For Group A
-One person
-You have a lap-top
-Having a deck of cards
-Each time draw a card
-For each card there’s a word
-Guided by your own rules, you can search, type, or whatever
-Show something to the other group
-Then draw next card
-Repeat previous steps, show something
-Do not show cards to others only when the game is over
For group B
-Any number of people
-Each person have two cards, “Yes” or “No”
-The person from the other group will show you something
-Guided by your own rules, raise yes or no
Process
Do you remember the first time when standing in front of a bunch of people and everybody is holding their breathe waiting for you to speak the next sentence? What kind of feeling you have during that moment? Scared? Excited? Or like both mixed emotions that really hard to describe?
This was inspired by Yoko Ono’s “GrapeFruit” and as a person who loves playing games, rather than watching others performing, I prefer letting everyone come and have fun.
I’m very interested in how people express themselves, because it’s really really really difficult to correctly convey one’s idea to another, letting others to accept your mind-set is even more difficult. Thus we will be terrified, because we are aware of we’ve been judge by others, but at the same time we really want others to understand ourselves.
So this is the starting idea for my score, initially it was only two people play against each other, showing things they have searched and take turns, and after several play test with my friends I realized this wasn’t “fun” enough, more specifically I don’t feel the excitement that I want people to feel in this version, and then I found the reason is the number of participants, when with only two people, for example, me and you, when I was told to show you something, it’s more about personal relationships, I may concern if I show something disturb you may damage our friendship, or I may know your characteristic and show something please you in purpose, well that sounds a little bit improper but you get what I’m trying to say here. Comparatively it’s different when it comes to your “public image”, it’s more about self-expressiveness rather than relationships, we all have the moment when we were misunderstood, not only misunderstood, people will sketch their own image for you, which is definitely an experience, good or bad? Well if you want one answer out of two, I strongly encourage you to play this again, that is another thing I want to express in this piece, things don’t necessary need to have an answer.
That’s basically how I iterated this piece to the final version, from 1 to 1 version, it changes to 1 to many, and I just explained the kind of experience I want people to have as a player in group A, as for people in group B, the experience will be totally different.
As a player in Group B, you are supposed to give a “Yes or No” answer for everything the person from Group A shows. What I think about this is that I want it to reflect the real-life situation where people put “good” or “bad” “tags” on things which makes them easier for decision making. However for something there isn’t a necessary answer to divide things into left or right, yes or no, good or bad, so I hope forcing people to judge things this way may make them feel the same as I do.
As I mention I try to make 2 groups have different experience, and in order to enhance both, I turned my target to the choice of words on the cards. People from Group B will not see what the person draws, there is already a gap between these 2 group of people, this is the gap of communication I previously mentioned, in this case, what if there is also an ambiguity in the expression included?
Even I know this “game” will be different every time I, I’m still very surprised that I couldn’t guess any of the words when Lexie shows to us. Even though whose words were written by me.