What happens when a bunch of people get together and design street games for people of all ages? You get the the two-day festival known as Come Out and Play. Held in 2017 in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and on Governor’s Island in New York, Come Out and Play has one primary pursuit: bringing fun outdoors.
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While the Internet Archive has done yeoman’s work in bringing back the warm fuzzies around Dig Dug, Pole Position, Street Fighter, and something called Return to Zork, the Video Game History Foundation is hard at work making sure that the more ephemeral aspects of video games don’t disappear. Founder Frank Cifaldi envisions a broad digital archive of game packaging, press and marketing materials, source code, and playable binary code, but also a rich library of print material, starting with his own collection of video game magazines.
Similarly, in the UK, the BBC Games Archive has collected, restored, and made available to the public a group of games developed in the early 1980s for the BBC Micro, an early home computer also adopted throughout Britain in schools.
The UK’s Victoria & Albert Museum in London has an outpost in Bethnal Green dedicated to all things childhood, but is known for its stunning collection of British and international board, card, and sporting games, along with dolls and dollhouses, figurines, LEGOs, and so much more.
Meanwhile, in Nuremburg, is the German Games Archive. Founded by a German literature scholar a few hours away in Marburg, the Games Archive is home to 30,000 German-language parlor games dating back to 1945. It even hosts an initiative called Stadt-Land-Spielt! (City-Country-Play!) to “promote games as a cultural asset in society.”
Back in the U.S., the University of Michigan Library has established the Computer & Video Game Archive, which includes a “Serious Games” category dedicated to games “designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment.” These include a game from 2011 that teaches players to handle the aftermath of natural disasters and a game that allows users to contribute to scientific research on protein folding.
The LGBTQ Games Archive should be required viewing for anyone interested in the cultural history of gaming or anyone entering the gaming industry. Not yet a fully fledged archive, but rather a resource of “queer game content” in digital games dating to the 1980s, including everything from Super Mario Bros. to Caper in the Castro. Game on, indeed!
Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.
(Photo credit: The Odyssey, the first video gaming console, was manufactured in 1972 by Magnavox. Courtesy of Heinz Nixdorf Museum Forum. Photo by Jan Brown.)
I design stories for video games. Some people think this means I’m the person who writes the line, Oh my god we’ve got to get out of here! Some studios still believe that this is all I should do: “Isn’t that what scriptwriters do? They write what characters say.”
But “narrative designers” have a broader remit. First we decide on the themes, the core motivation for telling a story, the politics of it. Then we create characters around those themes. Then comes the three-act structure: how the characters may change, and the minuscule plot details that lead you to a satisfying ending. Then, and only then, do you get to the dialogue. Slicing up the story so that it becomes a series of delicious, escalating, conflict-driven scenes (this is also how “branching narrative” is developed in games) is one of the hardest parts of the job. You decide what to show and how to make it the most interesting thing to show.
Most of this planning, this discussion, this detail work is the invisible part of the writing. Most people think that when someone sits down to make a story that it’s just as I am doing now: typing words into screenwriting software. But there are hours and hours of note taking, an agonizing amount of media consumption, standing in the shower, sitting in meeting rooms or cafes (notebook and pencil in hand), cursing and raging, and trying to entice a writing partner. Before you can begin writing the very first scene in a drama, many hair-pulling hours have been spent wondering if that scene will be worth the thousands of dollars that will be spent on making it to the screen. And that’s before even the first executive reads it (and probably hates it).
Designing stories for video games is complicated further by one particular thing: the verb. Video games have a lot in common with theater and improv. The game designer creates a virtual space in which each player becomes a performer of verbs within that virtual space. The narrative designer’s job is not just to decide what is shown, as in film, but what it means that you can experience specific interactions. A film director may control what you are seeing and hearing at all times. But in games it is the set of verbs, or what labor you can do, that tells the story. It is the experience of what doing is available that tells the player who their character is, what their purpose is, and most importantly, gives them the experience of story. It’s perhaps the most empiricist of all mediums.
That a game’s story power comes from the verb is still controversial in games because a “game designer” and a “narrative designer” are not always the same person. When they are, the game has a better chance of being nuanced and meaningful. Yet game designers often are employed to undertake the considerable mechanical work of constructing the video game verb’s execution, while the narrative designer is supposed to give those verbs emotional resonance. This may not make sense to people outside of video games: Why isn’t the narrative designer directly constructing the mechanical production of narrative?
Unfortunately it has a lot to do with the separation of sciences and humanities in schools: the idea that tech or science know-how is for introvert non-fiction-reading, math-nerd men, while the humanities is for feelings-junkies and Austen-reading “girls.” This self-fulfilling prophecy, and a lack of a balanced education on both sides (a combination of communication, ethics, and literacy in the sciences, and tech literacy in the humanities) has hamstrung us. To look at blockbuster video games (and tech products like Twitter) is to recognize that few people in tech are schooled in the complicated Big Themes of Empathy and Communication, or in how to produce caring and nuanced people-friendly systems. This is often the result of a university system that proselytizes Product Innovation, Novelty, and the Free Market as king. Game developers are so overworked that by the time they get into the business with their hard-fought tech skills they have no time to sleep, never mind read Nabokov and contemplate theories of conflict resolution. And for the large part good storytellers are fantastically frightened of technology: when you’re already poor, taking two years to learn how to program is out of the question. So we two are stuck on the verb, and we have to work together, often with different creative languages.
As my technical skills in game design have leapt forward, one of the biggest realizations I have had is this: much like how animators or comics writers regard successful storytelling, it’s all in the action.If you cannot tell what the story is saying in a 3D game without voiceover or text, someone has failed as a storyteller. One of the best pieces of comics craft advice is: write each panel as if there were absolutely no dialogue. With just a glance at the page, the reader should know exactly what is happening and how the characters feel about it.
To implement this theory in a game, a narrative designer has to constantly pitch to her colleagues: the environment artists, the animators, the game designers, the audio designers, sometimes even the coders who determine the transition speeds and frequency of behaviors in-game. And these days I find myself more and more pitching to the team that we might consider having no dialogue at all. What if I design a story that needs no words? How can we do that well? What about using silence here? Isn’t that more powerful than being overloaded with sound and chit-chat?
Some developers are incredulous at this coming from a job title they associate with screenwriting. But the advantage is that I am usually not asked to “fix” gameplay by having an obtuse piece of dialogue explain how to solve a puzzle, or how to connect A to B, or cover up a plot hole. We are forced to design so that mistakes cannot be made like this. We design for what the player can see or hear. There is less room for “Ah, Cara will fix it” (although, I still do fix things with story, plot, and character appearance). I sometimes glibly remark that I want to make my own job obsolete: the less dialogue the better the game is. But that’s me playing into my own complaint: narrative design isn’t just writing. It’s communicating in every form possible so that the natural output is that someone somewhere feels a connection to the material. After all, when we watch someone touch a loved one’s face, we don’t have to hear them say “I love you” to know that the action itself distills all the meaning we need. Now all we need to do is design a game capable of that gentle verb. ♦
Photo credit: Image from caraellison.co.uk. Courtesy the author.
Other games use rules to explore other issues. The Quiet Year is a game about communities. Together, we play as the people of a small village, rather than individual characters. We work together to define that community—the landscape, people, politics and resources—and then we guide it through one year.
We start in the gentle days of spring. We take it in turns, each of them representing one week. When it is our turn we draw a card that gives us a prompt to answer.“How does a girl cause trouble?” “There’s a bad omen, what does it mean?” “Is there anyone else on the map?” Once asked, the player takes an action that further explores and changes the community. Seasons pass and as we approach autumn and winter things get harder. Divides grow wider, projects are sabotaged, the land becomes tough.
Through all of this there is no freewheeling debate, the rules forbid that. We talk in clipped sentences, and only on our turn. Words are the most important thing, and the rules reflect that. Our terse communication leaves gaps; spaces to interpret, to misunderstand. If we want to break the silence, to actually communicate about an issue, we have only one respite. We can use our action to hold a discussion. Each of us offering a single line about a topic, reflecting a view from the community.
When the discussion ends, play passes to the next player, the next week. If we spend our time discussing a problem, we don’t get to act on it. Someone else has to do that, or we have to wait until our next turn, and by then other issues, other priorities will have inevitably emerged.
While we play we reveal the imperfections of our own communities. We are reminded of the inequality of our voices and opinions, and that even when we get a platform for our opinion, nuance is often lost. What gets conveyed depends on the audience’s willingness to hear. We get drowned out by people who think they know better, ignored because of who we are, overruled by those with an agenda.
When this happens in the game, when something happens that we don’t like or agree with, we have one recourse. We can take a contempt token, a symbol of our disapproval. We hold on to these tokens for as long as we like, we can give them up if we take a selfish action or someone makes amends. Largely though, they are an untethered mechanic: symbolic and cathartic.
14 Days is a two-player game about living with chronic migraines. We each create a character and tell the story of two weeks of their life. We map out a calendar with the things they need to do, what they’d like to achieve. As you play you juggle these with the reality of unpredictable pain. We play out these difficulties, explore what they mean for someone’s life. We are offered a glimpse into what it’s like to experience something that disables us, that makes it harder for us to achieve what we’d like. While ostensibly about migraines, part of the game’s effectiveness is that it gives space for players to consider the thing blocking them from achieving everything they’d like. The calendar is central to the game, on it is mapped everything from work we need to do to friendships we need to maintain. Removing our ability to achieve everything forces us to consider what is important. We are able consider the characters’ relationship with the pieces of their life, and in in doing so reflect on our own.
It’s rare that a set of rules can make us feel a thing outside of play. They’re not meant to. Rulebooks are like recipes, simple directions to play a game. The feelings and emotions usually well up once gameplay begins. Dog Eat Dog’s rules are barbed. It’s a game about colonialism and its human consequences. We play as natives on an island being invaded by an advanced nation. We create both of these forces, the occupation and the natives together. We define traits of both—maybe the islanders sing songs together each morning, perhaps the occupation refuse to speak in any language that isn’t their own. Then we assume our roles. The richest play as the occupation, the rest are the natives. It is up to us to define what “the richest” means. Through the game we explore what it is like to live through colonization. Playing as natives we know that our fate is settled in one of two ways: we can either assimilate and accept the new ways or we can sacrifice our lives to resist. It is possible for the colonists to be defeated, but it is rare (usually the best we can hope for is to influence the occupiers’ values). The mechanics are weighted against the natives. The game is unfair. The occupiers can force their way into scenes, they can ignore the rolls of dice to force the outcomes they want.
The barbs in Dog Eat Dog’s rules serve a purpose. Most players will have had no experience of colonialism, will not have faced that kind of prejudice. The rule makers know we might be uncomfortable, that as the occupier we might hold back. By forcing us to discuss wealth, by unequally slanting the resolution mechanics, the game knocks us off balance. We are forced to let our guard down, to tell the right story.
Play unsafe
We have a ritual. Once a week, or a month, or whenever we can find time, we gather around a table and tell stories. We create a world and act characters within it. We share in each others’ creativity, our friends’ inputs blending with our own. Sometimes when we play we tell difficult stories, critique the world around us, use the game as a safe space to transgress.
There is magic in these stories, but we should be aware of their limits. It’s tempting to imbue games with power they don’t have, to oversell the power of empathy. We can learn compassion, but we shouldn’t mistake the glimpse of understanding we gain from playing a game for understanding someone’s life.
Games tell stories through the void, their structures create space where stories can grow. When that void is filled, it is filled by us. It is directed, but ultimately most of what we learn about is ourselves. They give us space to understand our own values and assumptions, and, where necessary, challenge them. ♦
(Image credit: Image of College of DuPage Sci-Fi/Fantasy Club hosting CODCON 2015 on Flickr.)
We’ve met extraordinary artists, scholars, and fans of play while out and about in the field. We asked them to complete our manifesto and tell us “Play is . . . .” Here are their responses.
Featured in this video are Pedro Reyes, Eric Zimmerman, Jade Ivy, Eric Turiel, Tritemare, Charlotte Richards, Mattie Brice, Travis Larchuk, Jaden D. Francis, Tracy Fullerton, Jane Friedhoff, Sam Roberts, Alioune N’gom, Everett Phillips, Duke DeVilling, Kristen Skillman, Randall Roberts, Amanda Penny, Courtney Price, and Stephanie Barish.
Read the transcript.
(Music by Green North by DKSTR [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US].)
Speculative play is a form of critical design and creation that prioritizes players’ own engagement with key questions around technology and human society through play. The speculation involved allows us to look into the future and consider where we’re headed and what it might look like once we’re there. The play allows us to tread lightly, even with humor, as we consider the path ahead.
The two scenarios posed in my games It Is as If You Were Playing Chess and It Is as If You Were Doing Work are speculative fictions that explore future possibilities for technology and how they might affect our lives. And yet the two pieces of software described are real and can be played right now in your web browser. They are examples of what my colleagues and I are calling speculative play, a design approach focused on creating playful software that explores possible alternate presents and futures through interactive experiences. In our projects, we are most interested in the expressivity of interaction itself and how this can be used to encourage curiosity, questioning, and exploration not just for us as researchers but for the players and users of the software. Speculative play allows us all not just to ask “what if?” but to play “It Is as If….”
It Is as If You Were Playing Chess not only poses the idea of a chess game you merely pretend to be playing, but brings it to life and so allows you to participate in the experience itself. You really can ride a subway or bus, take out your cellphone, and load the game up in your browser. Hearing or reading about the game is one thing, but going through its motions yourself—raising an eyebrow or scratching your neck when instructed—places you in the alternate present the game comes from. With the game in your hands, it becomes possible to identify subtleties of experience, of context, and of emotion that might not easily come to you if you only read about the game. Likewise, It Is as If You Were Doing Work does not only suggest a potential future without human labor and the sense of value we draw from it, it positions you as an agent in that very world. As you click your mouse and tap on your keyboard, you are interacting with that future in ways that go beyond an intellectual understanding of its possibility: you are able to entertain how it might feel. You are able to experience the thrill of achievement associated with success in the game as well as the inevitable hollowness that the cumulative “achievements” lead you toward.
These two games are designed, most of all, for you to ask questions about possible futures or presents based on the interactions you carry out and experience. How does it feel to be released from the need to actively manage your responses? What does it mean when we willingly let go of our own agency with technology? To what extent do we perform with technology as a signal to others that we are useful, productive members of society? And how do and will these elements of technology transform us and our world? Rather than answer in words, these two games invite you to ask these questions of yourself, with the support of your own experience, however brief, in the worlds the games draw you into.
Look for more from Pippin Barr in February.
Highly produced life-like games—and games based on historical events—are, of course, not new to the gaming world, but indie game companies and designers are using everything from world events to community activism to personal experiences to build meaningful, education, and empathy-building games.
The war in Syria has been rich fodder for distilling understanding about the migrant crisis. Path Out is an autobiographical game that follows its creator, artist Abdullah Karam, as he escapes Syria—dodging land mines and armed military, the game may look like a Japanese anime, but addresses not just the war and the refugee crisis, but also the heartbreaking decisions families have to make about who stays and who goes. Bury Me, My Love, is a beautifully rendered interactive fiction game that presents as a WhatsApp conversation between Nour—who has hopes of reaching Europe from her home in battle-riven Homs—and her husband Majd. The player communicates—in the role of Majd, who stays behind—with Nour as she makes her stressful way out of the country.
Here is an excellent—and often surprising—overview of Iran’s gaming industry and the role politics, sanctions, and the black market have on it.
Is Israel weak at gaming at the expense of augmented reality? There is an app that can be downloaded at an Israeli-sponsored exhibition that “disappears” the Al Aqsa Mosque from the landscape.
Climate change is also a point of interest for many designers. Patrick Jagoda of the University of Chicago will soon be launching an ARG called Overcast and Earth Primer is billed as a progressive earth sciences textbook textbook you can play with. Old Weather is a participatory game that will help scientists gather and catalyze historic Arctic weather data to better understand the impact of climate change.
Block by Block takes Minecraft as a base for empowering underprivileged communities to improve their surroundings.
Closer to home, studies show that returning veterans can find coping mechanisms through the avatars and gameplay mechanics of video gaming and VR.
The aforementioned Patrick Jagoda and his Game Changer Chicago Design Lab also develops community-focused civic-engagement games with teenage students in Chicago—many aimed at addressing sexual health awareness, including HIV testing, the relationship between reproductive health and socio-economic status, and sexual harassment.
Kurt Squire designs educational games that skill-build and motivate young people to take direct action in their communities.
Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.
(Photo credit: Image of Path Out gameplay, designed by Abdullah Karam, courtesy of the author.)
Monopoly is a game in which anyone from a child to a grandma can become a ruthless property mogul. Sold in over 114 countries, the game was first commercially marketed as a success story of the American dream—a game invented, its packaging claimed, by an unemployed man for whom it made millions during the Great Depression. As a potent worldwide symbol for capitalism it has become so well recognized that during the Occupy London protest in 2011, an oversized Monopoly board sat outside St Paul’s Cathedral, featuring a destitute Rich Uncle Pennybags and attributed by many to famous street artist Banksy. The message to everyone was clear.
The young woman who originally invented the game, however, had far different ideals. Elizabeth Magie was inspired by her passion for the anti-monopolist economic theories of politician Henry George, and her desire to teach them to others in a simple, compelling way led her to develop The Landlord’s Game. In the words of her 1903 patent application, the game was designed “not only to afford amusement to the players, but to illustrate to them how under the present or prevailing system of land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprises.”
The game had two sets of rules. One was similar to today’s Monopoly, while the other rewarded everyone and avoided monopolies. The game was featured in The Review in 1902, where Magie was quoted as saying, “There are those who argue that it may be a dangerous thing to teach children how they may thus get the advantage of their fellows, but let me tell you there are no fairer-minded beings in the world than our own little American children. Watch them in their play and see how quick they are [ . . . ] to cry, ‘No fair!’”
Nonetheless, Magie struggled to generate commercial interest in her game. Parker Brothers told her it was “too political,” most likely because of its length, complexity, and anti-capitalist message. The game was fairly didactic, and its values were at odds with the American economic system, not to mention with Parker Brothers, a company that stood to benefit from the very practices that the game sought to censure.
Still, the game had popular appeal and quickly evolved beyond Magie’s control. Some changes were slight, such as adaptations of the street names to the players’ neighborhoods, but others were radical. Perhaps the biggest change was the reversal of Magie’s original intent: as players created their own boards and rules, they focused on the elements that were the most exciting for them, and for non-Georgists, those were accumulating capital, building a real-estate empire, and dominating the market. This shift was so marked that the game came to be known colloquially as “Monopoly.”
Monopoly was also the name used by Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman, when he took the game to Parker Brothers, pretending it was his original invention. His version, stripped of Georgist ideals, was already selling well, so Parker Brothers decided to take a chance on it, and Monopoly’s popularity spread quickly across American and European nations.
Communist countries were quick to ban the game as a bad influence that spread capitalist values. In Cuba not only was the game banned, but the existing boards were destroyed after a direct 1959 ruling by the newly empowered Fidel Castro. Some countries such as Hungary adopted the alternative route of providing a replacement. After banning the Hungarian version of the game, Kapitaly, they began to sell a low-budget board game known as Gazdálkodj Okosan! Loosely translated as either “Economize Wisely,” or “Budget Shrewdly,” the game was far more politically correct, encouraging hard work and exercise with didactic Chance cards chastising bad behavior. “You have dirtied the street! Pay 10 forints,” read one such not-so-subtle card.
But as Professor David Stark writes, a state-sponsored game couldn’t usurp Monopoly as simply as that. He tells the story of a Hungarian friend, writing, “You did not need to be a nine-year-old dissident to see that Monopoly was the more exciting game,” and going on to explain that in his friend’s home Gazdálkodj Okosan! boards were turned over and used to form the basis of a homemade Kapitaly. The result was something of a hybrid born from remembered rules of Kapitaly, the cards of Gazdálkodj Okosan!, and the innovations of Hungarian children themselves.
The failure of Gazdálkodj Okosan! to impart its message has not discouraged others from creating their own politically motivated adaptations. In fact, the spin-offs by academics, artists, and others seem endless, from a Hasidic version entitled Live Piously that reinforces Satmar community values, to Class Struggle, which aims to show the superiority of Marxism. None of these adaptions have had anywhere near the success of Monopoly. Their small sales suggest that they mostly remain within their community rather than spreading their values more widely.
If games can transmit values, however, why did Magie’s version fail while Darrow’s succeeded? As Keith Devlin, the “NPR Math Guy,” told KQED ’s Mindshift, “Games are just simulators with an internal incentive structure.” And The Landlord’s Game lacks real incentive. As professors Dr. Mary Flanagan and Dr. Helen Nissenbaum discuss in Values at Play in Digital Games, students at Virginia Tech who played both versions found that while The Landlord’s Game made its point, Monopoly was much more fun.
So are users learning to be ruthless capitalists when they play Monopoly? Research fellow Dr. Marcus Carter says probably not, arguing that “despite the arguments and allegations of betrayal Monopoly is likely to cause in homes this Christmas, its morality is as unrealistic as that in Grand Theft Auto. Players are granted no moral choice whether or not to bankrupt their opponents and consequently, there is little moral involvement.”
On the other hand, social psychologist Paul Piff believes that Monopoly might be able to be used to expose moral codes or ethics. Piff uses rigged games, in which the rules are changed to make one player unbeatably wealthy, to reveal what he believes his earlier research has shown: that wealthier people tend to lack empathy. His studies with rigged games showed that the person given all the advantages quickly became accustomed to them and played ruthlessly, feeling little to no regard for the other less fortunate player. His conclusions supported his continued work on the so-called “empathy gap,” but they also reveal two things about the game: first, that Monopoly can be set up to simulate moral decision processes, but second and more importantly, that those morals are affected by the rigged circumstances of the game. In other words, how people play isn’t necessarily how they act in the real world, but it is affected by the type of player the game sets them up to become. There is no evidence that they continue to act in such a fashion after they stop playing that role.
Flanagan contends that “Monopoly successfully imparts the values of competition, individual wealth, and exclusivity,” but it’s worth noting that these values weren’t a critique of the society in which the game evolved, nor of our society today, but rather a reflection of it. This makes it hard to know whether Monopoly really encourages such values, or simply represents the values its players already have.
So can games like Monopoly work to transmit new values? The more than 200 versions would seem to suggest that many believe so. But the lesson from the many adaptations that have failed to catch on, and from Magie’s original game, is clear: a game can be used to spread a message, but for it to reach beyond a limited target audience, first and foremost, it must be fun. ♦
“Propagandopoly” originally appeared in Works That Work, No 9. Photo credit: Courtesy of Thomas Forsyth, LandlordsGame.info.
This is our ritual: every Monday we sit around this table, covered with paper and pencils, books, and dice. Six of us. We talk, share jokes, and catch up until the sky behind the window turns black. Then we begin, we take on our roles. Five of us become someone else, we become actors playing a character we’ve designed. The other leads us in the ritual. They knit together a fictional world and all the people within it.
Games create stories. In between their structures and rules are gaps we fill with our own narrative—a fruitful void. This void is everywhere a game isn’t, the places where art, world building, writing, and mechanics don’t touch. It’s an invitation for players to create, to be playful with story. For some games this is a happy accident, an aside—when we play Cluedo we might create personalities for Mrs. Plum and Colonel Mustard. It adds to our enjoyment of the game, but isn’t really intended. Other games use the void purposefully: The Sims gives us tools to build characters, a house, a world, and then asks us to infer our own narratives and motives from the abstract language and actions on screen.
A man, covered head-to-toe with strange tattoos, appears as if from nowhere under the streetlight. “Help me,” he says, grasping your wrists, “They’re coming.” What do you do?
You’d never paid much attention to Darius before. You’d always thought he was leagues above you, it could never happen. But it is happening. He is walking towards you, frost-fire eyes locked on yours. What do you do?
For days your head has been under bombardment—pain, hallucinations, fever. You’ve spent half of your week locked in your darkened bedroom, but they still won’t go away. Tonight, your friend who is normally half the world away, is in town. What do you do?
This is about games that tell stories on purpose, that use mechanics to create spaces for players to tell stories—roleplaying games. Games played as a group, usually in real life though sometimes through Skype or Hangouts. We collectively imagine a world and tell a story that happens within it. We play with paper and dice, though words are our most important currency.
Dungeons & Dragons is the most famous of these games. A fantasy game where we play as elvish paladins, half-orc mages, and halfling rogues, raiding dungeons to protect the world and steal treasure. It’s the roleplaying game that normally appears on television shows, it’s the one that most people play first, it’s the one other games rally against. Let’s get out from under its shadow.
Roleplaying games aren’t all Dungeons & Dragons. There are games of countless genres, that explore mature themes, that have simpler rules, that are radical in rules and content.
Storygames, or indie roleplaying games, began as a movement in the early 2000s, defined by both their independent development, and, more importantly, their narrativist design. At the heart of storygames is the desire to put story first, the mechanics work to drive the narrative forward. Storygames tend to focus on a particular kind of story, and give players the tools to best tell it. We might tell a story of people trapped in a love triangle, play out a Coen brothers heist where everyone is down on their luck, or remember a made up arthouse film.
Limits of character
Usually the first step of playing a storygame is to create characters. We spend time together designing the person we want to play. We assemble a rough collection of stats, abilities, and traits that go some way to define who we’re playing. We give everyone an idea of who we want to be and then we play to find out more about them. We use these fragments to create a rounded person.
We often play people who are different from us; we might be a different species or have abilities that we don’t posess in real life. This creates space for transgressive play. We can occupy characters that have different genders, social classes, or sexualities than us; we can use our characters to explore ourselves, our fantasies, and the issues we care about.
There are games that go out of their way to encourage this style of play. Apocalypse World creates an environment that explicitly undermines the masculine, capitalistic power fantasies seen in a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction. In its character creation it foregrounds different expressions of gender. We make a choice of both our gender—ambiguous, female, male, transgressing—and how we express it, through a choice of the fashion we wear.
Apocalypse World has inspired a range of games. Using similar rules and mechanics, there are Powered by the Apocalypse games of every genre, from steampunk to comedy. Many of these games also adopt Apocalypse World’s progressive politics. Night Witches explores the realities of being a woman pilot in the Soviet air force, players dogfight the Nazis at night and face their own femininity—and people’s reactions to it—by day.
In Monsterhearts, we play teenagers in a high school where feelings of adolescent monstrousness are made literal. Our characters aren’t just students, they’re also werewolves, ghosts, witches, and ghouls. Figuring who we are and where we belong in the world is a central theme of the game, and our character’s sexuality is a large part of this. The rules explicitly tell us not to define our character’s sexuality, we must play in order to discover it. When someone tries to turn on our character, we use the dice to see if it works, to see what we find hot. How we react to that, how our character feels about what turns her on, is entirely down to us.
It is through our characters that we are given permission to explore our expressions and our fantasies, and whatever we choose, the implications of character bleed through into our game. ♦
In part 2, Adam Dixon looks at the growing impact of community, immersion, and empathy in role-playing games.
(Image credit: Feature image by and courtesy of the author. Apocalypse World image courtesy of D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker.)
African-American artist Mark Bradford has an inspired take on the role of play. He specializes in large mixed-media collages that bring together a variety of ephemera from urban communities, from end papers used at black beauty salons, to flyers advertising everything from divorce court to DNA testing, to other seeming pieces of refuse, in new and innovative ways. This work disrupts commonplace definitions of “trash” and “art,” inviting the audience to consider alternative paradigms. Likewise, Bradford’s art installations and video projects tease out the connections between popular culture and so-called high art to trouble or perhaps even collapse the usual distinctions between the two genres. There is a running theme of a particular type of irreverence and playfulness in Bradford’s oeuvre.
In a 2007 video installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bradford contrasts two events—the annual Martin Luther King Day parade in Los Angeles and a busy Muslim night market in Cairo. Both videos capture black and brown bodies at play. The video of the King Day parade shows cheerleaders and dancers celebrating the life and legacy of a slain civil rights leader; the scenes of the Cairo night market highlight the exclusive world of a Muslim-only night market complete with amusement park rides and street food. Yet, there is an important distinction between the two videos. While the Muslim carnival goers ride merry-go-rounds and eat sweets with their loved ones in peace, the MLK celebration happens amidst, or in spite of, a heavy police presence. Bradford notes, “I go to the parade every year. Certain details, you start to see over and over and over and over again, such as the policing. There’s as much policing of the parade as a parade. Every frame—and it’s not that I tried to put police in it, they were just in every frame.”7 So, the video invites us to consider, what does it mean to celebrate and play in a state of surveillance? As Bradford himself says, “To see so many black bodies in public space it’s always political.” Blacks existing and playing in public is a political act, a transgressive event. What might it mean if the black parade goers had a safe space like the Cairo night market? Would their play look different or hold a different meaning?
Bradford also troubles the line between playfulness and politics this in his video installation Practice (2003). In Practice Bradford appears onscreen on a basketball court, dribbling the ball and taking shots at the basket. He has also donned a Los Angeles Lakers jersey and pairs it with an incongruously large antebellum hoop skirt. The figure of Bradford playing basketball in a hoop skirt is a comical one, highlighting how impractical a hoop skirt is for any sort of athletic movement. He admits, “I wanted to create a condition, a struggle. I would create this huge antebellum hoop skirt out of a Laker uniform. My goal was to focus on dribbling the basketball and making the shot. But, obviously, when you have an antebellum skirt fanning out about four feet around you that’s going to be difficult. And it was an incredibly windy day, one of those Santa Ana, Southern California incredibly windy days where everything was blowing. What it created was this billowing of the wind. It would catch underneath the dress. It became almost like I was floating.”
Both the outfit and the elements conspire against Bradford’s free movement, mimicking the structures that impede marginalized bodies daily. Hoop skirts and other restrictive gendered clothing styles have had the effect of restricting their wearer’s movements. How could a nineteenth-century woman, for example, play, run, or even walk quickly if she is wearing pounds of encumbering fabric? Simply put, she cannot. She is not meant for movement but rather she is ornamental, an object that is perhaps moveable but which does very little moving on its own accord. Yet Bradford does move and play in this ridiculous outfit, not unlike the participants of the MLK parade who play and celebrate despite the threat of police violence: “And I would fall and get up and I would make the shot sometimes, and I wouldn’t sometimes, and I would always get up.” There is something comically poetic about Bradford ambling about a basketball court, dribbling a ball, occasionally falling down, but always rising again to take a shot. This playful take on basketball represents a larger metaphor about transgressing boundaries. Bradford reveals, “It was about roadblocks on every level—cultural, gender, racial. Regardless that they’re there, it is important to continue. You keep going. You keep going, and so that’s what it was. And I made the hoop, I made the shot. I always make the shot. Sometimes it takes me a little longer to get there, but I always make the shot.” Ultimately, play for marginalized peoples, particularly black bodies, is not necessarily about complete freedom to do as they would like, but celebrating what our bodies can do despite very real obstacles. ♦
Return to part one of Susana Morris’s “Black Bodies at Play.”
7 This and the quotes that follow are culled from the following interview: https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s4/mark-bradford-in-paradox-segment.
Mark Bradford, Practice, 2003, video (3 minutes in length). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, Switzerland.
The Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition about fashion, Items: Is Fashion Modern?, includes the shirt Pelé wore during the 1958 World Cup and Colin Kaepernick’s #7 jersey from his years as a 49er.
Project Backboard finds disused basketball courts around the country and transforms the playing surfaces into playable large-scale artworks. Maria Molteni‘s similar project in Boston.
Graphic designers Ill-Studio and fashion brand Pigalle collaborate on a colorful basketball court in Paris.
Will wonders never cease? Books on basketball in the library stacks at the Met? (Yes, that Met.)
The Beautiful Game has inspired a lot of art, some of it quotidian, some of it sublime, some, well, you be the judge. Other artistic soccer enthusiasts include Paul Pfeiffer, whose video sculptures often examine culture’s fascination with sports celebrity; photographer Jessica Hilltout, who looks at the role of football in African nations through its “open-air temples” to the sport; and Austrian painter Georg Eisler, who captured the horror of the Hillsborough tragedy.
Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.
(Image credit: William La Chance’s art adorns a basketball court in Kinloch, Missouri. Photo by Daniel Peterson.)
