Tag: contemporary-art-playtime

Spycraft: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Journalist Charlie Hall offers a look into the art of making board games for the CIA. Acclaimed designer Volko Ruhnke shares a whole new meaning to the term “serious games” with him.

The United States intelligence community has a long history with gaming. Role-playing and simulations have been part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s best practices for generations, and are often conducted with the help of judges and mediators behind closed doors to explore complex, real-world situations.

But recently, the CIA revealed that they also use tabletop games—in effect, complex modern board games—to train its own analysts, and analysts from other agencies.

By day, Volko Ruhnke is an instructor at the CIA’s Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis. By night, Ruhnke is an acclaimed designer of commercial board games best known for the COIN Series, published by GMT Games. He said the CIA has been interested in tabletop games for a very long time, well before he started working there in the 1980s. Applying his knowhow in the commercial space to building games for CIA officers in a classroom setting was a natural fit. The goal, he explained, is to facilitate repetition in the practical application of intelligence gathering skills, about separating actionable information from noise and acting on it quickly.

Unlike commercial board games, Ruhnke’s projects at the CIA don’t need to be fun.

Ruhnke shared an example of his work, a project called Kingpin: The Hunt for El Chapo, which he co-designed with another instructor in the Defense Intelligence Agency. Kingpin uses the historical details of the capture of Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán as well as some fictional elements to create a challenging, asymmetrical game.

Kingpin is an adversarial game where one side plays the role of law enforcement and the other plays the role of Guzmán’s own handlers and associates. It revolves around hidden information, with each side playing on their own hidden game board behind a screen. El Chapo’s team is constantly moving around inside Mexico trying to evade the law, but the cartel leader has certain tastes and expectations. He’s not just willing to sit inside a hole somewhere, and one viable strategy is for law enforcement to use his proclivities against him. In the classroom, the game is played twice, with students taking turns playing on both sides of the table.

A close-up of cartel’s game board from Kingpin. It shows how the cartel has robbed law enforcement of some intelligence collection capability, represented by the white pawn. It will constrain law enforcement’s ability to track El Chapo.

 

Traditional wargame-sized counters are used on the law enforcement side to keep track of where and when El Chapo and his assets were spotted, or to indicate an area they believe is clear. The production value here is actually quite high. Notice that the CIA spent time rounding the corners.

The key to the game, and to every other game played at the Kent School, is the facilitator. It’s their responsibility to keep things moving by interpreting the rules and feeding them to students on the fly. But in Kingpin, the facilitator also plays the role of referee. They have an important role in moving the action forward by revealing new information to both sides.

Unlike commercial board games, Ruhnke’s projects at the CIA don’t need to be fun. They also don’t need to support multiple playthroughs. In fact, they don’t even need to be played to completion.

“For a training game, it’s not nearly as important that you finish the game,” Ruhnke said. “It’s not even important that the game be balanced or have replay value. It might have those things. But our students are probably never going to play it again. It’s more about the insights and the process.”

The complete set-up for Kingpin. The law enforcement team’s game board is on the left, while the cartel’s game board is on the right. Both of those would be hidden behind a screen, while the middle board includes information shared by both teams.

Games are a very small fraction of what Kent School students will do in their coursework, but Ruhnke said the kind of hands-on work that tabletop gaming provides is invaluable.

Humans deal with complexity by forming mental models. . . . as instructors, we have to communicate those models to our students. Games do that very well.

“They are a tremendous tool for helping us prepare our understanding of complex affairs,” Ruhnke said. He likened it to studying the ongoing instability in Iraq and Afghanistan. “An insurgency is the interactions of many different actors, interests, tribes, forces, political movements, parties, village elders. It’s a complex compilation of factors, and that’s what we’re asking our analysts to understand. But human beings deal with complexity by forming mental models. So now, as instructors, we have to communicate those models to our students. Games do that very well.”

I was first introduced to the Ruhnke’s design work with a game called Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001 – ?, first published in 2010. In it, one player takes on the role of the United States while the other plays as Islamic jihadists. Each player takes actions by playing from a hand of cards that includes real-world, historical events. In one of my most memorable playthroughs the US prevailed only by keeping Benazir Bhutto alive long enough to drive the opposing player entirely out of Pakistan.

I asked Ruhnke about the potential conflicts that might arise between his commercial work and his classified work at the CIA.

“It is something that I have to watch,” he said. “I use my judgement in choosing to participate in work that’s outside of CIA work, and I’m not alone in that,” Ruhnke said. “I have . . . authorities here to double check. And in situation where I could have been exposed to sensitive information, I need to make sure that I’m okay here. That’s a routine procedure at the CIA. In my case, it happens to be that I’m making games, but if I were writing a book or writing an editorial in a newspaper it would be the same thing.”

The most gratifying part of the job for Ruhnke is in bringing intelligence officers together in a low-pressure environment in the same room with their peers. The Kent School isn’t just for members of the CIA, but provides instruction for analysts from the sixteen members of the United States Intelligence Community and all branches of the armed forces.

“It’s professionals coming together to practice their craft,” Ruhnke said, “separated from the immediate, pressing needs of our country. Of course, they’re interacting with each other every day, but in here it’s coming off the line, getting together as a brotherhood or a sisterhood of terrorism analysts. . . . I think it has to help.”  ♦

(Image credit: Detail from Kingpin, a board game used by the CIA based on the capture of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán, popularly known as El Chapo. All images courtesy Central Intelligence Agency.)

On Cheating: An Interview

Posted on by goplay
“The fascinating thing about cheating is that the cheat is not the player that knocks all the chess pieces off the table. That’s a spoilsport.”

Game designer Eric Zimmerman talks about why cheaters are a sign of a well-designed game.

Read the transcript.

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.

The Trouble with Losing at Chess: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

In the second installment of his essay, Tom Chatfield asks, does being human mean being conditioned to losing? Miss the first installment? Read it here.

To talk about machine fooling humans isn’t quite accurate, of course. If we are deceived, it is because other people have built machines intended to deceive us. If we endorse an illusion, it is because we have fooled ourselves into seeing it as truth. And if, eventually, Turing’s test is passed, the supposed divide between illusion and truth collapses—leaving us with the question of whether we call ourselves magic or mechanism. As they begin to replicate more and more human achievements, will our creations reveal our minds to be reproducible in software? Will they gesture beyond us to new kinds of mind—to a world in which we must abandon old conceptions of self?

For a vision of the second of these possibilities, you need look no further than the contemporary cult of the Singularity. Named after the event horizon surrounding the quantum singularity of a black hole—that threshold beyond which not even light can escape—the term was first used by author Vernor Vinge in the 1980s to describe how self-improving artificial intelligence might accelerate beyond humans, past a historical point of no return.

The Singularity offers a strange inversion of Turing’s game: a point at which time and technology dissolve into miracles. Two entities are at play. One is a shadow, a simulacrum, trying to convince its master to treat it as an equal. In the world of the Singularity, humanity is the shadow—trying to show its superiors that it still deserves some measure of consideration. After the Singularity, all old rules cease to apply.

I don’t believe the Singularity is coming, but I do take seriously its vision of technological apotheosis, not least because it draws upon the same fascination that Kempelen’s illusion harnessed: a vision of the future conditioned by games in which there are winners and losers, skill is measured on a single scale, and computation is synonymous with intellect.

What does it mean to play a computer at a game like chess? These days, it means losing. In 1997, humanity’s greatest chess champion, Gary Kasparov, was beaten before the eyes of the watching world by IBM’s Deep Blue. In 2016, Google’s AlphaGo did the same for Go champion Lee Seedol, besting humanity at a game orders of magnitude more complex than chess. In early 2017, an AI called Libratus vanquished the world’s best players at no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em, a game of bluff and imperfect information that some had hoped would remain dominated by humans.

How can we hope for anything other than obsolescence?

This progression points to a fundamental divide between people and machines. Much like athletes pushing up against the boundaries of biology, the increments of human improvement have hard limits. We advance towards a certain threshold in slowing steps. Across rapid generations of software and hardware, meanwhile, machines advance faster and faster. Since 1997, the world’s best human chess players have got perhaps a little better, helped by computers. Meanwhile, the speed at which Deep Blue calculated—around 11.4 gigaflops—has fallen more than an order of magnitude behind the 275 gigaflops powering Samsung’s Galaxy S8 smartphone, a device you can fit in your pocket. Modern supercomputers are many thousands of times faster than those built in 1997, and this trend as yet shows no sign of stopping. The Deep Blue of 1997 would stand about as much chance against today’s supercomputers as a two-year-old would against Kasparov.

Singularity theorist Ray Kurzweil coined the phrase “the second half of the chessboard” to help people conceptualize the staggering properties of this increase. The phrase refers to a mathematical parable, in which a scholar is told by a king that he can name any price as his reward for performing a great service. What I wish for, the scholar replies, is that you place one grain of wheat upon the first square of a chessboard, two upon the second, four upon the third, eight upon the fourth, and so on, until the chessboard is covered.

The king protests that this is too small a prize, but the scholar demurs. By the end of the first row of eight squares, he has 255 grains of wheat. By the time the first half of the chessboard is covered, he has 4,294,967,295 grains—around 280 tons. After this, the first square on the second half of the chessboard will contain as much wheat as the entire first half, and so on, until the wheat required becomes hundreds of times more than exists in the whole world. Once you reach a certain threshold, Kurzweil explains, any ongoing exponential increase demolishes old frames of reference: its sheer scale brings wholly new phenomena, and demands new ways of thinking.

By picking games like chess, humans have defined a terrain in which they are not only destined to lose but are also the architects of their own irrelevance.

How can we hope for anything other than obsolescence in the face of this exponential curve, lashing itself towards infinity? Within the bounds of game-worlds like chess and Go, the Singularity has come and gone. Never again in history will the world’s greatest player be an unaided human. Yet the game is not what it seems. By picking games like chess as both emblems of our rivalry and the ultimate arenas for training machine minds, humans have defined a terrain in which they are not only destined to eventually lose, but are also the architects of their own irrelevance—the creators of rule-bounded spaces within which any suitably-defined victory can be won by automation. Beyond this realm, however, the question of supremacy is not even the right one to ask.

 

Behind accounts of our near future such as Kurzweil’s lies a way of thinking called technological determinism. Determinism offers an account of the world in which the old is driven out by the new, sometimes violently, via mechanisms that nobody needs to have chosen. In warfare, guns beat spears—and people who choose to keep on fighting with spears will sooner or later find themselves on the wrong side of history. In business, advanced autonomous systems beat old-fashioned labour—and corporations who sentimentally refuse to replace their workforce with robots will sooner or later find themselves overtaken. Determinism’s logic is one of ceaseless winner-takes-all games between old and new—a context within which humanity itself is easily viewed as yesterday’s news.

Is this true? Evolution certainly requires no intentions in order to unfold. Yet inevitability, I would argue, exists only in retrospect—in a pattern that our minds project onto the world. We see a Turk seated at a chessboard, and so we also see intent and elemental opposition—a struggle for supremacy complete with winners and losers, old and new. Yet, while a machine may today beat us at chess, it is not actually playing in any recognizable human sense. Somewhere inside its circuits, human players remain hidden—programmers, designers, past grandmasters, creators of a history that has been uncomprehendingly digested and optimized. Our loss is also our victory. The only rules and measures we can lose by are those we have ourselves created.

What isn’t captured by such metrics? As the philosopher Bernard Suits put it in his 1978 book The Grasshopper, a game can also be thought of as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” We may play a game such as chess in the hope of winning. But this doesn’t make winning its purpose, any more than the purpose of listening to a symphony is getting to the end as fast as possible. Rather, the possibility of victory (and of losing, and of drawing) exists in order to create meaningful play: the exercise of skill and tactics, a pursuit undertaken for its own satisfaction. Constraint create the possibility of play, but it does not constrain the experiences play enables.

As strange it may seem to say it, this is also true of warfare, economics, and the other arenas in which we compete on a daily basis. Victory is the means to ends—power and influence, wealth and glory—that cannot remain meaningful if victory is the only value that matters. Economic rivalry may mean outdoing your rivals, but it also demands common aspirations if there is to be any economy worth succeeding within. The exponential logic of victory after victory does not hold for the human world—not when constraint and common ground are the places that any ultimate purpose resides. It’s our confusion of purpose with conquest, not any inherent property of machines, that’s most likely to destroy us.

Our loss is also our victory. The only rules and measures we can lose by are those we have ourselves created.

In his 1986 book Finite and Infinite Games, the religious scholar James Carse makes the case that “finite” games played for the purpose of winning are secondary to “infinite” games, played for the purpose of continuing further play. In Carse’s account, finite games are preoccupied by the kind of conflicts that determinism puts at the heart of history: power clashes in which faster, harder, bigger and better tools perpetually supplant weaker ones. Infinite games, however, take an interest in the process of play itself—and are alive above all to the possibility of surprises, transforming the trajectory of all that has come before. “To be prepared against surprise is to be trained,” writes Carse, “To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”

How should we think about the games we play with and through our tools? The philosopher of technology Luciano Floridi uses a very different parable to that of the chessboard to describe our interactions with technology. Imagine a relationship, he writes in his book The Fourth Revolution, in which one partner is accommodating and adaptable, and the other is extraordinarily inflexible. Over time, if the relationship persists and neither partner’s personality changes, they will end up doing more and more things in the way that the less flexible partner insists upon—because their choice is either to do things this way, or not do them at all.

Even the most adaptable machine is orders of magnitude more inflexible than the most rigid human. Once design decisions have been made—once the boundaries of the game together with its incentives have been defined—our creations will be able to maximize its outcomes with ever-greater efficiency. The question is not whether this automatically makes us redundant, but rather whether we have meaningfully debated which incentives we do and do not wish to see relentlessly pursued on our behalf—a debate that can only exist between humans, and that has significance only in our interplay.

Few people learn chess because they wish to be the best in the world; fewer still because they wish to bring the history of chess-playing to a close. Play and learning are themselves the point—the spaces within which value resides. Similarly, when it come to humanity and history, neither our velocity nor our theoretical destination are the metrics that matter most. In constraint, in life and the playing of games, what counts is the experiences we create—and the possibilities we leave behind. ♦

(Image credit: Courtesy of Eureka Entertainment via Flickr.)

The Product of Play: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell
In part two of Kat Brewster’s essay on play and artistic production, she gets down to the busy-work of leisure and how the Dadaists, especially, made work from their favorite pastimes.

Thought of as little more than troublemakers in the academic art world, those works in the Salon des Refusés proved to be incredibly popular, if controversial, and served to validate independent exhibitions. This was not the sort of art the French public were used to seeing—art was reserved for a conservative upper class, and prior to the exhibited work of the Impressionists, was subject to a defined hierarchy. For the luxury of academic approval, artists were to paint history paintings, portraits, landscapes, genre scenes, and still life paintings. In that order. Instead, the Impressionists paid attention to light, form, and color. The work of artists like Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, and Édouard Manet is characterized by suggestions, or impressions, of form, and painting subjects from life, rather than from history or mythology. To make the conscious choice of painting, submitting, and exhibiting these works, which several of the offending artists knew would never make it past the academy’s jury, was an intentional rejection and subsequent parallel of the ordinary. Much like Calle’s rejection of a conservative and listless ordinary, the Impressionists broke away from this academic fare to bring a shock of new.

To make the conscious choice of painting and exhibiting these works was an intentional rejection and subsequent parallel of the ordinary.

While the Impressionists achieved success in part due to funding from the state, they were not the only artists to submit later-revered items to a conservative jury of academics and be refused. Following the period of the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, a new normal had been established: these artists used bold colors, evocative and gestural figures, and paid little mind to the bounds of perspective. In a move which shocked the art world, Marcel Duchamp anonymously submit his now-famous Fountain, a urinal the artist had purchased, to the Society of Independent Artists for exhibition in 1917. Based on the very ideals of the French Salon des Indépendants, which had formed to showcase the work of the Impressionists, the society reneged on its stance that it would showcase all works submit, and rejected Duchamp’s fountain. While the object itself is now considered a landmark Readymade, the process of its submission was a simultaneous criticism and prank on the art scene of Duchamp’s time. Fountain was never shown, but its playful spirit and rebellion carried on.

Duchamp, an accomplished chess player, and his circle of friends—Dadaists, and then, once the movement had lost favor, Surrealists—were accustomed to playing more explicit games than simple pranks on conservative art committees. André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Kay Sage’s favorite pastimes included games of automatic writing, cutout poetry, or Exquisite Corpse, a parlor game of collective contribution. One person would draw on a sheet of paper, fold over the majority of their drawing, and then pass it on to another person to continue the work. The Surrealists used activities like this, typically associated with simple leisure time, and elevated them by awarding them the merit of intentioned time. Of these artists, Sage was no stranger to time wasted. The imposing structures and draped figures in her work are the dream-like markers of the movement, unsettling and evocative of the subconscious. The Surrealist painter spent a decade of her adult life as the idle wife of an Italian prince. As biographer Judith Suther describes her life, it had been one of “unfocused frustration.” Suther continues, “Sage says of her existence in these years that it was ‘like going to the cinema.’ After the Nth replay, the princess who was only playacting got up and walked out.”1 The work Sage made following her separation from her first husband was charged with a new life. As Sage described it, “Some sort of inner sense in me was reserving my potentialities for something better and more constructive.”2 By awarding merit to those very activities that her ex-husband regarded as useless pursuits, artists like Sage, Duchamp, and the Impressionists gave significant meaning to the quotidian and the intentional deviations that playful artistic practice provides.

The work that followed that of those heady Surrealists made their deviation known by tapping into a livelier practice. The Abstract Expressionists, like Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, and her husband Willem, made liberal use of color and sparse use of form. Anything representational about their work had largely slipped away in favor of a more primal exploration of art. The pieces which came out of the 1940s and ’50s—Pollock’s action paintings, de Kooning’s faceless portraiture—were a clear rebellion from the inward-facing Surrealists. The clean lines and direct engagement with pop culture from those working in the following Pop art movement achieved a similar deviation from their predecessors. These intentional deviations from those who came before them, the ordinary of art, are playful processes. Their actions do not denote what they might otherwise—when Allan Kaprow invites onlookers to lick jam off of a car, as he did in 1964, the activity is seen as a meaningful parallel from the day-to-day. When Yoko Ono asks participants to make a tuna sandwich in her 1964 Tuna Fish Sandwich Piece, neither the tuna sandwich nor its making are particularly revelatory. That she asks, however, and that something so normal is given the qualifier of Art, is. By the time Sophie Calle gets on a train to Venice, it is not so surprising that her attempt to ease the burden of boredom in Paris—her playing—could be art. The way she fills her time with a fictitious self, her parallel self, is the play of an artist.

They are parallel actions, a serious play with little tangible production themselves. These seemingly simple actions are, through careful planning, given weight.

This playful push and pull of modern and contemporary art movements have helped to pave the way for contemporary artists. Activists like Ai Weiwei, Wafaa Bilal, and Kara Walker are able to ask the questions of society that they do from a harbor of playfulness. Their works carry a bite in concept rather than action—Ai’s hammering rebar, Bilal’s tattooing, and Walker’s cutouts do not, in themselves, carry the weight of what those actions represent. They are parallel actions, a serious play with little tangible production themselves. These seemingly simple actions are, through careful planning, given weight.

Far from the mid-nineteenth-century academic demands for historical paintings or landscapes, these artists raise the busy-work of leisure, or the self-fulfilling and stimulating creative labors, to the status of art. The games they play are not always explicit, and the parallels they present may not be readily apparent. But when Carsten Höller builds a slide in the middle of Tate Modern, as he did for Test Site is 2005, it might be difficult to resist taking the plunge.  ♦

1 Suther, A House of Her Own, 47.

2 Ibid., 50.

(Image credits: Image of an exquisite corpse created in 1930 by Paul Breton, Nusch Eluard, Valentine Hugo, and Paul Eluard courtesy Tate, © 2014. Alfred Stieglitz, “Fountain by R. Mutt, Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, THE EXHIBIT REFUSED BY THE INDEPENDENTS,” in Henri-Pierre Roche, Beatrice Wood, and Marcel Duchamp, eds., The Blind Man, No. 2 (May 1917), 4, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Turnabout: A Story Game

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Writer J. Robert Lennon presents us with an engaging maze of story—move left, right, up, down, and find a new twist with each read.

I originally wanted to create a story, or cluster of stories, in the form of a “word search” puzzle, with story elements as “letters,” that invited the reader/player to find contiguous narratives within the grid. But then I wondered if I could make every single node part of a story. This is the result. Every column reads as a story from top to bottom; every row reads as a story from left to right (except for one, which reads right to left, just for kicks.) Readers/players may also find a few diagonal vignettes, and are invited to mix and match elements as they see fit. The whole can even be printed out, cut up, and rearranged.

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!”

Performing the Real: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Part 1 of Lizzie Stark’s essay introduced us to the world of larping. Here, she explores larping’s most vital element: the alibi and what it means to be in character.

Larp presents an alibi for interaction, an excuse that shocks participants out of everyday life and allows them to behave and connect with each other differently. Alibi is the convenient excuse we use to justify behavior that is out of the norm. Danish larpwrights Bjarke Pedersen and Jonas Trier Knudsen popularized the term “alibi” in its larp context. Larp is not possible without alibi, but alibi is present in many other social contexts, and permits special behavior in those situations as well.

One of the simplest and most effective forms of alibi is a physical mask. A mask takes away a person’s natural identity and substitutes another (ghost, Freddy Kruger, Mexican wrestling star) in its place. It causes others to respond differently and playfully to the masked person. And the masked person, in turn, responds accord to these new rules of identity. It’s implicitly understood that I’m not my regular self (but still, expressing some facet of my regular self) when I wear my luchador mask. When I threaten my husband by bellowing “clean the kitchen or suffer the consequences,” he will not take me seriously . . . though he may pretend so in the moment.

Alibis can . . . enable people to step out of their socially proscribed roles and engage in out of the norm behavior.

Alcohol and Halloween are familiar alibis. It’s understood that drunken confessions of love may fade when the speaker sobers up. During Halloween, people dress up in unusual costumes—many of them provocative and sexual—and mischief often results. The morning-after Halloween stories that I’ve heard mix the alibis of costume and booze: “I was so drunk, and you have to understand, it was Halloween and I was dressed up like Captain America, so of course I . . . .” ( . . . went home with Wonder Woman, picked a fight with Iron Man, stole an American flag, etc. etc.). Alibis can put people in a different frame of mind that is marked out from the mundane world of regular life, and enable people to step out of their socially proscribed roles and engage in out of the norm behavior.

The structure of a game or larp can also provide an alibi by changing the expectations around social behavior. Consider a larp that requires a villain, say, a twisted serial murderer. In real life, being a serial murderer is not acceptable—it’s a deeply criminal act, punishable by life in prison, or in some states, death. Even in a larp, players might look askance at someone who said, “yes, me. I want to play the serial killer.” But if the larp instructions call for the facilitator to assign roles to players, or for the players to draw roles out of a hat, and X ends up the murderer, then the responsibility is removed from X. Rather, the facilitator of the larp, or the structure of the larp itself has given X an alibi to take on the role of serial killer for the good of the group. It’s not creepy for them to play the serial murderer, because after all, it’s not like they chose it.

All larp provides an alibi for players to behave differently than they normally would. Someone raving about their desire to sue a particular ghost would either be committed or given their own reality TV show. But it would be perfectly normal behavior if you were playing Jason Morningstar’s ridiculous party larp Ghost Court. And it is through the alibi of larp that participants gain emotional access to their characters. Because I am embodying a character and relating that character to myself, I am allowed to take that character’s concerns seriously. Although it is inherently ridiculous to pretend to be a poltergeist suing for my right to haunt your kitchen, while I am in character, I can make a serious argument about why I should be allowed to stay, even if, seen from the frame of regular life, that justification might also be funny and absurd.

Alibi helps move participants into a liminal space where their identities are loosened and new types of actions and points of view are possible.

Alibi helps people move out of the head-space of their regular lives and into another aspect of themselves. It helps larp participants transition from doctors, waiters, and academics into new roles as cyborgs, magicians, and World War II refugees. And yet, the transformation is never fully completed. The shells of those original identities remain within the player who is portraying the character. (A player who genuinely believed they were now a real-life serial murderer or a cylon rather than simply playing one, would be unhinged and represent a serious risk to the safety of their co-players—in nearly a decade of larping, I have yet to encounter players who couldn’t separate reality from fiction in their minds). In this way, alibi helps move participants into a liminal space where their identities are loosened and new types of actions and points of view are possible. That between-ness allows players to try new things and form deep bonds with one another. It’s where the magic of larp resides.

(Image credit: A scene from the larp End of the Line, produced by Bjarke Pedersen’s Odyssé. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen via Flickr.)

Our Aesthetic Categories: An Interview

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline was an invention of the Enlightenment, and appropriately enough, most of the historical discussion has focused on the beautiful and the sublime. However, as J. L. Austin noted in “A Plea for Excuses,” the classic problems are not always the best site for fieldwork in aesthetics: “If only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy.” Cultural theorist and literary critic Sianne Ngai has dedicated years of research to such marginal categories within aesthetics. She talks with Adam Jasper of Cabinet about her ideas.

 

Adam Jasper: You’ve written on cuteness, on envy, on boredom, and now on the interesting. If it could be said that there is a unified project behind these topics, what is it?

Sianne Ngai: I’m interested in states of weakness: in “minor” or non-cathartic feelings that index situations of suspended agency; in trivial aesthetic categories grounded in ambivalent or even explicitly contradictory feelings. More specifically, I’m interested in the surprising power these weak affects and aesthetic categories seem to have, in why they’ve become so paradoxically central to late capitalist culture. The book I’m currently completing is on the contemporary significance of three aesthetic categories in particular: the cute, the interesting, and the zany.

I focus on aesthetic experiences grounded in equivocal affects. In fact, the aesthetic categories that interest me most are ones grounded on feelings that explicitly clash. To call something cute, in vivid contrast to, say, beautiful, or disgusting, is to leave it ambiguous whether one even regards it positively or negatively. Yet who would deny that cuteness is an aesthetic, if not the dominant aesthetic of consumer society?

AJ: Can you say more about the qualities of non-cathartic feelings? The explicit rejection of catharsis was central to Brechtian theater, but is that what you are referring to here?

SN: By non-cathartic I just mean feelings that do not facilitate action, that do not lead to or culminate in some kind of purgation or release—irritation, for example, as opposed to anger. These feelings are therefore politically ambiguous, but good for diagnosing states of suspended agency, due in part to their diffusiveness and/or lack of definite objects.

AJ: To get our hands a little dirtier here, could you provide some examples of typically cute and typically zany things and indicate the characteristics that make them that way?

SN: Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness. It hinges on a sentimental attitude toward the diminutive and/or weak, which is why cute objects—formally simple or noncomplex, and deeply associated with the infantile, the feminine, and the unthreatening—get even cuter when perceived as injured or disabled. So there’s a sadistic side to this tender emotion, as people like Daniel Harris have noted. The prototypically cute object is the child’s toy or stuffed animal.

Cuteness is also a commodity aesthetic, with close ties to the pleasures of domesticity and easy consumption. As Walter Benjamin put it: “If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle.” Cuteness could also be thought of as a kind of pastoral or romance, in that it indexes the paradoxical complexity of our desire for a simpler relation to our commodities, one that tries in a utopian fashion to recover their qualitative dimension as use.

While the cute is thus about commodities and consumption, the zany is about performing. Intensely affective and highly physical, it’s an aesthetic of nonstop action that bridges popular and avant-garde practice across a wide range of media: from the Dada cabaret of Hugo Ball to the sitcom of Lucille Ball. You could say that zaniness is essentially the experience of an agent confronted by—even endangered by—too many things coming at her quickly and at once. Think here of Frogger, Kaboom!, or Pressure Cooker, early Atari 2600 video games in which avatars have to dodge oncoming cars, catch falling bombs, and meet incoming hamburger orders at increasing speeds. Or virtually any Thomas Pynchon novel, bombarding protagonist and reader with hundreds of informational bits which may or may not add up to a conspiracy.

The dynamics of this aesthetic of incessant doing are thus perhaps best studied in the arts of live and recorded performance—dance, happenings, walkabouts, reenactments, game shows, video games. Yet zaniness is by no means exclusive to the performing arts. So much of “serious” postwar American literature is zany, for instance, that one reviewer’s description of Donald Barthelme’s Snow White—“a staccato burst of verbal star shells, pinwheel phrases, [and] cherry bombs of . . . . puns and wordplays”—seems applicable to the bulk of the post-1945 canon, from [John] Ashbery to Flarf; Ishmael Reed to Shelley Jackson.

I’ve got a more specific reading of post-Fordist or contemporary zaniness, which is that it is an aesthetic explicitly about the politically ambiguous convergence of cultural and occupational performance, or playing and laboring, under what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call the new “connexionist” spirit of capitalism. As perhaps exemplified best by the maniacal frivolity of the characters played by Ball in I Love Lucy, Richard Pryor in The Toy, and Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy, the zany more specifically evokes the performance of affective labor—the production of affects and relationships—as it comes to increasingly trouble the very distinction between work and play. This explains why this ludic aesthetic has a noticeably unfun or stressed-out layer to it. Contemporary zaniness is not just an aesthetic about play but about work, and also about precarity, which is why the threat of injury is always hovering about it. ♦

(This interview between Adam Jasper and Sianne Ngai was originally published in Cabinet magazine, issue 43, 2011. Image courtesy Janeen via Flickr.)

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.)

The Women of World of Warcraft: An Interview

Posted on by goplay
“I was like, Wow! There’s all these women playing World of Warcraft again. It’s amazing! But they’re all played by men.”

Artist and gamer Angela Washko talks about entering the social sphere of the online role-playing video game World of Warcraft and investigating players’ views on gender.

Read the transcript.

The Trouble with Losing at Chess: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell
In the first of a two-part essay, writer and tech philosopher Tom Chatfield looks at an early progenitor of artificial intelligence.

 

In 1770, the inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen displayed a mechanical marvel to the Viennese court. Watched by the Archduchess Maria Theresa and her entourage, he opened the doors of a wooden cabinet four feet long, three feet high and just over two feet deep, illuminating its interior by candlelight to display glistening cogs and gears. Seated at the cabinet was a life-size model of a man in Turkish dress—a turban and fur-trimmed robe. In front of the Turk, on top of the cabinet, was a chessboard.

Kempelen closed his cabinet and asked for a volunteer to play a game of chess against the Turk. It was astonishing request. Finely crafted automata had been entertaining royalty for centuries, but the idea that one might undertake an intellectual task such as chess was inconceivable—something for the realm of magic rather than engineering. This was precisely the point. Six months earlier, Kempelen had claimed to the Archduchess that he was utterly unimpressed by magic shows, and could build something far more marvelous himself. The Turk was his proof.

Count Ludwig von Cobenzl, the first volunteer, approached the table and received his instructions: the machine would play white and go first; he must ensure he placed his pieces on the centre of each square. The count agreed, Kempelen produced a key and wound up his clockwork champion, and with a grinding of gears the match began. To its audience’s astonishment, the machine did indeed play, twitching its head in apparent thought before reaching out to move piece after piece. Within an hour, the Count had been defeated, as were almost all the Turk’s opponents during its first years of growing renown in Vienna.

Humanity, for so long self-defined as the pinnacle of nature, had begun to feel less than mighty in the face of its own creations.

A decade later, Maria Theresa’s son, Archduke Joseph II, asked Kempelen to bring his creation to a wider public. The Turk visited Paris, London and Germany, inviting fervent speculation wherever it went. Among its losing opponents were Benjamin Franklin, visiting Paris in 1783, and—under its second owner after Kempelen’s death—the emperor Napoleon in 1809. Napoleon tested the machine with illegal moves, only to see the Turk sweep the pieces off the board in apparent protest.

It was, of course, a fraud—a magic trick masquerading as a mechanism. Behind the cogs and gears lay a secret compartment, from within which a lithe grandmaster could follow the game via magnets attached to the underside of the board, moving the Turk’s arm through a system of levers. In his book The Turk, the British author Tom Standage tells the story in captivating detail—noting that even the unmasking of its workings in the 1820s scarcely diminished the age’s fascination with the Turk. The image of man and machine locked in combat across the chessboard was simply too perfect—and too perfectly matched to a growing unease around technology’s usurpation of human terrain.

Humanity, for so long self-defined as the pinnacle of nature, had begun to feel less than mighty in the face of its own creations. The Industrial Revolution brought fire and steam as well as clockwork into the public imagination, together with anxieties that have echoed across society since: of human redundancy in the face of automation, and human seduction by new kinds of power.

Kempelen’s desire to make not simply a machine but also a kind of magic trick was no accident. The Turk set out to inspire belief, and had picked the perfect arena for persuasion: a bounded zone within which complex questions of ability and intellect were reduced to a single dimension. Sitting down opposite a modern reconstruction of the Turk in Los Angeles, Standage found himself surprised by how “remarkably compelling” the illusion remained, speaking to “its spectators’ deep-seated desire to be deceived.” Tools that can master a task are one thing—but it’s when they are also able to engage and enthrall that enchantment begins.

 

Long before digital computers had gained a genuine mastery of chess, one man devised a twentieth-century game with some remarkable similarities to Kempelen’s scenario. “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?'” wrote Alan Turing in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” The trouble with such a question, he observed, was that answering it was likely to involve splitting hairs over the meaning of the words “machine” and “think.” Thus, he continued, “I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words. The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the ‘imitation game.’”

Turing’s imitation game entailed a conversation between a human tester and two hidden parties, each communicating with the tester via typed messages. One hidden party would be human, the other a machine. If a machine could communicate in this way, such that the human tester could not tell which of their interlocutors was machine or human, then the machine would have triumphed. “The game may perhaps be criticized,” Turing noted, “on the ground that the odds are weighted too heavily against the machine. If the man were to try and pretend to be the machine he would clearly make a very poor showing. He would be given away at once by slowness and inaccuracy in arithmetic.” Pretending to be human meant embracing limitations as much as showing strengths.

The answer was likely to involve splitting hairs over the meaning of the words “machine” and “think.”

Turing’s thought experiment suggested that, if the impression created were robust enough, the means of its achievement became irrelevant. If everyone could be fooled all the time, whatever was “really” going on inside the box ceased to matter. A game was the perfect test of intelligence precisely because it abandoned definitions in place of a challenge that could be passed or failed, as well as endlessly restaged. By excluding the world in favor of a staged performance, it made the ineffable conceivable.

Turing’s game is today played for real during the annual Loebner Prize, which since 1991 has promised $25,000 for the first AI that judges cannot distinguish from an actual human—and that convinces its judges that their other, human conversation partner must be a machine. No machine has got close to winning this award, but competing AIs are ranked in order of achievement. To the frustration of many AI specialists, the most successful chatbots tend to use tricks based on stock responses and emotional impact rather than understanding. Much like the grandly dressed Turk two centuries ago, the setup rewards the use of distractions and deceits: bogus bios, pre-programmed typing errors, hesitations, colloquialisms and insults. To win an imitation game, in certain circumstances at least, is not so much about perfect reproduction as targeted mimicry.

This is echoed in the world at large. If and when people are fooled by modern AIs, something more like stage magic than engineering is going on—a fact emphasize by the importance that companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google attach to quirky features which make their creations more appealing. Ask Amazon’s digital personal assistant Alexa whether “she” can pass the Turing test and you’ll get the reply, “I don’t need to pass that. I am not pretending to be human.” Ask Apple’s Siri if “she” believes in God and you’ll be told, “I would ask that you address your spiritual questions to someone more qualified to comment. Ideally, a human.” The responses have been pre-scripted both to amuse and to disarm. They’re meant to fool us into perceiving not intelligence but innocence—products too charming and too useful to provoke any deeper anxiety. The game is not what it claims to be.

Check out part two of Tom Chatfield’s essay here.

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