Month: April 2016

Artist Statement:

The concept behind the game, Poverty, was to design an experience that allows people to effectively understand the struggle of being stuck within a poverty loop and the difficulty for one to escape that. The inspiration for this game to be created originally came from the idea of creation of art through process, which can be seen in Yoko Ono’s scores and in particular, white chess, as the meaning of the game is done through gameplay. On top of that, the concept of modifying something that exists so it becomes artwork which is similar to Marcel Duchamp’s artworks (LHOOQ, Fountain) also provided me with the inspiration to use origami as a metaphor for the labor that people in poverty have to go through. This allowed the game to successfully convey the concept of hard work as players had to quickly fold objects in order to be able to reach the end game goal. Nonetheless, it is also important to note that the feeling of hopelessness and tiresome work within Poverty came from playing the game This War of Mine which is highly noted for it’s sombre atmosphere and difficult yet simple game play, as well as the game The Cost of Life by Ayiti which is a difficult game about poverty. The mixture of multiple inspirations results in a simulation that attempts to convey the simulation of labor within families struggling in poverty, which is done through the tiring and difficult to win gameplay.

Materials:

• Paper
• Chance cards (included with the game)
• Timer
• Calculator

Rules

• Each round is 6 minutes long
• There is no maximum player count for this game. Though because of the total number of chance cards that are included (40), 1 to 4 players is ideal.
• At the end of every round, players must first take a chance card, then calculate the total amount of money made from folding items.
• Players can fold the following:
  • Origami Hats (each worth $5)
  • Origami Shirts (each worth $15)
• Each round players need to pay for the following:
  • Water (worth $10): if the player if unable to pay for this they are disqualified
  • Food (worth $20): if the player if unable to pay for this for two rounds in a row they are disqualified
• Things players can buy/invest into to progress:
  • END GAME GOAL: School for the child ($150). If this is met the game is won
  • School for the player ($50). This must be paid twice for the player to complete school. Payment can be separate.
    • If school is completed for the player, everything folded will have a x2 value. (Origami Hats [$10], Origami Shirts [$30])
• Players are allowed to look at the samples to remind themselves how to fold the items.

Documentation:

Folded origami pieces: due to the fact that there are a lot of origami pieces folded after a single game, I have only included one set of items from one player in the photo.

Chance cards: The cards provide players with advantages as well as situations that slow down the player’s progress to reaching the end game goal.

In a total of three play tests, these things were changed: the time per round, the money that each piece folded provides the player, and what is foldable. At the start, the game was adjusted to 5 minutes per round but soon the upkeep that the player has from food and water per round made it difficult and slow for the player to progress within the game. In terms of the money that each piece folded provides, a hat originally provided the player with $5 and a shirt would give $10. However, in a play test the players just decided to make only hats since the fold count between the hat and the shirt differed drastically. Thus, I changed it so the price for a shirt would give $15 instead. Also, the game used to allow players to fold cranes. Yet, after the play tests it revealed that players do not want to fold cranes since the steps were too hard to memorize and overall it was too time consuming to fold. This made me rethink whether or not the crane was necessary to be included, which resulted in me removing it completely from the game.

If I were to place Poverty onto Schrank’s avant-garde game matrix, I would put it in an area next to the Political scale as the topic that my game discusses is extremely political and is something that connects with the everyday world directly. In a way, my game also does not allow players to really control gameplay as the chance cards and the food and water upkeep make it difficult for players to be able to progress. Because of this, I may also place it a little north of political (close of Negation) as the rules of the game dictate it heavily.

For this artwork project, I decided to make a game that simulates the process of understanding another person’s emotions and learning how to detect them, so as to avoid making incorrect assumptions that will be detrimental to the relationship.

This game requires two players, a deck of “Emoticards,” and a simple game board consisting of 31 tiles. One player is a drawing player who draws from the deck of “Emoticards” and the other player is a reading player who attempts to read the expression of the drawing player and accurately guess the emotion they are displaying. The deck of “Emoticards” contains 9 unique emotions that the drawing player has to portray with their facial expressions, and there are multiple copies of each card so as to provide repetition and allow for the reading player to learn from the drawing player. Pictures of the game board and “Emoticards” can be found at the bottom of this post.

Each player starts with their piece on one of the respective stars, and the game is won when both players have advanced to the middle “Understanding” tile; alternatively, both players lose if they regress to the last available tile on the board. At the start of a turn, the drawing player will draw an “Emoticard” from the random deck and create a facial expression of the given emotion. Upon seeing the facial expression, the reading player will either guess the emotion or declare, “I don’t know.” If the guessed emotion is correct, both players advance one tile towards the center. If the guessed emotion is incorrect, both players regress one tile away from the center. If no emotion is guessed, neither player moves.

I drew a lot of the concept of this game from our in-class discussions, especially when we had the guest speaker Ichiro Lambe come in and talk about his process as a rising Indie game developer. I was really interested in the dynamic that occurs between a game developer and a tester, and since I know more about emotional relationships than game testing, I decided to combine what I knew with the process Ichiro was describing to create this finished product. An interesting fun game that is similarly avant-garde in nature is What?!? Oh…, a card game that uses conversation cards and action cards to create a funny dialog between two or more people. My game draws from the same idea of combining actions with dialog, but does it in a slightly different way by allowing the players to decide the action (facial expression) rather than being instructed on how to portray it. In terms of where my game fits on the Shrank Avant-garde diagram, I placed it just slightly to the bottom and left of the center crosshairs which makes it slightly more political and complicit than radical and formal. This was my placement because the game is supposed to make the players think about their everyday actions in a different way and ultimately change the way they interact with people in life.

Game Board:

Emoticards:

Emoticards Layout

Documentation: I have only played this game all the way through three times with friends, however I have changed several key aspects so as to fine tune it to be more playable. One big aspect that I changed was how players would express their emoticards. Prior to allowing players express the emoticard freely, I had instructions on the card of how to form the given facial expression and that ended up causing more trouble than benefits in the game. Another change I had to make was with the size the game board. Originally, I required each player to advance 5 spaces to win and only allowed 4 spaces to lose, which ended up with players either winning too quickly or losing too quickly, and ultimately ended up making the game shorter than I intended. Since the change, both players must now advance 9 spaces to win and are only allowed 6 spaces to lose. This results in a more strategic game play and influences players to think more about the meaning behind the game. Here is a link of the old game board, and a photo of my friend Matt playing it.

Old Game board

BUMP

Bump is a single-player crowd navigation computer game. The object of the game is to navigate through each crowd to the goal.

Documentation:

The source code can be found on my github repository for the game.

A Mac OS X app of the game can be found (compressed) here. (The download should begin automatically.)

Screenshots of Gameplay:

Sources of Inspiration / Artist’s Statement:

The idea for Bump came from a data collection game I played on my commutes when I worked downtown. This was a simple unnamed game where I incremented a counter (located on my pebble watch) every time another person made physical contact with me. This was almost always accidental, and usually as a result of rush hour traffic or crowded trains.

Consciously recognizing every time that I was bumped, pushed, or tapped by strangers very quickly grew to be quite stressful, and it was this experience that I aimed to capture with Bump.

While the mechanics of the game (moving around from Point A to Point B) are fairly standard, the game itself disrupts the player’s sense of flow by antagonizing them with a short soundbite. This soundbite is an appropriated clip of Imogen Heap’s song Hide and Seek, although its usage is in reference to the 2007 SNL skit entitled “Dear Sister”, which is itself a loos parody referencing a scene in the second season finale of television show The OC, which uses the song.

The heavy reliance on audio as a game mechanic was also partly inspired by Julian Oliver’s game Quilted Thought Organ, which plays music as the player navigates. Another somewhat less superficial inspiration for the game was Taylan Kay’s game Auti-Sim, which seeks emulate the auditory hypersensitivity aspect of autism spectrum disorders. Bump has a similar aim: I wanted to capture the anxiety that I feel in crowds, which is one of the more persistent struggles that I have personally had as an adult on the autism spectrum.