Month: November 2016

I am thinking to make a board game that lets to show what you know about the opposite sex. First, people divide into a guy’s team and a girls’ team. On each turn, a member of the other team asks the playing team the questions on the card. Players take turn on asking the questions. It is men vs. women in a challenge to answer 3 question categories.

Each team member has 45 seconds to answer the questions.

1. Knowledge Cards: Gender-specific trivia that member of your sex should know

Example: What exotic flower is the source of vanilla pods? – for guy’s group

2. Daily Life Cards: Questions about things that have actually happened in a player’s life

In this card, you have to read the question out loud to the other team, then secretly pick how you would answer. Then, place the card face down on the game board.

Example: The most important quality I look for when buying a car is:

1. Performance
2. Styling
3. Cost of the car

3.   Move Cards: Both teams perform a gender-specific action.

Example: Changing a baby’s diaper, cutting wood

Each team mixes all the cards and pick one each turn to ask, and each team moves one space by knowing the answer right.  When they pick one card from the deck, they either encounter to a “our facts” card, “our moves” card or “our lives” card. If you arrive to the center first into the Equality Circle, you won the first prize for the first round. Later on, a new prize will be placed in the center. It is now the other team’s turn. The first team to capture all three prizes wins the battle.

As I explained in class, I am a huge fan of both casual and competitive games, but competitive games can become boring very quickly because they lose some of the important aspects of casual games, namely player interaction and playing for fun. Being a proponent of having fun with games, I wanted to go to an online chat room full of competitive players and see how I could get them to have fun in a different way than being competitive.

A big inspiration that I had was the video we watched in class, The Institute. There were very many parts of this video that involved combining real life and the game world, for example dancing while you were on the phone, and using real world locations to tell a story. I wanted people to see my piece and have fun watching it, and even be motivated to join in.

The players didn’t even know what they were getting into, either. This counts for unaware game participation, they saw flyers in the streets, and did not know they were being pulled into a game when they took a slip and began their journey to the institute. I really liked the way they did this, how people were willing to follow along with this game just because they wanted to. I wanted to replicate this behavior in my piece. I feel peoples’ attitudes towards something would more dramatically shift if they decided to participate on a whim, so this is why I favored unaware game participation.

I also wanted my piece to deliver an important message, much like The Institute did. The Institute wanted people to take life less seriously, to play in the world, and to be in a perpetual state of ‘Divine Nonchalance’.  I proposed a different message, but one along the same lines: sometimes, competitiveness takes the fun out of games and I wanted to break up the competitiveness in the room with some lighthearted games.

I decided to choose a Pokemon Showdown server, which is a site where you can have competitive Pokemon battles. I was a member of certain server ‘leagues’ beforehand, which tend to focus on competitiveness, improving battling skills, and defeating other leagues on the server for dominance. I quit because I didn’t have time to participate, plus I wasn’t getting much out of the competitive side because it was getting boring. I decided to try to spice things up by playing a chatroom game that wasn’t entirely related to competitive Pokemon battling to see how the players would react.

I decided to have a Humans vs Zombies game in the chatroom. Certain ‘Zombies’, denoted by their nametag, would challenge users to CC1v1 battles (the quickest and most random Pokemon battling format out there). If the Zombie won, the loser would have to change his/her name tag to a Zombie tag, and challenge others to convert them as well. This provides a totally different context for the competitive players to relate to.

I do have online friends on this server, but not too many, because a lot of them quit as well. I did manage to get at least 2 or 3 people to agree to the ‘Humans Vs Zombies’ game idea, though. Due to this fact, and that I wanted this to mainly be an unaware game that people jumped in, I did not feel I needed more people. The plan was to have the players see what was happening, and then they’d join in and agree to the game once a couple people were playing the game.

Once I started, I realized this project was doomed to fail. I only had one other zombie, and the others who were going to play were online but not responsive. I believe that this is a result of multiple facets, one being the fact that this Humans vs Zombies game requires a lot of effort to participate, especially in an unaware crowd. Also, people did not see the point behind the activity, so they did not join. They just thought I was another troll and ignored me. After all, my name was ‘ZOMBIE ON FIRE’ and they had no connection to me whatsoever. Pictures are below:

So, I decided to go with a different approach: a simpler and more personal game. I changed my name back to what it normally was (Kant Ketchum), so people knew I wasn’t a troll. I still wanted the unaware game participation, also, so I needed to think of a really easy to play and fun game. I decided on a game of tag – all you had to do, was tag someone else when you got tagged. Typing in someone else’s name gives them a notification, so they will know when they got tagged and they’ll definitely consider whether to participate or not. This is very simple, fun, and it creates a game within the server. Some pictures are below:

This game of tag worked a lot better than the Humans Vs Zombies game. People were willing to continue, and it seems they had fun with it. I really liked the inclusion of emoticons while playing the game – it really gave the game a more personal feel to it. The competitive language used (“loses to ferrothorn”, “toxic doesnt touch poison”, “when is alliance cup”) really contrasts with the tag game, and I loved that about the piece. There can be long conversations about competitive topics, and breaking that up with some fun conversation is something I appreciated.

Although the impact my game had was minimal, I feel that I did add some fun to the lives of these competitive players, no matter how competitively they played this game. Overall, there could be improvements, but this was a fun piece to work on.

Self-esteem is something many people struggle with today, including myself. I enjoy being able to make therapeutic exercises and wanted to create an interactive piece that could help others to feel better about themselves.  I also wanted to create more interaction between people while they complete mundane tasks such as waiting for the elevator or coming back from classes. While doing said things, people tend to not want to socialize and continue on their way. I knew this would be a difficult obstacle to tackle, so I tried to look at different approaches to the problem.

A reoccurring trend that I’ve really taken a liken to lately is to create something therapeutic and to bring a smile to someone’s face. Initially, I was inspired by the Crosswalk Ballet piece in which was presented in class. Although premeditated, I loved how it brought people together and allowed for the public to also interact with the piece. It brought a liveliness to an otherwise mundane task in the daily life of the city dweller. I took inspiration from this and wondered how I could recreate a similar effect without having people directly interact with one another.

In my piece, I wanted to incorporate some of these elements indirectly. Since confrontation with strangers can be unnerving and awkward, I wanted to create a way for the passerby to interact with others in a positive way without doing it directly.  My idea was to create a space for the public to donate uplifting phrases and ideas to others.

In order to prompt others to join in, several phrases were written out on different pieces of colored paper and placed into a bag. A sign was then placed alongside the bag, pen and writing pad that read “Take One or Give one”.

Due to time constraints, I was only able to execute the piece in one location, that being the East Village lobby. Initially, I had wanted to place it in two different places: one social setting, and outside of the health center where people may really need uplifting thoughts.

Upon execution, I was intrigued to see that people were afraid to either approach the piece or reach into the bag. Several people had stuck their hand into the bag, but as soon as they realized that the bag was filled with crumpled papers, they pulled their hand out and carried on with their normal routine.

I feel as though prompting people to take from the bag was successful and that they liked the idea of free stuff, however the excitement was lost once they realized they were only getting pieces of paper. Perhaps if the papers were disguised in a different way and if someone were to have moderated the piece as opposed to it being anonymous, the execution could’ve been more successful.

If I were to test this in a social setting such as a party, I feel as though it would interfere with the initial goal of my piece (to give others motivational words),  however it wouldn’t deter from making others smile. In this case, the social setting would have been a better location for this piece.

For my intervention, I left a flock of origami cranes in a bush outside of East Village. Each of the cranes had a page’s worth of text from some well known piece of writing (Othelllo, A Tale of Two Cities, The Hobbit, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Pride and Prejudice, and My Immortal) printed on it.

In practice, the intervention sort of went how I wanted it to. At the end of about two and a half hours, I had quite a few cranes left. However, people did interact with the piece, sometimes in unexpected ways. Specifically, one person took one out of curiosity and left with it, two people took pictures of each other in front of them but didn’t take any, and one couple took them and unfolded them in front of the bush and read them aloud to each other (pictured below).

If I were to do another iteration of this intervention, I would like to do something to make it more obvious that the cranes are meant to be taken. One way that I would do that would be to use different colors of paper so that they look more temporary. I think part of the reason that many people looked at the cranes but didn’t take them was because they looked like actual garden decorations. I would also like to do this in a different location at a different time. I chose where and when I did because it was after most classes got out and people were less likely to be in a huge rush. However, I still think people were too caught up in their own worlds for the intervention to work fully.

My primary inspiration for this intervention was the pieces  in the Dada and Fluxus movements that encouraged people to take pieces of the artwork,  such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Portrait of Ross. I wanted to people to experience the work and have something physical that they could take away from it. Hopefully, that would be something that would brighten their day (which was why I was sure to include Hitchhiker’s Guide and My Immortal).

I also wanted to play with appropriation, which was why I chose to use published works instead  of generating my own text, I have generally found that finding a reference to something that you are already familiar with is more exciting than finding a random piece of text.

img_3651

img_3652

My intervention project was a game of hopscotch that was carried out in front of Ryder Hall out near the Centennial Quad. However, this game had a twist where on each square that each player landed on, they would have to strike a dance pose. The players would take turns throwing a rock down the length of the hopscotch game and then hop down to it, pick it up, then return to the start of the game.

My main inspiration for this intervention piece would have to be the video clip we watched in class of people dancing along a crosswalk in the middle of a busy city. It really intrigued me how people could be so carefree and open while others were busy hurrying to and from work and other obligations. This scenario could easily be recreated almost anywhere, but I wanted to have similar implications on campus. I studied up on the areas around Northeastern and deemed Centennial as the spot that saw the most foot traffic during the day. I had originally planned on preforming the piece inside Ruggles station, but I soon noted that people would be so busy trying to get from one space to another, that if I was in the middle of such a small space, dancing no less, people would get irritated fairly quickly and that was not the point of the piece.

I drew out the hopscotch game on the sidewalk with chalk and labeled each square with a certain dance move. Each move was fairly simple in nature to allow for a low-level barrier to entry and would allow for more people to join should the need arise. While the plan was to have more people join in, many just watched and continued to walk on to their classes or another destination. There were a few times when a person would walk by and try to copy the moves I was doing, but other than that there was no interaction.

I later realized that my piece was probably not done during an appropriate time. After having finished the piece, I learned that there had been a tragic accident inside of Ruggles station. I feel awful having done something so childish and carefree while such an accident happen. I feel as though it would have been ten times worse had I carried out my original plan of conducting the intervention inside of the station.

This whole intervention and experience has made me think a lot more about planning out a piece and not just coming up with an idea and immediately carrying it out. I now know to plan for more circumstances that could change the meaning of my intervention or could interfere with it in some way that makes it lose its original good-hearted meaning. I only wanted to show that even in an adult’s hectic life, there should always be some time for play and relaxation to go back to childhood and remember the simple games that made them smile.