Tag: play-is

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.)

Black Bodies at Play: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

In part 2 of her essay, scholar and activist Susana Morris extends her look at racial identity and play and reflects on the work of artist Mark Bradford. Missed part 1? Check it out here.

 

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.

What does it mean to celebrate and play in a state of surveillance?

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.”

It was about roadblocks on every level—cultural, gender, racial.

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.

Play Digest: Full Court Press

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

It’s that special time of year when hockey, basketball, major league soccer, football (and even the tail end of baseball’s post-season) merge. This week’s link pack is all about art and sports.

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.)

 

Playground of My Mind: A Memoir

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

In the second part of artist Julia Jacquette’s graphic history of the adventure playground, she finds both a connection between New York and Amsterdam’s approaches and a geometrical key to living and playing in the same space. Missed part 1? Check it out here.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Julia Jacquette’s memoir. Coming soon.

Gradient: An Avatar

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz
Artist Juliana Horner, known widely as her persona on Instagram, creates extraordinary makeup effects. She brings her unabashed creativity to us with a special series of videos. This week, a first glimpse.

Horner tells us more: “Times are changing. As technology continues to press into the social realm, the shape of our tools outlines how we create, identify, and PLAY. With quick access to camera and video technology, people around the world are sculpting themselves in ways previously unknown to the darkroom. The makeup industry is booming, and apps used to both define and contort are becoming a fixture of internet culture and self expression. Real-life communication and video game fantasy grow closer each day; in a way, we are each creating our own AVATAR . . . which player are you?”

Here, in the museum: a spectacle! To the melody of “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” from The Planets by composer Gustav Holst.

Look for a new installment from Juliana Horner next month.

Black Bodies at Play: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

How does playing with racial identity reinforce contemporary minstrelsy? Scholar and activist Susana Morris looks at the practice in art and culture from the Br’er Rabbit stories to pop star Miley Cyrus.

Comedian and writer Paul Mooney often says, “everybody wants to be black but nobody wants to be black.” To be sure, Mooney is known for provocative claims and bold language in his own standup and with his work with Richard Pryor, but this statement is not just a colorful play on words: it also describes the strange dance of desire and repulsion regarding blackness in the American cultural imagination. When divorced from actual black bodies, historical markers of black embodiment—from supposed sexual prowess, to proficiency in sports, to full lips and curvy figures, and other markers—are often viewed as fun, playful ways for non-blacks to change their appearance or to take on a new identity. This desire to embody aspects of blackness explains Miley Cyrus’s attempts at twerking, Katy Perry’s baby hair and cornrows, and Kylie Jenner’s new lips, hips, and behind, not to mention Rachel Dolezal’s so-called transracial identity. When the trappings of blackness imply the possibility of being cool, sexy, and authentic even if for a small moment in time.

Playing with blackness in online spaces can show up as what Lauren Michele Jackson calls a type of “digital Blackface,” or the “various types of minstrel performance that become available in cyberspace,” wherein non-black people use memes and GIFs with famous or anonymous black people to illustrate moments of feeling sassy, angry, lazy, petty, and the like.1 Digital blackface has become a sort of shorthand (not unlike using emojis) in social media, personal messaging, and even in digital journalism. Perhaps inserting a GIF of Oprah giving away cars on her show or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt actor Titus Burgess gasping at a computer screen can convey “I am really excited” or “I’m very shocked” better than the words themselves. Or perhaps it is something about the “exaggerated” expressiveness that their blackness permits is speaking a language that plain English simply cannot.

Viewing, consuming, enjoying, and profiting from black bodies in pain has been an American pursuit from the days of black-face minstrelsy.

Blackness in whiteface is playtime, an American sport. But it’s not a wholly American pastime. Take for instance, German figure model Martina Adama, who underwent an extreme chemical tanning process and other surgical procedures to “become” a black woman. For Adama, “becoming a black woman” is as easy as child playing dress up: tan skin just so, purchase bodily enhancements, add curly wig and—voilà!—one can become a black woman. And when she is tired of the experiment charade—or when it is no longer lucrative—she can go back to living as she had before.

Blackness as a commodity that non-blacks can use to play dress up and escape their own dull reality is not just a twenty-first-century phenomenon. Langston Hughes—bard of the Harlem Renaissance—jokingly referred to the era as the time “when the Negro was in vogue,” referring not only to the style and substance of the art, dance, music, and literature that came out of the era, but also to the scores of whites who came uptown to slum it in the black part of town, eat black food, dance, and sleep with black people, before heading back to their tidy white lives. In The Black Interior, poet and essayist Elizabeth Alexander notes that, “Black bodies in pain for public consumption have been an American national spectacle for centuries. This history moves from public rapes, beatings, and lynchings to the gladiatorial arenas of basketball and boxing.”2 Put another way, viewing, consuming, enjoying, and profiting from black bodies in pain has been an American pursuit—indeed, a key part of American popular culture and art—from the days of black-face minstrelsy.

At the same time, the desire to embody and appropriate blackness also has a dangerous underbelly. This phrase also explains Officer Darren Wilson coded language in justifying his killing of unarmed teenager Mike Brown; that Wilson thought Brown “psychotic” and “hostile,” that he “looked like a demon” and “grunted” and “charged” toward him like a wild animal.3 Wilson’s account sounds less like he is a protecting the suburbs of St. Louis and more like he is hunting big game on the African savanna. Maybe for him and others like him, there is little difference. So while Mike Brown’s black life did indeed matter, his death became a spectacle.

Recognizing and embracing blackness in popular culture is not necessarily problematic in and of itself. It is the cavalierness with which blackness and, by extension, black people are treated that is the problem; when we play with people and their culture as if they are discardable objects, in fashion for a time and then out of fashion the next.

 

Blacks have been accidental, or rather unwilling, muses in art and popular culture in America almost since the country’s inception. Take for instance the figures of the sambo, the uncle, and the mammy, popularized in the first half of the nineteenth century. This mythological trio of the lazy but lovable shirker, the benign patriarch, and the fat, jolly matriarch were perfect for an antebellum America intent on depicting slavery as a benevolent, albeit peculiar, institution that rehabilitated savages and enabled them to be what God intended: “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”4 Everything from paintings to advertisements and bric-a-brac, not to mention popular songs, theater, and eventually film featured this unholy trinity of black figures. And although at their very heart these figures represented chattel that had as much legal right and standing as a glass pitcher, a chandelier, or a cow, they were often illustrated as playful or at play. For example, despite being a servant for life, the sambo is frequently depicted as a lovable slouch that loves naps and gets into hijinks because of his desire to cut corners and play rather than work. The uncle figure, such as an Uncle Remus, is a master storyteller who entertains white children with stories of tricksters like Br’er Rabbit. The mammy is devoted to cooking and cleaning for her white family, enabling the leisure of the people who owned her without complaint.

After a hard won emancipation, led by decades of agitation by free and enslaved blacks and a cohort of liberal and radical whites, these figures remained but stood alongside newer, more sinister depictions of blacks, such as the hyper-sexualized black buck and jezebel, that underscored the fear of newly empowered free blacks. Still, the old trifecta never fully went away, especially as newer mediums such as film took hold, alongside nostalgia for “simpler” days. These depictions of black folk have become engrained into the very psyche of American culture

Because of this contentious history, the notion of blacks embracing play has been a fraught one.

In the late nineteenth century, respectability politics arose as an antidote to these problems. According to historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, respectability politics was conceived of by black Baptist women and eventually spread beyond them to large swaths of black communities.5 The strategy behind respectability politics was for blacks to present themselves as the most respectable in their speech, comportment, attire, and family life. They would not appear silly, playful, or unserious. This would eventually earn them respect, favor, and full citizenship among the whites who both feared them and who controlled most aspects of society. Needless to say that this strategy was only partially successful; indeed, particularly during the nadir of black life—the time during and after the instantiation of the black codes that saw the rise of white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings—being respectable and successful just might have made one the target of hate.6

Because of this contentious history, the notion of blacks embracing play has been a fraught one. But the history above is just one side of the history. Just as slavery apologists were framing fictional portrayals of blacks at play, enslavers were cracking down on certain types of dance, music, and celebration, as they recognized their transgressive possibilities. Black folk have spent centuries defying rules and expectations about how to express joy, sadness, and laughter. They reinvented how to play.

Read on with the second half of Susana Morris’s piece on PlayTime artist Mark Bradford.

 

1 Lauren Michele Jackson, “We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs,” Teen Vogue, August, 2, 2017, http://www.teenvogue.com/story/digital-blackface-reaction-gifs.http://www.teenvogue.com/story/digital-blackface-reaction-gifs.

2 Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004), 177.

3 U.S. Department of Justice, “Department of Justice Report Regarding the Criminal Investigation into the Shooting Death of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri Police Officer Darren Wilson,” March 4, 2015, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/doj_report_on_shooting_of_michael_brown_1.pdf.

4 The Bible was often used to justify American chattel slavery. This phrase from Joshua 9:23 refers to the curse of slavery that Joshua put on the Gibeonites. He proclaims that they will be forever held in bondage to the Israelites for their sins. Racist antebellum preachers and theologians often used this verse and others to point to the Biblical foundation of slavery.

5 See Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) for more on the foundation of respectability politics.

6 See the work of nineteenth century journalist Ida B. Wells for more on this phenomenon.

(Image credits: Jamel Shabazz, Flying High, 1981, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, gift of Jamel Shabazz. © Jamel Shabazz. Then NAACP President Rachel Dolezal speaking at a rally in downtown Spokane, Washington, May 1, 2015. Photo by Aaron Robert Kathman, on Wikicommons. Neave Parker, Brer Rabbit is thrown into the briar-patch and outwits Brer Fox in the Tar Baby episode, from The Tales of Uncle Remus, 1953, Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, courtesy of the The New York Public Library.)

Failure Is an Option: An Infographic

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

The subjects of artist and funnyman Andrew Kuo’s colorful infographics are personal memories, moments from the near past, and thoughts about the future. In this installment of our monthly series, Kuo’s use of first-person data becomes art.

Look for the next infographic in coming weeks.

Vocal Blind Man’s Bluff: A Story

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz
The latest in Albert Mobilio’s series of fictional stories based on old-time games continues to illustrate how the characteristics of play are the essence of our inner lives.

Music—loud, insistent, and dissonant—makes remaining calm difficult. Clanging bells, penny whistles, and what is probably a toy piano ride treble-high over a honking bass saxophone playing “Yakety Sax” at half-speed. It’s a funeral march for a suicidal clown, or that’s what Sandy surmises. She observes Bean at the kitchen table fiddling with his laptop, jumping from one noisy video to another and judges the probable success of hitting him from across the hall with the mug she squeezes with increased annoyance. Just thump him in the back. Divert his attention from playing whatever he’s playing. As this only slightly violent thought discharges its modest current, she’s conscious of the weight and hardness of the mug. An empathy too finely tuned allows her to absorb the sensation of being hit with it and there, in the big armchair, she flinches.
“Bean, please,” Sandy says. To herself, though. Louder then, “Bean, please turn it down.”
“Yeah, turn that shit off,” Jack shouts as he descends the stairs. He holds his hands out, palms up. “Who took the towel out of the bathroom?” “We need it for Blind Man’s,” Bean declares as he brandishes the purloined hand towel and calls the group to form a circle.

People from Jack’s office are here; some college friends of Jess’s, too. No matter the increased numbers, he chooses Sandy—she knew he would as if in retribution for those angry thoughts—and soon her face from forehead to the tip of her nose is draped in a towel held in place with a binder clip that catches a hunk of her hair.
“Hey,” she says. The towel smells like sink.

She sits in the big chair while they dance around her—yes, dance; it’s not a pretty sight—until she gives a signal. She could clap, or shout “Stop.” When everyone halts Sandy will point to one of the players and that person will have to make a vocal sound that’s been determined in advance. They may have to imitate the sound of an animal named by the blind man, sing a song, speak in tongues, or impersonate Lucille Ball discovering a bat in her bedroom. Tonight, Sandy asked that those she selects cry like an eight-year-old who has been sent to their room for backtalk. She has one shot at identifying the player; if she succeeds, the two trade places. If she fails, she will continue drawing breath through what increasingly stinks of drainpipe.

The circular cavorting begins; the floor’s vibrations make their way through the chair to Sandy. It’s a pleasant sensation, like she’s in a drink being stirred. She can’t see anyone and they can’t quite see her but she is at the center of things. She tightens a bit and calls out “Stop,” and the vibration recedes. People laugh. Someone trips, it seems, into someone else and there’s more laughing. Sandy stands, slowly turns, and with a regal flourish points into the darkness. She’s pointing out there, out past the circle, to the living room. Out there.

It’s a friend of Jess’s, the woman with chipped fingernail polish who has been popping out all evening to smoke on the stoop. She begins with tiny moans, more sexual than sad, but then pushes them higher, allowing a raggedness to creep in around their edges. It’s throaty and wet and everyone is quiet. They build quickly. Soon there’s something undeniably genuine; the choking catch begins to spark some small alarm. She is wailing and heads turn away or down because there is fear that this woman’s face will be streaked with tears. And then, as if a needle jumped its groove, the sound ceases and is replaced by her panting— healthy exerciser’s panting—as if she’d done a steep stretch on the elliptical trainer. Slack faced, smiling, she covers her mouth to cough. The room temperature drops a few degrees as the flush of embarrassment ebbs.

Sandy knows that crying; she hears all of its parts and pieces. In the dark, she can see it. Jagged streaks of chalk across a blackboard crisscrossing and swirling over and over until the blackness is almost hidden behind a veil of white dust and grit. And when it stops, she knows who is crying, too—the cough is the clue. She thinks about the fingernail polish, chewed away or just neglected. You would have to disown that cry wouldn’t you? Sandy is about to say her name but doesn’t. There’s someone else here who could cry like that. There’s someone whose name she says out loud with a little glee, with a little accusation.

Photo credit: Detail of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Blind Man’s Bluff, oil on canvas, 1755–56, Toledo Museum of Art, from Wikicommons.

Playground of My Mind: A Memoir

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

A visit to her childhood home unfurls a memory and prompts artist Julia Jacquette’s visual history of the adventure playground. This is the first installment of a three-part series.

About fifteen years ago, while visiting my parents—who still live in the apartment I grew up in—I walked past the courtyard of their building. Looking in, I was suddenly struck by a sense of regret that I hadn’t in some way visually recorded the now-demolished playground—a mini-gem of 1960s Brutalism—that had once stood there.

That sense of regret for not having documented the playground led to an urge to somehow recreate it. In turn, it also prompted me to ask my father—an architect himself—about who had designed it (M. Paul Friedberg, it turned out). Research ensued, but turned up very few photographs of the playground, forcing me to make drawings from memory. This process later proved to be inexorably tied to what became the core narrative of Playgrounds of My Mind: how compelling architecture can prompt creative thinking in the minds of those who inhabit it.

My initial approach to making art about the Friedberg playground was to attempt to recreate it in three dimensions—in miniature—but I quickly shifted to a two dimensional approach, which took the form of a graphic memoir. I felt as if I could say more with a visual language.

As I began to work, the narrative immediately expanded. I not only included other “adventure” playgrounds built around the same time (the most obvious choice being the playground my father himself had designed with Jim Ryan and Ken Ross in Central Park), but also the playgrounds of Aldo van Eyck (in Amsterdam, where I live part of the year), which shared a strong affinity with the design and play philosophy of the playgrounds I’d grown up with in New York City. The more I learned, the more fascinating it became to me.

The story that emerged was one of how these New York City playgrounds influenced my own aesthetics and ideas about making art and design. A story about how any work of art and design can offer its viewers a structure they can use to create their own artwork.

 

 

Look for the second part of Julia Jacquette’s “Playground of my Mind” next week.

Games for Social Change: An Interview

Posted on by goplay
“Play gives us that opportunity to really try things out, and then, maybe when we’re done, to think about how we can apply that kind of playful mindset to the world we live in.”

Can games promote social change? Game designer Colleen Macklin talks with us about how play has a unique ability to change the way we think.

Read the transcript.

Board Gaming the System: A Comic Series

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

In this month’s comic, Jason Novak and Adam Bessie share a little magical thinking with a Magic: The Gathering–inspired card deck.

Before Pokemon gave us “Catch’em All,” there was Magic: The Gathering, a card game invented in the early ’90s that burned through teenage allowances faster than dragon fire. If you’ve never played Magic, you’ve certainly seen the fantasy roleplaying game at your local coffee shop, an entire table filled with animated characters—and that’s just the players, whooping and hollering after a ghost warlock decimates an upstart ice golem with a flaming spellblast. In 2017, what new magical creatures might we add to our deck?

 

 

Come back for next month’s installment in the Board Gaming the System comic series. Missed the last one? Check it out here.

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