game about life in a wizarding college in a real life Polish castle, where everything you see is present in the game, as players did in the larp College of Wizardry. And you can live in that reality for days at a time. This is called a 360-degree aesthetic—it’s a larp played in an environment as close to the production’s real setting as the larp designers can reasonably get. Time moves at the same speed both in and out of game—a ten minute walk takes ten minutes in the real world as well as the larp universe; your character looks like and is wearing whatever you are wearing; the game setting is a castle and you are in an actual castle.

Plenty of larps eschew the window-dressing. Freeform and black box larps make use of space and time symbolically. Set in unadorned conference rooms and classrooms, these productions don’t require fancy props, set, or costuming. If power of imagination can transform you into the personification of “tethered love,” as in Peter Fallesen’s Let the World Burn, then what you’re wearing is probably irrelevant. A disposable coffee cup can easily stand in for a bouquet of flowers, an urn for grandmother’s ashes, the world’s last bowl of soup, or anything else that is physically needed. In this style of game, designers can telescope time in and out. We can play out the first flirtation between two characters, as in Emily Care Boss’ Under My Skin, cut to the next flirtation a week later, and play out the entire character arc of infidelity of several couples in a little under five hours. Or perhaps we play the same five-minute scene over and over again for two hours until we have discovered every iota of nuance present.

Larps vary widely—in the stories they tell, in the production values they require, the amount of time they last, and the tools they use to heighten and calibrate the story. Over the last five years, I have spent transformative hours as a young man at the height of the AIDS epidemic; helped allocate a family inheritance by breaking numerous china coffee cups; lived as a servant in Jane Austen’s world for four days; and transformed the flavor of garlic into a character, a second-generation immigrant desperately trying to hold family tradition together. I’ve been a refugee, a settler, a douchey mountain-climber, a manic pixie dream girl commando, a professional nail technician, the democratically elected dictator for life of a space colony, and a ghost suing for possession of the kitchen I haunt.

To think of larp as becoming a completely different person is both true, and a fundamental misunderstanding.

Playing these roles—many of them pre-written in short paragraphs—always requires acts of creation. Newcomers to larp often tell me they couldn’t become a completely different person for a few hours or days—it would just be too hard. But to think of larp as becoming a completely different person is both true, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what happens when a larper plays a character. I am not a gay man at the height of the AIDS epidemic. But the process of playing one in Tor Kjetil Edland’s I Say a Little Prayer forced me to map the character of Benny, the new single boy in town who often acts without thinking, to Lizzie, the overly analytic, straight, married journalist. To do so, I had to connect filaments of my own identity with parts of Benny’s. During a larp you’re continuously improvising, responding to situations and other characters on the fly. There simply isn’t enough time to construct a vision of the character that is completely separate from yourself. By necessity, you spin a character out of the stuff that makes up your own soul. Essentially, larp allows us to say, “I’m not Benny. But if I were Benny, my life might have gone like this.”

As in all art, my experience as Benny was made more meaningful through the designer’s use of structure and techniques. I Say a Little Prayer featured, among other things, a thematic act structure. Every act concluded with a lottery of death, designed to represent the randomness and terror of the early AIDS epidemic. Each surviving character put at least one ticket into those lotteries—more, if they had engaged in risky sexual behavior. During the act breaks, the facilitator drew a name out of the hat, a character died, and we held a funeral that represented our connection to the dead character with touch.

I still don’t know what it was like to be a young gay man at the height of the AIDS epidemic, but by playing one in this larp, I have a better understanding of what it might have been like. I had to recognize the shared humanity between Benny and myself. And in doing so, I also put on and connected with certain parts of my personality, for example, the part that is terrified by the early death of people I love. There’s my friend Cheri, dead of metastatic breast cancer at 35; my cousin Kitt, dead of a skiing accident at age 19; or the litany of female relatives whose genetic error I share, dead of breast and ovarian cancer quite young.

Larp manipulates the social masks we have inside of us for many purposes—catharsis, aesthetics, and even fun. Because larp allows players to tap into their fundamental personal essences, it allows participants to connect with each other very deeply in very short amounts of time.

As I said at the outset: larp manipulates the social masks we have inside of us for many purposes—catharsis, aesthetics, and even fun. I sometimes think of core personality as being a bit like a river of liquid rock—no one vessel can contain it completely, though it can be channeled into manageable eddies, and scientists can safely sample it in small quantities and purpose-made containers. In other words, as Walt Whitman put it in Song of Myself, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Every human embodies multiple identities—we are mothers but also daughters and granddaughters, writers but also amateur chefs, jokers who can be deadly serious when the situation demands it. Together, these roles and how we approach them—each its own eddy of the lava flow—make up our core humanity and identity.

Because larp allows players to tap into and perform their fundamental personal essences, it allows participants to connect with each other very deeply in very short amounts of time. And it does this both by asking participants to play roles, and by asking them to improvise all their own lines. They are themselves, but different. Consider improv theater pioneer Keith Johnstone’s advice on the form (which is connected to but not identical with larp). Johnstone advises improvisers to “be obvious” because your obviousness is really your true self; it comes out of you and will therefore be different from my obviousness. If I ask you what you’d bring on our trip to Mars and your first impulse is to say, “a Kenny Loggins tape,” then you’ve revealed something about your true self. This stands in stark contrast to traditional social situations, where the lines we utter can be almost scripted—polite conversation consists of exchanging pleasantries—and those scripts remain remarkably similar across different social situations and individuals. Consider the narrow range of appropriate responses to the question “How you doing?”; “Fine. You?”; “Good.” The wild situations and setups of larp free us from these socially prescribed exchanges, and in doing so, open up possibilities for deep human connection.

In the second installment of Lizzie Stark’s essay on larping, she explains how the role-playing game provides alibi for an experience.

(Image credit: © College of Wizardry 2017)

Game on! PlayTime on pem.org is live! Join the conversation: how is play changing our lives? In advance of the exhibition, we’ll explore the shifting role of play in art and culture with leading writers, thinkers, game designers, poets, artists—and you. This week, check out features by Virginia Heffernan, Carlo Rotella, Eric Zimmerman, J. Robert Lennon, Lizzie Stark, Angela Washko, Adam Bessie and Jason Novak, and more. #pemplaytime #peabodyessex @peabodyessex

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

Board Gaming the System: A Comic Series

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

In this month’s comic, Jason Novak and Adam Bessie turn the classic board game Chutes and Ladders into a play obstacle course. The children surmount the walls and fences, and the barriers are transformed.

As fathers of young children, Jason and Adam have spent many fun hours playing board games, several of which were created by Parker Brothers, which made its start as a game company right in Salem, Massachusetts. These board games aren’t just about diverting play, but about rules you must follow to win. The rules of game often reflect the idealized rules and mores of the culture—by playing the game, you are learning how to behave in the culture. And thus, board games are like a time capsule, a way of seeing the dominant values of a place and time. Our five-part series, Board Gaming the System, honors the legacy of the board game (and the many hours we’ve spent playing them) and reimagines classic boards to reveal the unwritten rules of our culture today.

Come back for next month’s installment in the series.

Game-Changing: A Crossword

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz
Puzzlemaster David Steinberg developed this games-themed crossword just for PlayTime. Download this printable PDF version to complete at your leisure and when you’re ready for a peek at the answers they’re here.

Across

1. What some jeans do

4. Winter pear variety

8. Got along

13. “That’s so not cool!”

14. Sea creature that can swim 40 mph

15. Top 10 hit for Elvis Presley and Lil Wayne

16.                               S

E

R

18. Add lots and lots of

19. “Hell ___ no fury . . . ”

20. Kind of board used for spelling

22. Catch red-handed

23. “The Lord of the Rings” actor Sean

25. Ope[rat]ion

28. You might skip them

30. Carrier to Sweden

31. Letters on a stick, in cartoons

32. Nintendo game with a Balance Board

35. Bara of silent films

37. Sergio

40. Chicken serving

41. ___ meteor shower

42. Glass on the radio

43. Quarterback Manning

45. Like a small garage

49. TLARH

53. Chosen one in a kids’ game

54. Kung ___ chicken

55. Did some data entry

57. “Call of Duty: Black Ops” guns

58. Pitch perfect?

60. Peabody Essex Museum exhibition that suggests games . . . and an inspiration for this puzzle

62. Colorful aquarium fish

63. 2016 Isabelle Huppert film

64. Really long time

65. / or \

66. Female deer

67. Movie format, eventually

 

Down

1. “For example?”

2. Open-mouthed

3. Needy part of a city

4. ___ choy

5. Cookies and Cream cookie

6. Rugby formation

7. Timex competitor

8. Batman, to the Joker

9. French for before

10. Banter

11. My Chemical Romance and others

12. Place to do a jigsaw puzzle

15. Capital of Tibet

17. Friendly conversation

21. Angry partner’s dismissal

24. Disagreeable choice

26. Leftmost member of a violin quartet?

27. ___ meeting

29. Basic dog command

33. Adjective for a Persian

34. Wrath

36. Cops may search for one

37. Shell fragments

38. Italian bread inspired by the baguette

39. Palindromic singer

40. Shop ___ you drop

44. Facebook group?

46. Snuggled (up)

47. Author who coined the term “robotics”

48. Forward, perhaps

50. Personal letter sign-off

51. Did some data entry

52. Word on a name tag

56. Broad valley

58. They’re in the singular

59. “Meh, I’ll pass”

61. “Sure, I’ll do it!”

Ball Games and War Games: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Carlo Rotella takes us on a playful meander through his formative years on Chicago’s South Side, remembering a youth spent shuttling between the solitary world of military board games and the complex social dynamics of the pickup basketball court. This is the first installment of a three–part series.

 

Growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1970s, I played the usual games. Indoors, I did most of my world-thinking with wooden blocks and toy soldiers, though we also had a tabletop hockey game that pitted the Blackhawks against the Bruins. One of the Bruins had somehow ended up with two backs and no front when we applied the decals that turned two-dimensional plastic blanks, centaur mergers of human and hockey stick, into men. The two-backed, no-faced Bruin lurched and flailed in a blind rage as he and his yellow-and-black teammates and red-and-black opponents, each mounted on a rod and constrained in his own slot like a chained dog, chased the skidding, rolling puck up and down the pasteboard ice.

Street football, especially when played two-on-two, reduced the sport to a permutative series of binary deceptions.

Outdoors, I played chase, guns, Moose and Wolves, and other such hunting- and fighting-themed games, and there was an across-the-street guts Frisbee mutation that resembled doubles tennis, but mostly I played ball. Street football, especially when played two-on-two, reduced the sport to a permutative series of binary deceptions―fake going long and stop short or vice versa, fake a pass and run or vice versa―periodically interrupted by someone calling out “Car!” and then a pause while we all struck postures of enforced idleness as we let traffic pass. I played baseball-derived rubber-ball games adapted to street (piggy move-up), sidewalk (running bases), stoop (pinner, also known as ledge), wall (strikeout), and schoolyard (all of them). I did some of my earliest batting in a side yard squeezed between two bungalows, so at first I drove everything back up the middle, a fine professional hitter in the making, until I graduated to regular fields and devolved into just another lout dead-pulling everything to left. When we had enough kids and a suitable stretch of grass, we played sixteen-inch softball―a barehanded variant, fetishized in Chicago, suited to showcasing the potency and grace of fat men. Fielding a lumpy, much-hit old sixteen-inch ball was like handling an overripe cantaloupe, but catching a new one fresh out of the box, rock-hard and blindingly white, felt like flagging down a cannonball. I avoided playing with these finger-crushing juggernauts because I needed my hands in working order to play pickup basketball, which I did in driveways, backyards, schoolyards, parks, gyms, wherever a rim and opposition could be found. One driveway court had several inches of ankle-threatening length of pipe coming out of the pavement under the basket, and another had no corners and a high hedge that played permanent impartial zone defense against anyone attempting to shoot from the left wing, but we played the changes, as musicians say: you got an extra point if you made a basket from behind the hedge.

As I entered my teens, two kinds of play rose to dominance. Among ball games, pickup basketball defeated all comers to become the sport of choice. It was the most formally complex and satisfying of our ball games, a chess among checkers, and so navigating inside its workings offered the most intense pleasure: the forking intricacy of the pick and roll, the cavalry-charge momentum of the fast break. Of all our ball games, it was the most obviously connected to advanced versions one might see on TV or in an arena. Street football or piggy didn’t look much like real football or baseball, but a steady two-way flow of style and players joined the pickup basketball circuit to uniformed, referee-supervised, clock-bound league play on the high school and college levels. And the man-to-man ethos of the playground game most closely resembled the most advanced version of all, the pro game played in the NBA, where zone defense was outlawed. Also, because basketball was known as a Black Thing and therefore endowed with special cachet on the South Side, competence in it was expected of a game-playing boy, especially one who wanted to explore the city and engage with people. Pickup ball gave me a plausible reason to show up with a crew somewhere I otherwise didn’t belong, negotiate with strangers on the sideline to claim a spot on the court, and run that court with a confidence that transmuted it from a strange place to one located on my expanding map of the world.

War games were almost entirely a solitary pursuit, somewhere between reading a book and writing one.

Among sedentary indoor games, military simulations gradually conquered everything else. I had progressed from murmuring “dooge” while knocking over green army men to laying out elaborate period dioramas of Airfix HO-scale miniatures―Napoleonic, Civil War, Second World War―to working out rudimentary rules to put those tableaux vivants in motion as war games. At some point it grew unseemly to play with toy soldiers, just as it had grown unseemly to run around on the block making gun noises, though the formal elegance of maneuver in miniaturized landscapes still drew me. When I discovered the martial board games made by Avalon Hill and Simulations Publications, Inc., the toy soldiers went into permanent storage, Wellington’s Highlanders and Union artillery and the French Foreign Legion all entombed in the same box in a promiscuous jumble. The war games had inch-thick rulebooks that reeked of intellectual respectability; the very existence of, for instance, rule 8.9.2, governing how Flemish Dragoons in a brigade stack can be used during Rainy Weather scenarios, offered reassurance that you were not just some little kid saying “dooge.” Each game had scores of little square cardboard pieces representing military units, each bristling with coded information in tiny print: nationality, unit type, offensive and defensive combat strength, movement allowance, strength when disorganized, and so on. The units were deployed on hexagon-covered maps on scales ranging from a scattering of country villages to continents and empires.

I would disappear into these hex-gridded worlds for hours, days, at a time. I didn’t know anybody else who found war games appealing or even knew about ​them―other than Eric, a gentle night-walking insomniac my parents’ age who sometimes came over for Sunday dinner―so they were almost entirely a solitary pursuit, somewhere between reading a book and writing one. Playing both sides and preferring the stately symmetry of preliminary dispositions to the messiness of pitched battle, I could march and countermarch almost indefinitely, trying to outsmart myself. Serially re-contesting Guadalcanal or Austerlitz or the siege of Constantinople in nearly absolute solitude was like doing pushups with my imagination. Mostly, it built up my ability to do more pushups.

Check out the second part of “Ball Games and War Games” here and read part three here.

(Image credit: Amy Blechman.)

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