Tag: peabody-essex-playtime

Constellation: An Avatar

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

In December’s video from artist Juliana Horner, she transforms herself before our eyes using makeup and digital effects. This month, we find her persona, Claropsyche, known widely on Instagram, “summoning the highest quality cosmic pearl droplets by any means necessary.”

I feel that in the past, I would have opposed using an app like Photoshop to alter an image of myself. I would have tried to be true to myself, or what I believed to be true to myself. But was I not still ‘editing’ by being selective of the images I chose to share with others? Humanity will always edit; it is our definition of editing that will change over time.

I believe that more people will become comfortable with the idea of digitally editing themselves, unattached to the idea that their physical bodies should match the image they’ve made as technology progresses. Not only does it take much longer to alter the physical self rather versus the idea of self- there are limits. And regardless: is it not thoughts that plant the seed of reality? There would be no car without a preexisting idea of a thing that moves to take you from one place to the other, there would be no videogame without its creator’s fever dream . . . I welcome imagination with open arms. Unreal is real enough for me—better, even.

The Throwback Special: A Story

Posted on by Eugenia Bell
Novelist Chris Bachelder took inspiration from an infamous 1970s football play (and grievous injury) to spin a story of friendship, ritual, and growing older.

Today in Sports History

November 18, 1985 — Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann, 36, suffers a career-ending compound fracture of the right leg on a sack by New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor during a telecast of ABC’s Monday Night Football. On first-and-ten from their own 46-yard line, early in the second quarter with the score tied 7–7, the Redskins attempt a trick play called a flea flicker. Theismann hands the ball off to tailback John Riggins, who takes several steps forward and then pitches the ball back to Theismann. Theismann looks to throw a deep pass, but he immediately faces pressure from Giants linebacker Harry Carson. “Theismann’s in a lot of trouble,” says play-by-play commentator Frank Gifford. He steps forward into the pocket to avoid Carson, but Taylor, rushing from Theismann’s blind side, leaps onto his back. Theismann ducks, and as Taylor falls and spins, his thigh strikes Theismann in the calf with enough force to snap the bones of Theismann’s leg. “It sounded like two muzzled gunshots,” Theismann says later. Taylor stands quickly, waving to the Redskins sideline for medical help. ABC decides to show the reverse angle replay twice. “And I suggest,” Gifford says before the replay, “if your stomach is weak, you just don’t watch.” “When you see a competitor like Joe Theismann injured, especially this severely, I don’t think anyone feels good about it,” commentator O. J. Simpson says. Theismann receives an ovation as he is carried from the field at RFK Stadium on a stretcher. “I just hope it’s not his last play in football,” says commentator Joe Namath. Jay Schroeder replaces Theismann at quarterback, and the Redskins defeat the Giants 23–21. Theismann, a former league MVP who had played in 163 consecutive games, never plays again.

 

The hotel parking lot, in which there were no trees, was covered by a thick layer of leaves. The leaves had blown from afar to reach their final resting place. They decayed pungently in pulpy clumps the color of old pennies, impervious now to wind or leaf blower. Beneath this wet stratum of decomposing vegetative matter were the faded arrows, directing traffic flow circularly toward the check-in portico, primarily a nonfunctional architectural gesture of welcome, and only rarely utilized by Old World Europeans and those of very advanced age. The lot was divided by berms, mounded and sparsely coated with bark mulch and cigarette butts. Lights on poles defined the perimeter.

Power lines transected the airspace above the lot. There were few cars in the large lot, and all seemed to have been parked to maximize the distance between them. The rain had begun, its inaugural drops fat and hostile. Vince and Fat Michael stood on a berm, staring upward with attitudes of appraisal and discernment. Vince’s hand still ached from Fat Michael’s handshake. Vince, whose grip was moderate, had attempted, mid-shake, to match Fat Michael’s firmness, and consequently his greeting had been, he knew, restive and undisciplined. At what point, Vince had occasionally wondered, would daily life cease to consist of a series of small threats? What age must he achieve before the large cucumber was stripped of its dark power? Vince and Fat Michael were comparing forecasts for the weekend. Each, as it turned out, had a favorite meteorological website—chosen by chance and maintained by habit—and neither could quite accept the validity of rival predictions. Ignoring the real weather, they squared off about the conjectural weather. Vince scaled the berm to get taller. He suspected Fat Michael’s site was dot-gov. Their forecasts were similar—rain was virtually certain—but each man might as well have been talking to the other about acupuncture or St. John’s wort. Fat Michael rubbed his hands vigorously with antibacterial sanitizing gel.

At what point, Vince had occasionally wondered, would daily life cease to consist of a series of small threats?

Others by now had arrived. Tommy, Carl, Gil, Myron, Gary, Chad. Carl, in a galling violation of an unwritten but commonsense rule of the group, emerged from his extended cab pickup wearing his jersey from last year, that of Giants nose guard Jim Burt. As always, Gary drove in slow circles around the lot, blasting his horn and shouting community-sustaining threats and maledictions. A small school of men darted away from Gary’s car, over two berms toward Derek’s green sedan. After parking, Derek had lifted the hood, and he stood bent at the waist, peering down. Andy, sitting far away in his car with the engine still running, saw the men converge on Derek and his raised hood. The men spread out on the perimeter of the engine, gripping the edge of the car, like zealous spectators at a dice table. There was just enough room for everyone around the warm and possibly defective motor. Their duffel bags lay at their feet. Andy, who may or may not have been hiding here in his running car, turned on his wipers to watch them. They all stared down, nodding. Oh, pistons, oh, hoses! The rain was nasty now, cold and slant. Carl’s Jim Burt jersey was obviously getting wet, forcing his cohorts to decide whether and to what extent Carl was an asshole. Other men arrived, and attended to Derek’s engine: Jeff, Wesley, and Bald Michael, whose nickname, unlike Fat Michael’s, was more or less accurate and non-ironic, though still unkind. Andy watched as the engine summit drew to a close. Derek, always so resourceful, closed the hood and guided the men through the rain toward the protection of the check-in portico. They bowed their heads like monks.

Andy turned off his wipers. He remained in his car with the engine running, pretending to inspect the bottom of his cleats. He held a shoe in one hand, and with the other he used a ballpoint pen to scrape at imaginary dirt around the studs. He had cleaned the cleats carefully earlier in the week, and of course he had cleaned them after the last time he had worn them, a year ago. They were very clean. He wasn’t ready to go inside yet, and he was trying to give the impression to any possible witnesses that he was busy and content here alone in his parked and running car. He cut his engine, not unlike an animal playing dead. He worked earnestly and with renewed vigor at the pretend mud in his cleats.

 

“‘Hair on a mammoth is not progressive in any cosmic sense,’” George said to Rick, a copyright lawyer for Prestige Vista Solutions. He was in the hotel elevator, returning to his room.

“Okay,” Rick said, looking at his shoes.

“That’s Stephen Jay Gould.”

“Is it?” Rick said.

“What he means,” George said, stepping into the elevator with Rick, “is that there is no inherent or objective value—good or bad—to the woolly mammoth’s thick hair. The hair becomes valuable, or not, only within a specific context or environment. Only in an ice age would hair be favorable. Only in warmer temperatures would it be deleterious. The woolly mammoth is not, cosmically, a fit creature, and neither is its hairless counterpart. Fitness, always, means fitness within particular environmental conditions. It’s not as if you could look at both and predict which one would survive.”

Rick pushed his floor button, then pushed the door close button several times. He shifted his weight back and forth from left foot to right.

A play can take its form—and value and fitness—only within the medium, the crucible, of the adversary’s play.

“Gould provides an interesting analogy,” George said slowly. “So you said, what, that the flea flicker was a horrible call. Well, yes and no. I would argue that you need to consider a play in its context, its environment. And the environment of a play is, to a large extent, the opposing team’s play. A play can take its form—and value and fitness—only within the medium, the crucible, of the adversary’s play. What we call a play in football is actually the reaction that occurs between two plays, which up to the point of the snap are just competing abstractions, just fantasies of domination. To call a play is simply to transmit information.”

George was pacing the car. Rick stared at the illuminated and unchanging numbers above the doors. The elevator stopped, and its doors opened to an empty hallway. Rick resolved to write an online review of these elevators.

“The plays that are called from the sidelines are speculative, abstract. The line of scrimmage is the narrow barrier between those abstractions. When the ball is snapped, the barrier dissolves and the two plays begin to act upon each other. We have confluence! From two plays the play comes into being. Each team’s playbook fantasy takes on terrestrial form. The play lives a fleeting life, like certain unstable isotopes. Each play attempts to assert dominance over the other play, by force and deception. This is why football is the most scientific of sports. A game is a series of discrete experiments. Hypothesis, observation, results, analysis, conclusion.”

Every play is in fact a limitless number of plays, depending on contingency.

The number 5 button was illuminated, but Rick jabbed it eight or nine times. Rick’s simple point in the lobby, which he now regretted making, was that if your quarterback’s bone comes out of his leg during a play, then it was a bad play.

“The Throwback Special was not a priori a bad play. Or what did you say? A dumbshit play. You can’t say it was a dumbshit play merely because it didn’t work. That’s a tautology! The trick play happened to be catastrophically bad on that unseasonably warm evening on natural grass on a first and ten from near midfield against the Giants’ charging linebackers, who were drawn in, it is true, by the handoff to Riggins. And of course one of those charging linebackers was Lawrence Taylor, who was really a kind of player the league had never seen before. Taylor himself could make a lot of teams’ plays seem, what you said, fucking asinine. But every play is in fact a limitless number of plays, depending on contingency. Not just the opponent’s play, but injury, wind and weather, field conditions, crowd noise, execution, personnel, and all of the special properties of the compound that is created by the two constituent plays. Bye. Peace. This was fun.”  ♦

(Adapted from The Throwback Special: A Novel by Chris Bachelder. © 2016 by Chris Bachelder. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Photo credit: Football field photograph by Daniel X. O’Neil on Flickr.)

Dispatches from the Field: Come Out and Play

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

“We just want people to have experiences that they think are joyful and fun.”

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.

Read the transcript.

Play Digest: Dust to Digital

Posted on by Eugenia Bell
Games are a core part of cultural history and many academics, librarians, archivists, and laypeople have dedicated enormous amounts of time and expertise to ensuring that how we play, and have played, isn’t completely lost to the sands of time. This week we look at who’s collecting and preserving game history, like this, the first video gaming console, the Odyssey.

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.)

The Gentle Verb: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Narrative designer Cara Ellison untangles the not-so-subtle distinctions between those who design games and those who design the narratives that drive them.

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).

Each player becomes a performer of verbs within the virtual space.

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.

If you cannot tell what the story is saying without sound or text, someone has failed as a storyteller.

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?

We design for what the player can see or hear.

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.

Ritual: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Can the communication central to certain immersive role-playing games help build empathy and resolve cultural misunderstandings? Game designer and writer Adam Dixon looks at some extraordinary games that are attempting just that—and succeeding. Missed part 1? Check it out here.

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.

Our terse communication leaves gaps; spaces to interpret, to misunderstand.

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.

We are offered a glimpse into what it’s like to experience something that disables us.

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.)

Finish This Sentence: Play Is

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz
“Play is central to the creative process. To have room to play is to have room to say what if?”

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].)

 

Playing It Is as If: A Perspective

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Game designer Pippin Barr says, “I don’t make popular videogames. I make videogames to think about videogames.” Here he introduces two games that allow you to participate in the experience of playing them. Think about that.

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….”

Speculative play allows us to tread lightly, even with humor, as we consider the path ahead.

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.

Playground of My Mind: A Memoir

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Artist Julia Jacquette continues her reminiscence of the playgrounds of her youth (and her adulthood), and sees a link between the geometry of space and the natural flow of play.

 

 

The next part of Playground of My Mind will appear soon, stay tuned! See the previous installments here and here.

Play Digest: The World We Play In

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

In today’s climate of political strife, environmental crisis, and escalating international tensions, it makes sense that games offer an opportunity for escapism and fantasy. Increasingly, however, game designers and gamewrights are turning a responsive eye toward current events and drawing on them for inspiration. In this week’s link pack, we think about play globally.

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.)

Propagandopoly: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Is it possible for the world’s playful introduction to capitalism to transmit a new set of values? Writer Naomi Russo looks at Monopoly as an ideological tool.

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.”

[Elizabeth] Magie struggled to generate commercial interest in her game and told that it was “too political” because of its anti-capitalist message.

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.”

Communist countries were quick to ban the game as a bad influence.

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.

Monopoly spin-offs included a Hasidic version entitled Live Piously to Class Struggle, which aimed to show the superiority of Marxism.

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.”

A social psychologist found that Monopoly can be set up to simulate moral decision processes.

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.

Ritual: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell
Roleplaying games, long defined by the likes of Dungeons & Dragons, have expanded—as game designer and writer Adam Dixon discusses here—to include broad new descriptions of the culture-impacting characters we assume playing them.

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.

Words are our most important currency.

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.

Role-playing can be a space for transgressive play.

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.)

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