Tag: contemporary-art-playtime

The BEIGE Programming Ensemble: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

In 2003, a posse of artists, programmers, and musicians raised on first-generation computers and early programming languages embarked on a cross-country house tour. Los Angeles Times music writer Randall Roberts tells the story, including the details on a stop at his home.

A few years after graduating from college, the dozen-odd creators included, at various stops, an outfit known as the BEIGE Programming Ensemble, the electronic noise group Extreme Animals, whose screaming singer Jacob Ciocci was a co-founder of the Paper Rad artist collective, the elusive stunt-mixer who performed as DJ Shoulders, and ghetto-tech producer Bitch Ass Darius. They dubbed it “The Summer of HTML.”

The pitch for the series of events was this: “on this tour we will be doing live HTML performances as well as audio music nintendo hacker adventures audio rave nightmares and video showings of our cartoons. We are going to make new webpages and put them on a cool webpage.” Like a package concert tour but minus the concert part, the two week expedition took them to galleries and performance spaces in New York, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, and elsewhere. In St. Louis, the tour landed at my house, a.k.a. the Louis Hartoebben Contemporary Art Museum, named in honor of the retired fireman who had sold me the building for a song.

The BEIGE Programming Ensemble, which featured multimedia artists Cory Arcangel and Paul B. Davis, sound engineer Joseph Bonn, and high-level programmer and DJ Joseph Beuckman, had recently issued a record called The 8-Bit Construction Set: Commodore 64 vs. Atari 2600, an interactive 12-inch “DJ kit” on which they had transferred a few dozen of their programmed locked-groove beats. The sounds on one side were programmed using a Commodore 64; the B-side on an Atari 2600, each of which had its own distinctive synthesized tones. When employed by a DJ with a pair of turntables, a mixer, and two copies of the record, the looped grooves served as building blocks—the construction set—to create on-the-spot, 133 beats-per-minute, 8-bit tracks. Place the needle in the groove and rather than progressing through a song as it glides toward the center, the stylus moves in an infinite circle, looping whatever recorded sound is contained therein. The record also featured sound samples of Atari- and C64-related tones and two wildly complex original Davis compositions, “Dollars” and “Saucemaster.” The inner band on each side was a data track, or stored program, that—when taped onto cassette and loaded into a computer tape drive connected to a computer—ran a Roland 303 emulator.

 

 

Raised on first- and second-generation computers and gaming consoles, BEIGE was exploring ways to harness interfaces and their low-level programming languages in service of visual and sonic art. Most famously, Arcangel and Davis, both students at Oberlin (along with Bonn, who is now an accomplished music editor for film and just concluded work on Star Wars: The Last Jedi), were cracking open Nintendo cartridges and reprogramming the chips to create striking video game vistas and blippy 8-bit music scores.

“Arcangel had recently unveiled his acclaimed hack Super Mario Clouds, and offered a step-by-step tutorial.”

Along with Beuckman, who was living, studying, and spinning records in St. Louis under the name DJ Cougar Shuttle, the quartet weren’t a musical group per se. “It was barely a band,” Arcangel told me during a recent conversation. “I always thought of it more like a crew—like a graffiti crew or a drum ‘n bass crew.”

During the performance at the Hartoebben, Arcangel delivered a PowerPoint demonstration that included a detailed explanation for how he and Davis hacked Nintendo cartridges and messed with the innards. Arcangel had recently unveiled his acclaimed hack Super Mario Clouds, and offered a step-by-step tutorial. Davis teamed with the mysterious spinner DJ Shoulders to tear through a set that mixed Detroit techno – a lot of Underground Resistance, if I recall correctly—and improvised Construction Set compositions featuring squiggly-sounding acid house tones and Atari and C64 samples. Extreme Animals—Ciocci and David Wightman (a.k.a. DJ George Costanza)—performed a frantic set of synth noise. Ciocci also screened short Paper Rad films created by him, his sister Jessica Ciocci, and the visual artist Ben Jones.

BEIGE seldom “played” music as a band would, either on the tour or any other time. “It was even more disparate, which is more in line I think with how one would operate over a computer,” Arcangel said, describing the process as “more electronic or something, where we were never all in the same place at the same time.”

Now an artist and lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, Davis told me that when he was working on the already anachronistic machines in the early ’00s, he was thinking about “the explosion of the internet and how it often felt like the interfaces were leading you where whoever designed the interface wanted you to go, rather than, from a programming perspective, where you might tell the computer what to do.”

 

The video game character Mario might seem to be content to race through his programmed course upon boot-up, but he was locked in a Sisyphean cycle. What if, pondered ensemble members, Mario and his gaming environment could be freed from the shackles of the creator’s programming?

One piece that Davis programmed featured Mario set against a black background, staring to the side. Above him in Nintendo-era digital lettering were the words, “Now I just stand here silently among data that grows cold.” Arcangel said that when he, Davis, Bonn, and Beuckman were working on the record, he’d just switched majors, was overwhelmed with schoolwork, and was making beats onto a Commodore 64 at off hours. Working with what the artist described with affection as “a beautiful, simple tracker that just showed a screen full of hexadecimals” called Future Composer 4.0, he built loops one coded line at a time. “The game was to get these really raw sounds,” Arcangel said. “Just make these really nasty, raw loops.” It didn’t hurt that the record was mastered in Detroit by legendary techno engineer Ron Murphy, who made the loops sound gritty and deep.

“Working with what the artist described with affection as “a beautiful, simple tracker that just showed a screen full of hexadecimals” he built loops one coded line at a time.”

In addition to being an awesome object, Davis stressed that aspects how they made beats for the 8-Bit Construction Set were, for him, “slightly political in their response, I think, to the way I saw computer usage progressing in society at the time.” Describing “anti-reverse-engineering and surveillance laws then coming into effect,” Davis recalls being critical of the corporatization of programming. Now, he said, “It’s like par for the course. No one even thinks about it. It’s understood that that’s how these devices are in our lives. They’re not supposed to be investigated in any way.”

Simultaneously, Arcangel said, the goals of the project and the tour “were very unclear, but that was part of the fun. Nothing was planned. There was just a lot of energy, and that is kind of what sustained the enterprise. Especially with the tour. You saw the tour. It was chaotic. You couldn’t do it if you’re forty.” ♦

 

Photo credits: Feature image of Cory Arcangel’s Totally Fucked, 2003, courtesy of the artist. Marginal images of the 8-Bit Construction Set in St. Louis and posters, courtesy of Randall Roberts. Lower left image by and courtesy David Wightman (Paper Rad).

 

Dispatches from the Field: Cosplayers at PAX East

Posted on by goplay

“Instead of being the shy person that fixes computers, I can run around and say, nerf this!“

Cosplay is the act of dressing up as a character from a movie, book, or video game. Many people at PAX East dress up in elaborate cosplay costumes and we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk with them about it.

Read the transcript.

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.)

Play Digest: Alibis and Avatars

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Halloween is Tuesday and PEM’s hometown of Salem has been planning for the event since November of last year. This week’s edition of our link pack is dedicated to the alternate personas that most of us wait all year to celebrate.

But if you’ve been reading Lizzie Stark’s Performing the Real—a three-part introduction to the world of larping—you’ll find that there are plenty of folks who don’t wait for Halloween to embrace their alter egos. Part 2, in particular, focuses on the key role that wholly assuming an alibi plays in the success of a larp. She goes so far to say that alibis are not reserved for the players alone, but that larp itself can be an alibi for interaction. Part 3 arrives on Tuesday.

Cosplayers of color don’t always have representative characters to model on. Recently, a vocal community united on social media to affirm their presence and prowess—and voice support for one another—after Mic.com interviewed five cosplayers who addressed the role race plays in their character development.

Then there’s cosplayers of . . . construction?  This cosplayer got a little meta when he costumed himself as the Javits Center, host to this year’s New York Comic Con.

Meet Gnomen.

File under: just because we can, does that mean we should? Digital Avatars and fake news.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was roundly and justifiably rebuked for “teleporting” his virtual self to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico in a bizarre attempt to show sympathy for storm victims. He later apologized.

Janelle Shane—a  research scientist who trains neural networks to create Dungeons & Dragons spells,  trendy beer names, and pub names (a pint of Bombie Saison down at the Old Festerian anyone?) has trained her algorithms on designing Halloween costumes this week in case anyone needs any last-minute ideas (sorry, I have dibs on Panda Clam).

Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.

(Image credit: The Jacob Javits Center by Steven Leung on Flickr.)

Dear Nintendo Power: Live Gameplay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell
Rutherford Chang is an artist and collector—and the third-ranked Game Boy Tetris player in the world. Watch Chang in a live streamed performance of Game Boy Tetris.

In 2014, Chang started recording and broadcasting his gameplay to a competitive gaming world for which Game Boy Tetris held little sway any longer. Once he began recording and streaming on a daily basis, he began to look at his gameplay as a kind of performance.

Dear Nintendo Power, a companion piece to Chang’s live performance, is at once a testimonial to the addictive nature of achievement and a modest homage to Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. Chang says in a recent interview on The Creative Independent:

“He used to write these letters to Nintendo Power in 1991 boasting about his top score. I did some stuff like that too when I beat him and he heard about it apparently. He left a comment on a news article about the project. He had claimed he had gotten higher scores, but I’ll believe him when I see him stream it live on Twitch.”

 

 

Watch Chang play Game Boy Tetris via the video stream link below, recorded live on October 25. Has Chang bettered his ranking? Tune in to find out!

 

Watch the live recording from drofrehturgnahc on www.twitch.tv

(Image credit: Courtesy of Heinz Nixdorf Museum Forum. Photo by Jan Brown.)

Tomorrow Rutherford Chang (@drofrehturgnahc)—artist, collector, and the third-ranked Game Boy Tetris player in the world—plays LIVE from 1–2 pm EST on playtime.pem.org. Will he better his ranking? Tune in and find out! #pemplaytime #gameboy #gameboytetris

Posted on by goplay

Tilt: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

In the second installment of her two-part essay, writer Virginia Heffernan continues her pinball pilgrimage and humanizes the digital-analog divide. Missed part 1? Read it here.

There were also beeps in this game. When my balls—my extra balls by now, I’m that good—hit one particular bumper and bounced back on it, again and again, piling up points and aiming me for the leaderboard, the beeps beeped furiously. Each one was a half-second, more or less tonal, and—as usual for me—beeps sit on the knife’s edge of puzzling and rapturous.

Beeps belong to nature and electricity and electronics and the Internet. All the centuries. Like the railroad toot but unlike an old telephone ring, beeps have both a distinct start and finish, marked by the twin plosives “b” and “p,” and an elastic center that can generously expand and contract like an accordion: beeeeeeeep. You can create Morse code in beeps. Beeeep beep beep beep. Beep. Beep. Beep beeeep beeeep beep. Yes, they’re a frankensound—but nature can almost, almost suggest them. They certainly seem to have always existed. Maybe art teases beeps out of nature.

The beep is synthetic; it’s manmade, like climate change. Plants don’t beep, nor weather, nor animals, nor birds except Road Runner. If you hear a beep, you know that a person, or more likely his artifact, is signaling. There’s no wondering, Is that a beep or a nightingale? Is that a beep or a tornado? Beeps are also not voices or music.

And still, sonically exotic as they may be, beeps are, as my pinball home insistently suggested, easy to make; they are cheap and light. No wonder everything beeps. E-mail beeps. Texts. Trucks in reverse. Hospital monitors. Stoves, dashboards, cameras, clocks. Coffee machines. Dishwashers. Elevators. Toys. Robots. Toy robots.

[In] the Monopoly game the beeps were modulated and engineered to define my experience, the very victories I thought I was creating with my analog tendons and fingertips and wrists.

The onomatopoeic word “beep” launched in 1929, and prewar beeps were produced by car horns, though sonar, electric elevators, and clown horns may have beeped or protobeeped even before the 1920s. Other car horns of the period, and now especially those of big cars, are usually heard to “honk.” Beeps as the sound of cute cars—makes sense. A small, zippy, nuisancey thing chirping, “’Scuse me, could you move a smidge? Thanks!” That’s a beep.

As a source for beeps, car horns gave way to piezoelectric technology, a breakthrough used increasingly after World War II in labs, hospitals, and military operations. With the arrival of the transistor, small piezo buzzers could be made to beep in devices like electronic metronomes and game-show buzzers. An efficient, low-power way to gin up a tone for a device to emit. Beeps could now be heard in a range of contexts, but the sound still managed to speak of seriousness and technology.

The material world and our bodies, in concert, can reconfigure themselves, as if to prove they can’t be digitized.

Were those beeps on the pinball playfield digitized? I choose to believe they were not made in sound labs, but date from the bells and horns of J.P. Morgan days. That every time a ball hit a bumper it squeaked because it was weighted metal on hard, smooth rubber, and something in the angle—and I misread it as a beep—but I’m not crazy: Naturally on the Monopoly game the beeps were modulated and engineered to define my experience, the very victories I thought I was creating with my analog tendons and fingertips and wrists.

Beautifully, submissively, we have adjusted to the hegemony of computers. But this Monopoly table, with its rusty screws and peeled paint, suggests one road back or through to an ecstatic, three-dimensional, and entirely mortal form of culture, in which our imperfect and limited bodies might reassert their centrality to culture, politics, and philosophy. This reassertion I anticipate with some giddiness the way, in my Bolshevik days, I used to anticipate the digital revolution. This time I resolve not to be so impatient with my elders.

The material world and our bodies, in concert, can yet reconfigure themselves, as if to prove they can’t be digitized. I believe that. In games like this one, from 2001, before broadband razed our nervous systems, I hear trills of promise. Of course, on this day, I was at forty-five in the middle of the journey my life, lost in the dark wood of an executive hotel. I was a truant; I had skipped a conference for a stolen pinball game. And reader: I was winning. ♦

(Image credit: Pinball by el-toro on 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.

Ball Games and War Games: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Carlo Rotella examines the threads of play in his upbringing in an essay in three sections. Here, in the second installment, we resume his story on the basketball courts of Chicago, where Rotella learned to navigate the complex social world of pickup basketball. Check out part 1 here.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the elaborate tactical board games over which I hunched for hours and days at a time as a child, learning the ins and outs of military strategy while perfecting the art of being alone, was pickup basketball: a laboratory for developing social self-knowledge and expertise.  First, you had to get in the game. Say you showed up as part of a crew of four at a playground where a full-court five-on-five was in progress and there were seven guys already waiting. That meant there was a team of five ready to go next, with two left over. You’d have to figure out who those two were and size them up, then decide whether to a) sit out two more games until you and your whole crew could pick up one guy at courtside and constitute a team of five; or b) put forward three of your crew as teammates for the two current leftovers and thus get onto the court after sitting out only one game, though that would leave one of your number to fend for himself; or c) if those waiting seemed exceptionally weak or fractious or otherwise unequipped to defend their claim, brazenly declare that your crew had next and enlist the big dude in the cut-off Brothers Johnson T-shirt as your fifth. The negotiations could get tricky, with everyone assessing everyone else’s skill, size, confidence, willingness to back his own claim, and support from allies. If somebody tried to pull a fast one by claiming at the last moment, just as you and your crew were about to take the court to play your duly called next game, that he had actually called next way before but then had been obliged to go to take care of some business but had now come back, you had to decide whether to get all lawyerly in response or to simply brush aside this pretender, dismissing his claim out of hand as sorry-ass would-be gangster bullshit not even worth a reasoned rebuttal. However you played it, the main thing was to act as if you were the kind of guy who got in the game as a matter of course, and not the kind who could be pushed out of line with a strong-arm move.

I was obliged to cultivate the specific skill of playing with and especially against one’s betters, a skill not identical to being good at basketball.

Once in the game, I had to survive it. Because I hung out with serious players who tended to get me in with stiffer competition than my modest abilities rated, I was obliged to cultivate the specific skill of playing with and especially against one’s betters, a skill not identical to being good at basketball. My main challenge was to fend off humiliation when matched man-to-man against a member of the other team who, if we both did our best, could outscore me so badly that it would obviously be my fault if my team lost. That meant playing serious defense, which was not generally regarded as a principal virtue in pickup ball. I began by taking calipers to my man’s footwork, figuring out how much room he required to operate smoothly, then moved inside that limit, finding the sweet spot of his discomfort. I wanted to be just close enough that I was perpetually, irksomely there; rather than trying to prevent my man from doing what he wanted to do―get the ball, dribble, shoot―I just tried to make it unpleasant and difficult for him to do these things. By staying close and varying the rhythm of my intrusions to keep the irritation fresh, I could make him feel that there were extra feet where he wanted to step, extra bulk clogging up his movements. I used my hands on him as little as possible. I’d just follow, follow, follow, lining up my navel with his at the chosen distance and then trying to keep them lined up no matter what he did, so that he would begin to feel as if he was dragging around my body and will, my whole story, in addition to his own. I aspired to be like Jack Vance’s Chun the Unavoidable, who, even after the fleet and cruelly handsome Liane the Wayfarer slips into a sorcerous portable hole to escape him, shows up at Liane’s elbow in his coat of eyeballs and says, “I am Chun the Unavoidable.”

I appeared to be model citizen of the little commonwealth of the pickup team.

I appeared to be model citizen of the little commonwealth of the pickup team because I performed needful tasks that most other players, fixated on the universally acknowledged priority of racking up points, didn’t feel like doing. In addition to playing defense on my man with irksome persistence, I passed the ball to teammates with care and sensitivity, boxed out, rebounded, fetched loose balls, tipped away opponents’ passes, and ran the court on every possession. But this appearance of good citizenship was an illusion: other than wanting to win so that I could stay on the court, I was, at best, agnostic about the greater good of my teammates; at worst, I was willing to sacrifice them in the cause of preserving my own dignity. My basketball self, a bad person masquerading as a good neighbor, only incidentally made his teammates’ lives better by making opponents’ worse. Intent on holding my own by destroying my man’s virtuosity and dragging him down to my level, I regarded offense―the soul of the pickup game―as wildly overrated. Offense was mere slavishness posing as inspiration, a company man’s sorry campaign to make Employee of the Month. But defense―not the rah-rah kind but the I-live-you-die kind―was the essential business of denying your enemies their heart’s desire, which was to put your hamlet and crops to the torch and carry off your loved ones into the night.

Return to the first installment of “Ball Games and War Games.” Read part three here.

(Image credit: A pickup basketball game in Chicago’s Lake Meadow Park, 1970 (Lake Meadow Park (0263) Activities – Sports, 1970.). Courtesy of the Chicago Public Library.)

Play Digest: LEGO Edition

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Play Digest is our weekly link pack of themed recommended reading — items we enjoyed or found interesting and hope our readers will too. LEGO, everyone’s favorite Danish building toy, has been in the news lately.

It came as a surprise last month when the company announced a major round of layoffs, but this week came the happier news of a “women of NASA” set that will feature astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, and astronauts Sally Ride and Mae Jemison. LEGO’s philosophy—that learning through play promotes innovation and creativity—is no longer groundbreaking, but its product continues to be fodder for researchers, scientists, and psychologists who have tapped the potential of the toy to illustrate the nimbleness of the human mind.

LEGO is serious play for many psychologists. Researchers are looking at the act of building with LEGO—and the results—as conceptual spaces to learn about play psychology and how to apply it to teaching the psychology of creativity itself.

Maybe some people spend too much time on LEGO: “It is clear that our participants treated LEGO people differently than LEGO nonpeople.”

Academics are looking at the rigidity of LEGO kits and are advocating for the right to “un-make.”

Related: does following the instructions make people less creative? Perhaps. Here are some people who go off-piste with their LEGO building:

Designer Milan Madge built a huge Leica camera in his free time.

Architects at Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) have completed an institutional project for LEGO in the company’s home-base of Billund, Denmark: the 12,000-square-foot Lego House.

In 2015, Olafur Eliasson hosted The Collectivity Project on New York’s Highline, a massive collective build that used only white bricks.

Japanese children reimagined their country in 1.8 million bricks during the “Build Up Japan” event in 2012.

Ai Wei Wei both addressed a political controversy in LEGO form, while LEGO courted some in its response to the project. This project, Trace, is currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC.

Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.

(Image credit: Ai Wei Wei’s Trace installed at Alcatraz prison in 2014 courtesy of Glen Bowman via Flickr.)

 

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)

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