Consolas is both photographer Javier Laspiur’s tribute to the games of his youth and a visual evolution of the object of interaction with, and the very human link to the game: the console.
From Ralph Baer‘s early “brown box” to today’s Nintendo Switch, the video game console has a long history at the intersection of tech, design, economics, and pop culture. From the crude graphics of Pong to the brutal realism of Battlefield, games have evolved significantly since the dawn of the phenomenon in the 1970s. Most serious gamers have their loyalties to systems and, thus, their associated consoles.
“A lot of times people get caught up into tropes about games and I really want to say: How can we sort of expand what a game is? How can we expand what it means to play? How can we expand what culture is?”
Choreographer and game designer Boris Willis and his students at George Mason University step away from the keyboard to discover how important their own body movement is to designing games.
Gwen Smith and Angela Washko come to the idea of the avatar and what it might represent from two different places. Nonetheless, the work of both artists can teach us something about compassion, hate, and who we are.
New York-based artist Gwen Smith‘s Yoda Project is something of a collaboration. Her partner, fellow artist Haim Steinbach, has for a number of years taken Yoda as his avatar. Over time Smith has photographed Steinbach in everyday situations, often with their son in the frame—using it as an opportunity to make something of a photographic growth chart and to use this playful approach to illustrate her family’s character. Smith describes herself as “an artist, a mother, a seeker, a finder, and a player,” and her playful (yet thoughtful), observational oeuvre captures this complexity.
Angela Washkohas assumed a herculean task using a massive platform: “teaching feminism” and questioning received notions of women within the milieu of World of Warcraft, the most popular, cumbersome, multi-player video game in the world. For her, game hacking is a feminist project. As assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Washko’s academic work not only embraces play, but messes with it and the expectations we may of it, and it doesn’t stop with tackling the creation and perception of female avatars in WoW: recently she’s taken on that most loathsome of cultural phenomenon, The Game.
“Tired of playing [WoW] as directed,” Washko went off-piste and began asking questions and naming names. Unfortunately, she “did not learn how to turn WoW into a space for equitable, respectful conversation,” as intended, but she has unmasked some ugly truths about who we are and how we present ourselves in the realms of these games: “Who we are online is who we are IRL.”
Lydia Gordon, assistant curator forPlayTime, will be moderating an upcoming panel, Game Changers: Women Activists in Digital Space, at PEM on Saturday, May 5, at 4:15 pm. Join us for this special PlayTime conversation with artist Angela Washko, scholar and activist Susana Morris, and game designer Jane Friedhoff. The panel is made possible by the George Swinnerton Parker Memorial Lecture Fund and offered in conjunction with the Present Tense Initiative.
Tedi Asher, PEM’s resident neuroscientist, looks at play’s power to heal.
For millennia psychiatric disease has plagued the human population. It has remained difficult to treat, let alone to cure, in part because of its obscured etiology. We just didn’t understand enough about what goes on in the brain to generate these clusters of symptoms that we experience as mental illness. It was the introduction of technologies, like neuroimaging (e.g. fMRI), that allowed us to begin to identify biological markers of psychiatric disease; to point to a mark on a brain scan and say, “this is what’s wrong here.” It is these same neuroimaging technologies that are now enabling treatment of the disorders that they initially delineated.
Neurofeedback training is a process by which an individual can change the way their brain operates. It is based on the premise that the human brain is plastic: it has the ability to alter its structure and function. During neurofeedback training, patients receive information about what their brain does naturally, and then they change it. How? By playing.
What would it mean—for humans and humanity—if play suddenly became purposeful?
We are all driven to play. We are motivated to solve the problems that keep us from winning games, completing puzzles, or scoring points. Yet, explaining this seemingly innate drive to play is difficult, as play is often characterized as an act performed without purpose and without the expectation of practical outcomes. It requires an appreciation of the means without a lust for the end. So, what would it mean—for humans and humanity—if play suddenly became . . . purposeful? Researchers are now harnessing this robust and universal motivation to play to treat patients suffering from psychiatric disorders. Let’s take a closer look at how this works.
Many neurofeedback training programs employ a digital game interface to deliver feedback (from neuroimaging, for example) to patients about what their brains are doing: what parts of the brain are active, which regions are talking to which other regions, etc. When the desired regions of the brain spontaneously become active at the right time, patients receive a reward in the game, perhaps more points or an extra life. When patients’ brain activity fails to produce the desired pattern of neural activation, they do worse in the game. By repeating this protocol, patients with severe psychiatric illnesses can essentially change the activity patterns in their brain to function more like disease-free subjects, which in turn is associated with improved symptom severity.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a psychiatric condition characterized by difficulties in communicating and interacting in social settings. Neuroimaging studies have identified correlates of these behavioral symptoms at the level of neural connectivity: two key regions implicated in social processing, the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and the somatosensory cortex, have been shown to be connected more weakly—to “talk” to one another less—in ASD patients relative to healthy control subjects.
In a recent study published in the scientific journal eLIFE, researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health sought to ameliorate symptoms of ASD by increasing the connection between these two regions using neurofeedback training. fMRI neuroimaging was used to scan the brains of ASD patients (males fifteen to twenty-five years of age) while they played a video game. As part of the digital puzzle-like game, participants had to reveal regions of an image that were covered by a blank mask. They were not given any further instructions, but while they were playing the game, the fMRI scanner monitored the activity of the two brain regions of interest, the STS and the somatosensory cortex. When these two regions “talked” to one another (exhibiting the desired neural activity), patients were rewarded in the game: a piece of the masked image would become visible. Because the patients were motivated to play the game and uncover the masked images, over time, they learned to unconsciously reproduce the neural activity that resulted in this reward. And in the end . . . it worked!
Under some circumstances, our innate drive to play can be harnessed to heal.
By the end of the neurofeedback training regimen, ASD patients had significantly increased the connectivity between the STS and the somatosensory cortex even when they were no longer engaged in playing the video game (i.e. at rest). Importantly, this change in neural activity was correlated with a decrease in ASD symptom severity. Even more impressive, these changes in brain signaling were durable: they were still evident even a year after the neurofeedback training had ended. So, it appears that, under some circumstances, our innate drive to play can be harnessed to heal.
In response to this realization, I can’t help but wonder: what happens to our experience of play when it is endowed with purpose? Will our motivation to play dissipate the more utilitarian it becomes? Will the act of childhood play continue to promote healthy emotional development, as it has been shown to do in many species? At this point it may be too early to answer these questions. What is apparent, is that play holds the potential to help us learn, to help us grow, and now, to help us heal—at all ages of life. ♦
Comic Josh Gondelman and artist Molly Roth share a list of just a few of their favorite games that adults play. Seriously, call your mother.
TELEPHONE (YOUR PARENTS ONCE IN A WHILE)
Number of players: 2-5, depending on remarriages
Description of gameplay: One player (Offspring) reminds him/herself to call their parents. Points are awarded for every successful phone conversation. Leaving a voicemail message counts for half a point, as does listening to any voicemail from a parent that lasts over a minute.
Game ends when…: Let’s not talk about the end of this game. It’s too sad.
Look for the next installment of Games Adults Play in the coming weeks.Missed the last one? Check it out here.
Lydia Gordon, assistant curator at PEM, pays a visit to the studio of artist Derrick Adams and considers the racial politics of play and the pool.
On a recent research visit to New York City, I had the privilege of sitting down with multidisciplinary artist Derrick Adams in his Brooklyn studio alongside PEM’s Curator of the Present Tense Trevor Smith and George Putnam Curator of American Art Austen Barron Bailly. Adams is finishing up a body of work that depicts black bodies in water: figures relaxing on floats, embracing each other, and playing. Using a brilliant mix of warm and cool colors, Adams deconstructs his subjects into collages: a figure’s arm is a different hue than her leg, one’s cheek is a different color than his nose, and their swimsuit patterns stand in vivid contrast to their deep turquoise environment. While the treatment of color and flatness of paint initially captures one’s attention, it is the content of Adams’ series that begs further thought. What are the politics surrounding representations of leisure and the black figure?
Representations of the figure in states of leisure are not new to the history of art. We can trace representations of recreation and leisure to the art-making of ancient civilizations, including Egyptian, Roman, Greek, and Assyrian. But in modern Western societies, the practice of leisure became an arena of racial, class, and gender divisions alongside the development of cities and growing populations. Particularly after the French Revolution, it was only the bourgeoisie who had regular access to the parks, cafes, and operas, while the working class had free time only on Sundays. This imbalance and the mundane ambivalence associated with bourgeois leisure activity is captured in many of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works of European artists, such as Mary Cassatt (born in the U.S., lived and worked in France), Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The representation of figures swimming was also a worthy subject of art, and made popular by Renoir, Gustave Courbet, Viggo Johansen, as well as American Impressionists, including Childe Hassam. To this day, artists take inspiration from the figure aswim, such as British artist David Hockney whose work on this subject is arguably his most iconic. Yet, all of these canonical examples fail to depict a figure who is not white. Where do we find representations of black figures swimming—at leisure at all—in art and why has it taken so long?
Childe Hassam, The Bathers, 1904. Courtesy of Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester.
A recent exhibition at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, called Bodies in Water, explored representations of the human relationship to water. The wall label that accompanied Charlie “Teenie” Harris’s Swimming Instruction at Integrated Pool (1959) explained how most public pools in the U.S. were segregated until the 1950s, and almost no pools were built in black communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When African Americans did have access to pools, they were small and insufficient compared to the grand resort-style pools built in white communities. In places with racial segregation policies (whether official or community-policed), swimming pools became sites of extreme violence and oppression against black children and patrons. The effects of this racial injustice and oppressive site continue to plague our society: seventy percent of black Americans do not know how to swim.
Charles “Teenie” Harris, Swimming Instruction at Integrated Pool, 1959, printed 2001. Courtesy of deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.
Harris’s photograph presents an uncommon image: a black lifeguard giving a swimming lesson to a white student in a 1950s integrated pool. While Swimming Instruction shows no immediate conflict, the story behind the image perseveres: the Highland Park community members and city officials resisted integration of Pittsburgh’s public pools through 1951. It was only the threat of legal action that forced the city to pass non-discrimination laws at swimming pools and to hire black lifeguards. While the central figure in Harris’s photograph is unknown, we understand he is giving more than just a swimming lesson. At the time, an image of a black lifeguard in a position of authority was a political one: the boy is responsible for not only for his student’s safety, but he is also seemingly risking his own well-being against a backdrop of very recent oppressive and violent actions that occurred at his very site of employment. Swimming Instruction at Integrated Pool represents the racial politics of staying afloat.
Derrick Adams, Floater No. 52 (two kids and a woman), 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery.
Considering this history of swimming pools as inaccessible sites of leisure for black Americans, Derrick Adams, like Harris, carefully selects which scenes to signify. By depicting his subjects in reclined and relaxed positions, Adams’s work confronts this legacy with optimism and ease. His subjects take the place of white America’s (read: Taylor Swift’s) obsession with swan floats and flourish, many of them seemingly posing for their own close-up. And it’s about time. Adams’s figures are so diligently rendered that the paintings serve as portraits as much as they do to capture a scene. His representations of black bodies swimming and floating work to insert a kind of humanity within a long trajectory of everyday subject matter and the omission of black figures within it. It is through this lens of being and belonging that Adams’s art creates new ways of understanding sites of leisure as not only raced and privileged, but also optimistic and playful.
Derrick Adams, Floater No. 48 (unicorn), 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery.
(Image credit: Derrick Adams, Floater No. 58 (two rafts), 2017, courtesy of the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery.)
The common practice linking the work of Robin Rhode and Roman Signer—this week’s highlighted Playtime artists—reveals the playful interaction the artist can have with their own work.
South African artist Robin Rhode has a favorite wall in Johannesburg, where he has painted more than twenty murals since 2011. While Rhode has lived in Berlin for the past fifteen years, his connection to the Newclare neighborhood of Johannesburg is strong. He visits often and stages his performative drawings on the wall there regularly. Inserting himself (or a performer) into his drawings has become his trademark. It is said that his practice is, in fact, derived from a hazing ritual that occurs in South African schools “in which newcomers are made to draw and interact with a figure as if it were real.” Rhode’s approach as it intersects with PlayTime is summarized perfectly when he says, “If you grow up in a volatile society—under apartheid, for example—you start to develop very interesting, humorous takes on the world. You begin to use humor as a coping mechanism. Humor becomes a means of destabilizing a reality that is much harsher. Humor becomes subversion.”
Playful experimenterRoman Signersays “art is a game.” In response to the question, “Do you think a lot about the meaning or background of your works?” he said: “No. I read a lot, about avalanches, dams, volcanic eruptions, fire fighters, architecture, weather. . . . I am neither a craftsman nor an intellectual. Something in between—a game-player.” Working with everyday objects, Signer manages to uses the functional aspects of these objects in a completely unexpected way.
In the spirit of PlayTime, Signer freely admits that he utilizes with multiple elements (wind, water, sand) that play together in concert in his “useless inventions” that are “completely pointless.”
Signer’s reputation as the “explosion artist” is justified, but his engagement with the human need to experiment—a sort of risk and play exercise in itself; a lived experience.
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.)
Comic Josh Gondelman and artist Molly Roth share a list of just a few of their favorite games that adults play. We wave the flag with renewed energy this week.
RECAPTURE THE FLAG…GING ENTHUSIASM FOR THINGS YOU ONCE LOVED
Number of players: 1, or however many you can convince to play with you
Description of gameplay: Player attempts to rekindle their youthful passion by playing in an adult sports league, attending live performances, or taking up a new creative hobby.
Game ends when…: The player wins when he or she successfully convinces his/her friends and co-workers to see their band or improv team perform live. Another path to victory is an entire holiday season spent giving away handmade gifts, crafted with a newly formed skill.
Look for the next installment of Games Adults Play in the coming weeks.Missed the last one? Check it out here.
Lydia Gordon, assistant curator, takes a look at Salem’s board game history and finds gaming treasure in the museum’s collection.
In 1883, sixteen-year-old George Swinnerton Parker (born 1866 in Salem, Massachusetts) was bored. A lover of board games, Parker had become restless with the available options of his time, including the highly successful and proselytizing The Mansion of Happiness. This track game included sixty-seven spaces through which players would journey to arrive at the titular manse in the center of the board. In addition to counting, players could also partake in “An Instructive, Moral & Entertaining Amusement” as they tried to advance towards the mansion quickly by landing on spaces marked “Piety,” “Honesty,” “Humility,” or “Generosity,” while avoiding the dangers of “Audacity,” “Cruelty,” and “Ingratitude.”[1] Sound familiar? In the twentieth century, Milton Bradley Company rebranded the game to create what is now the classic Life.
W. & S. B. Ives, The Mansion of Happiness, an Instructive, Moral, & Entertaining Amusement, about 1843, 18 3/4 × 15 in. Peabody Essex Museum, 122436. This is a virtual copy of the English game of the same name. The Ives edition has the same number of spaces, the same images in identical locations, and the same instructions.
The game of piety was originally developed in Italy during the sixteenth century and later published by England’s Laurie and Whittle in about 1800. Anne W. Abbott of Beverly, Massachusetts, contributed to the development of The Mansion of Happiness, an Instructive, Moral, & Entertaining Amusement, published by the Q. & S. B. Ives Company of Salem, in 1843. Beginning in 1823, Stephen and William Ives had founded The Q. & S. B. Ives Company as Salem’s printing company. They published early track games while maintaining a long publishing record for The Salem Observer (1828–96), Salem’s Charter (1853), and even the East India Marine Hall Corporation’s by-laws (1826). Immediately following Mansion of Happiness, Q. & S. B. Ives Company published The Game of Pope and Pagan or Siege of the Stronghold of Satan by the Christian Army in 1844, a game based on the struggle of Christian missionaries to overcome Satan and paganism (they also released the card game Old Maid around this time).[2] In this questionably titled and generally offensive game, Robert Rath notes how, “[The Game of Pope and Pagan] depicted “half-unclothed ‘natives’ gathering around a roaring fire.”[3]
Q. & S. B. Ives Company, The Game of Pope and Pagan or Siege of the Stronghold of Satan by the Christian Army, 1844, printed ink, mache, paper, watercolor, paperboard, gouache, 14 1/4 × 11 3/4 in., Peabody Essex Museum, gift of Mrs. Garfton Fenno, 1901, 4216.
No wonder young Parker was bored. By 1883, he was living in a world where new manufacturing processes were invented, developed, and implemented. Parker had witnessed first hand this shift to industrial society. Born at 103 Essex Street to Captain George Augustus Parker and Sarah Hegenmen Parker, George was the youngest of three brothers. As Salem’s maritime trade dried up by the mid-nineteenth century, his father moved the family to Medford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a merchant and real estate agent.[4] By 1870, George Augustus Parker’s wealth had depleted. The man suffered from Bright’s disease and passed away in 1876 when his son was just 10 years old.[5] Now residing with his widowed mother, aunt, and uncles in the family’s large Medford home, the youngest Parker son turned towards his older brother Charles, then just twenty-three, of Salem for support. Charles was living in a local boardinghouse and working his way up at a fuel wholesaling firm.[6] With brotherly encouragement, George moved back to Salem with his mother into a much smaller home at 8 Mall Street, leaving behind extended family in Medford, in order to pursue a better life.
While George S. Parker’s own childhood was riddled with sickness and the loss of his father, he held a passion for thrilling and new playful experiences. The concept of childhood—in which both play and study helped shape future productive adults—was becoming widely adopted.[7] Parker’s desire for secular games reflected the cause and effects of industrial society, including human initiative over divine submission. So at age sixteen, he developed and sold his card game Banking door to door in Boston while on approved leave from high school. Banking was a game of supposition, free will, and trade: players received loaned cards from the bank only to repay with interest. Players earned profits and formed financial alliances, all while being encouraged to betray one another in order to advance one’s own interests.
In 1885, Parker bought the rights to Anne W. Abbott’s 1840 card game Dr. Busby and several other games, including a reissue of Mansion of Happiness. He opened a toy store at the corner of Salem’s Franklin and Washington streets in 1887, the site of the current Hawthorne Hotel. As business grew, his brother Charles joined the company in 1888. The brothers renamed their store Parker Brothers and moved to 182 Bridge Street. In 1893, third brother Edward Parker joined the company, relocating one last time to 190 Bridge Street.
The incorporation of Parker Brothers occurred on December 19, 1901. The company went on to open offices in London, Paris, and New York to great success, even through the Great Depression, due to the development of Clue, Risk, and Monopoly.[8]
George S. Parker was an avid supporter and former director of the Essex Institute, one of PEM’s precursor institutions founded in 1848 with a mission to preserve and publicize the history of Salem while overseeing natural history collections, historic homes, a library, and public museum. Parker often invited his highly regarded colleagues to lecture at the Essex Institute. It is within this legacy that George S. Parker’s grandson, Randolph Barton (born 1932) became president of the Essex Institute while serving as the last CEO of Parker Brothers. Barton was instrumental in the 1992 merging of the Essex Institute and the Peabody Museum into what is today the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM). PEM’s Barton Gallery is named in honor his parents, Robert B. M. Barton (1903–1995) and Sally Parker (1907–2000). At PEM, play is part of our DNA.
A particular Parker Brothers legacy can be discovered in the PlayTime exhibition. Parker Brothers developed a precursor game to table tennis, or ping pong, in 1896 called Pillow-Dex. This game invited players to bat inflated balloons back and forth across a string stretched over a table. One would win by landing the balloon on their opponent’s side ten times in a row.[9] Martin Creed’s Work No. 329, 2004, on loan from Rennie Collection in Vancouver, invites a comparable experience.
Martin Creed, Work No. 329, 2004, balloons, on loan from Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Photo by Bob Packert/PEM.
While Parker Brothers played a major role in developing Salem’s identity and community, Parker Brothers was in poor shape by the 1960s. In 1965, General Mills approached the company about a buyout that became official in 1968. Ranny Barton continued to serve as president of the company through 1984. Today, Parker Brothers (along with Milton Bradley Company) have been consolidated as part of Hasbro, Inc., with headquarters in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
In addition to the objects mentioned above, PEM holds many Parker Brothers games in our collection, including Tommy Town’s Visit to the Country, Authors, Sherlock Holmes, The Wonderful Game of Oz, Star Reporter, Dealer’s Choice, and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.
Lydia Gordon will be moderating an upcoming panel, Game Changers: Women Activists in Digital Space, at PEM on Saturday, May 5, at 4:15 pm. Join us for this special PlayTime conversation with artist Angela Washko, scholar and activist Susana Morris, and game designer Jane Friedhoff. The panel is made possible by the George Swinnerton Parker Memorial Lecture Fund and offered in conjunction with the Present Tense Initiative.
[1] “90 Years of Fun: The History of Parker Brothers, 1883–1973,” Instructive and Amusing: Essays on Toys, Games, and Education in New England (Salem, MA, Essex Institute, 1987), 138. Original tapes from Fox’s interviews are in our collection and at Salem State University.
[3] Robert Rath, “Board Games were Indoctrination Tools for Christ, then Capitalism,” waypoint, Vice, November 30, 2017.
[4] Philip E. Orbanes, The Game Makers: The Story of Parker Brothers From Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), 2.
[7] For more on this, see Hugh Cunningham, The Invention of Childhood (London: BBC Books, 2006).
[8] “90 Years of Fun: The History of Parker Brothers, 1883–1973,” Instructive and Amusing: Essays on Toys, Games, and Education in New England (Salem, MA., Essex Institute, 1987), 154–55.
[9] Margaret Hofer, The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board and Table Games (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003).
These three PlayTime artists exhibit a range of expression—from sculpture to video to sound to textiles—but all three are inspired to negotiate political and cultural forces through play.
Paul McCarthy draws inspiration from the realms of childhood movie fantasy: Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Pinocchio, and other tales of mischief, silliness, and naughtiness (along with more adult Hollywood fare). The piece that appears in Playtime, Pinocchio Pipenose, embodies McCarthy’s (and to a large extent, Playtime‘s) spirit of play rewarding misbehavior and, as Trevor Smith puts it, acting as a safe space for transgressions (to which McCarthy is no stranger). At the same time, McCarthy is a complicated figure whose work sparks as much controversy and revulsion as it does praise and criticalacclaim.
Rivane Neuenschwander is known for a playful approach to her work, which—like the piece presented as part of our exhibition, Watchword—also requires wordplay, communication, and participation to activate the work for the viewer, including games, wearable work, and comics.
Neuenschwander has also created work geared directly at children. In London, in 2015, she initiated a program whereby kids created their own superhero capes, of sorts, that helped the children confront their fears.
“We are doing holes in these rifles before the rifles make holes in us.” Pedro Reyes‘ flutes made from guns were played recently at a March for Our Lives rally in Cincinnati, Ohio. Like the “gun flutes”—a signature part of the Reyes’ art making—his Disarm Mechanized II in Playtime comments on the depth with which deadly weapons have infiltrated our culture and have come to define different, fraught aspects of it. No stranger to building protest and politics into his work, Reyes has been known to employ satire and comedy to surprising effect. In a new project—Manufacturing Mischief—to premiere later this month at MIT, the artist uses puppets to expand Reyes’ commentary on the impact of new and old technology on current politics.
Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.
Comic Josh Gondelman and artist Molly Roth share a list of just a few of their favorite games that adults play. This week’s game is a hop, skip, and a jump—and repeat—until retirement.
JOBSCOTCH
Number of players: 1
Description of gameplay: Player jumps from job to job attempting to find satisfaction and financial security while avoiding stress, poverty, and harassment. Each game lasts roughly 45 years.
Game ends when…: The player wins when he or she retires with benefits and savings.
Look for the next installment of Games Adults Play in the coming weeks.Missed the last one? Check it out here.
