When we talk about emergent behaviors, we often default to thinking about them through the lens of code: the ways we can manipulate digital algorithmic systems to create glitchy, weird, poetic, delightful, and unexpected outputs. But as we play with delightful and unpredictable rulesets in code, it is worth stepping back to explore the rulesets humans have been making to surprise, delight, and connect with each other for millenia: that is, those found in play and games.
In this session, we will explore what game design and play studies can bring to our practices of poetic computation and design. How do we play in and around rulesets, both in the magic circle of games as well as our daily lives? What does it mean to design a game for a special someone, a special space, or a special circumstance? What unique mechanics can we draw from our own life experiences? What does it mean for us to play well together? What new relationships can play foster? How can we use rules, play, and games to create momentary glimpses of the futures we want to share? How might those benefits ripple out after the game has ended?
We’ll use game design techniques to create experiences that tap into shared joy and connection. We’ll also pull in readings from artists and activists thinking about the politics of play, joy, and pleasure, and what those experiences can bring to the world and our relationships.
Sessions will be split between guided lecture time, design/prototyping time, and playtime. Students will be prompted to make personalized analog games for each other, multiplayer games for public spaces in their community, and more. Students will finish the session by forming groups and creating a small game by and for the local community, which will be documented and distributed in zine format.
No coding experience is required. We will be playing some digital reference games, so please bring a computer if you have one, but computer access is not required. We will do exercises with analog tools (paper, pens, markers, index cards, string, dice, anything else students would like to bring in to work with), although students are welcome to make digital projects if they like.
- Why should we think about (primarily) analog play and games during a course about poetic computation?
- What do games and play have to do with using technology to make gifts for each other?
- Exercise: Group discussion on the memories of our best and worst "multiplayer" play experiences. Why was it the best or worst? How did you feel during and after? What do the bad ones have in common? What do the good ones have in common?
- How can we tap into that feeling of good play? What does it mean to play well together? What are the tenets of a "play community"?
- Thinking about designing for coliberation and joy (in the Spinozan sense), and what those concepts can bring to our art practices, whether play-centered or not
- A very brief overview on the various ways we have defined and understood the relationship between games and play
- Huizinga, Caillois, etc.
- A loose definition of play for the course moving fowards, centered around voluntary engagement in and experimentation with a ruleset
- Why "voluntary" matters
- Why "rulesets" matter
- Why "experimentation" matters
- Thinking about three categories coming out of this definition of play:
- Play as a way to be artistically expressive
- Play as an excuse to subvert the rules of the world at large
- Play as a way to activate the world around us
- A brief overview of art movements that use rulesets or constructed social environments to create emergent behavior (not necessarily play, but also not excluding playfulness)
- Conceptual art: Yoko Ono, John Cage, Sol Lewitt
- Relational art: Nicolas Bourriaud
- Humans as source of emergent behavior and humans as activating the art piece
- What arises out of the atmosphere created by these rulesets?
- Exercise: playing with some more informal and play-oriented artistic rulesets, including Exquisite Corpse and the Conditional Design Workbook
- Discussion: what did you make? Were you surprised? Did you laugh? What was hard? What was easy? Did you have to figure anything out together? How are the resulting pieces similar? How are they different?
- Discussion: when is it okay to bend rules around the game? When is it not? Why? How do we decide?
- Example: what is okay in a private karaoke room? Can you invite strangers in? Can you take a selfie? Can you take and share video of someone singing without them knowing? What makes some of these things okay and some of them not?
- An introduction to the magic circle
- Thinking about using play/game objectives as justifications for acting in new, sometimes much longed-for ways that society doesn't necessarily allow for (for often-intersectional reasons)
- Exercise:* rotate through an assortment of games, including Scream Go Hero, hair nah, and Fingle
- Discussion: Were these games hard to play? What did you enjoy? What did you not enjoy? How do you feel after playing them?
- Playing games while in public space, vs. actually playing with or in public spaces
- Situationist games as tactics against the society of the spectacle:
- How boredom is capitalised on by capitalism
- Interrupting the fabric of the everyday by "transforming material life with ludic actions"
- Different forms of dérive
- Games targeted at moments of liminality, estrangement, or fatigue/burnout:
- Exercise: Choose one of these games and play them before our next class.
- Big exercise/homework: Make a game for another classmate to be played in a liminal moment during their average day.
- I'll give you a partner.
- Interview them about their typical daily life, (especially the time until the next class). Then they'll interview you.
- Each partner will design a tiny game for the other to play for a moment during their day. Play your partner's game.
- Each person will present for 2-3 minutes about their experience (both design and play).
- Group wander around Yamaguchi/YCAM to design a game for various spaces.
- Collating and organizing these games into a zine, to be distributed at the final show.
- Games, Design, and Play, by Colleen Macklin and John Sharp, Chapter 3: The Kinds of Play
- The Well Played Game, Bernie DeKoven, Chapter 10: Coliberation
- Making Games in a Fucked Up World, Paolo Pedercini
- Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud
- Joyful Militancy, carla bergman and Nick Montgomery
- Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown, The Power To Make Light