Experimental Game Design

Month: November 2021

Intervention: Why can’t we peace?

by | Nov 12, 2021 |

In my intervention, I chose the game League of Legends to be the base and add my rule into it. It’s called zero-damage plan.

Details for what I do and the data:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/187eSSJCVMeX1Il2NOfoEyRbutEyVF16PmJ1oeM3U86U/edit?usp=sharing

 

Art statement:

When the first time I started to play League of Legends, I was taught to kill enemies as more as I can. Back to the begin, League of Legends is a MOBA game and the target is to destroy the enemies’ base. However, when I asked my brother why everyone’s just killing each other, he told me, everyone’s doing that. “You get killed if you don’t kill them”. That’s why I’m trying to find a way to win without dealing damage to the enemies. I played the game with my friends. I went to the top lane since the top lane players have got a tradition — split push. They stay in top lane trying to destroy the towers while the other four teammates group together for dragons and baron. It gives me the chance to win by dealing no damage.

The idea is actually from the Chinese history story that the country “Qi” assigned their army to attack “Wei”‘s capital so that they can rescue the country named “Zhao” who was attacked by “Wei”. I really admire how they can win the war without any fight. That’s what I want to do in my plan. Nowadays, people overtrust the power itself, but ignore the people who command the war. Even though I won’t hurt the enemies, I can limit the enemies’ action. They can’t ignore me when I’m destroying the towers. That’s why I want to try this plan to see if I can win without a fight.

So the basic idea is like, in the lane, I take as much damage as I can and ask my jungle to help me limit the enemy top to farm. (It will be better if we kill him). During the mid game, I keep split pushing, if someone comes to catch me, I escape. When this person goes back to the front lane, I go for push again. Like this, there will always be an enemy on his way to the front or to me. If the enemies don’t care about me, I can push and destroy the towers very fast. under this condition, we’ll easily win since the lane I do split push is really far from the baron or dragon the enemies want. At this time, my teammates are really important since they must win the 4v4 team fight or play for time in a 4v5 fight. The winning condition is for everyone doing their job without any wrong! I was like a military counsellor, sitting in the back and command everything in its correct way.

There’s a better solution that I asked the enemy top to be peace in the lane. If he/she agrees with me (I tried this before), we can easily farm and I can build items for push very fast. However, I was always refused or ignored so that I can only ask my jungle to Gank him/her.

More details are in my Google doc. I really love the idea. Although it’s hard to win, but really gives me feeling of achievement!

League of Legends Champion Swap: Intervention – (Joey)

by | Nov 12, 2021 | ,

Playing League of Legends: The Correct Way

My intervention idea was basically playing League of Legends without any constraints or without apply the community’s norms when playing the game. League of Legends is a 5v5 competitive multiplayer game with 5 roles on each team where for each role, all the champions have implied role or roles. So, I would jump into a game of League of Legends and depending on whatever role I selected, I would pick a champion that would usually not be considered part of the acceptable champion pool of that role. So, for instance, the champion Irelia is considered to be a mid or top laner but playing her support is counterintuitive since her skill set is based on killing minions and stacking them whereas the support role usually does not kill all the minions.

Artist Statement

During the process of coming up with an intervention idea, I really wanted to intervene in a community that I was part of and somewhat try to suggest new perspectives or ideas that would be considered unordinary, toxic, or confusing. So, I decided to intervene the League of Legends community by picking champions that were not necessarily in their correct position in the eyes of the community. I was really inspired by the phone game that was presented by Professor Curry and Gradecki and the Yes-Men where both of these interventions really tried to comment something about part of their community. The phone game explicitly showed the entire process of how an iPhone was made where the game showed the somewhat radical forced labor that goes through in other countries that makes the phones. This included child labor in Africa to mine resources for the phones. This game was only on phone game apps such as the Apple Store which speaks volumes towards how someone in another country can play the game and view these horrific real-life issues but still go on with having a phone. Also, the Yes-Men inspired me in a similar way where they created an obscene outfit that would definitely not be mainstream, yet people were still inviting them and asking them to talk about these outfits. Nobody considered them wrong at all and continued to take notes and listen even though this was complete joke. In a similar way, my intervention wanted to touch on the subject of toxicity and the rigidness of competitive games especially in team games where other players actions heavily influences the outcome of the games. I chose the role support and picked champions that would typically not be considered a support such as Irelia, Azir or Lee Sin. I wanted to see the reactions of my teammates from these unconventional picks and see what happens when I would do bad in game or well. I found that whenever I played better than my teammates expected, they didn’t really have anything negative to say but whenever I did bad, the opposite happened. The community became toxic and start to question my choice. However, besides this comparison, most of the time, my teammates would already question these champions. I realized and asserted the fact that, maybe not as a whole, but gamers would be set on what is the norms in competitive games and whatever happens outside would be questioned unless done well. Especially the League of Legends community, unconventional ideas that don’t fit what’s right or normal causes doubt and toxicity.

A bundle of responses that I received from my teammates because of the champion that I played. Sometimes this was a mix of bad gameplay but for the most part, players would either or include all, leave the game before the game started, question my support pick, and criticize me because of my pick.

Artwork #3 Intervene: Spotify Experiment

by | Nov 12, 2021 |

This project idea originated after the Guest Lecture that Professor Derek Curry and Professor Jennifer Gradecki presented in class. As well as the documentary viewing of The Institute. When I watched the Institue, what spoke to me most was the way people stopped by a poster and started a game based on just texting or calling a random number. This is when I thought of a paper poster format for this project. I also thought of the Twitter game that both of the Professors spoke about and how they used people’s real-life interaction and put it into a game. I then realized I wanted to play around with everyone’s music interest and decided to put up posters of a Spotify playlist all around my dorm building, with the playlist labelled Make your Own Playlist and no prompt whatsoever.

Sadly, my first iteration of this project was not so successful. I quickly learned that we need permission to put up posters around different buildings. For my next iteration, I decided not to go the paper route at all. I decided to put up an Instagram story with the link to the Spotify playlist and the result was 16 users added songs. There were 362 total songs added to the playlist. It was an assortment of every kind of song, a hodgepodge of songs if you will. This was the most enjoyable project so far! I loved seeing the different types of music taste everyone had and the variety of songs I ended up with. Here is the link to the Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2LBz5ZvMwGgajSFnwzC9kn?si=3af805ccf2a54f46

 

 

 

Intervene Project: Becoming The Virtual Imposter Amogus

by | Nov 11, 2021 |

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

“give me the HUGGY WUGGY SKIN THAT I GOT SCAMMED FOR!”

The first quote is from The Society of the Spectacle, a book written by prominent Situationist Guy Debord. The second is from a kid in a vrchat among us lobby who was subjected to trickery and tomfoolery when trying to acquire a Huggy Wuggy avatar in vrchat.

While the first iteration of this was more of an intervention (I actually intervened in a vrchat among us game with my youth pastor schtick) and I was more of an observer in the second iteration, where my plan was to do Seinfeld stand-up bits, I think that the spectacle I encountered is more interesting to focus on. While we didn’t have any assigned reading focused mainly on the situationist movement itself (at least as far as I’m aware), I believe they are relevant to the teachings of this class, especially since they built on the Surrealist and Dada movements. And I believe the philosophy of the Situationists was demonstrated in the spectacle I witnessed in vrchat.

The use of the word “scammed” in the huggy wuggy affair is interesting. What happened, as far as I am aware, was that someone lead the seeker of the huggy wuggy skin to a vrchat world where he said he could get the huggy wuggy skin (vrchat avatars are often gained in “avatar world” where an object in the world gives you and allows you to save an avatar), but the world contained nothing. There was no monetary transaction, and yet the bamboozled party claimed they were scammed. While scammed could just be the first word the kid could think of to describe the situation, I believe it reflects a deeper commodification of society that Debord wrote about. “give me the HUGGY WUGGY SKIN THAT I GOT SCAMMED FOR!” is an expression of the anger of someone who couldn’t acquire an image that is treated as a rare an expensive commodity as they wanted not only to have that image, but appear as it, in order to affect the social relation they had with others in this virtual world.

So to summarize this, in my adventures in the world of vrchat I encountered an exaggerated and hyperbolic representation of the modern society described by Debord and the Situationist movement. But rather than trying to do any direct critique of it or the capitalist world it is derived from, I just did some youth pastor and Jerry Seinfeld bits. Cuz why not, that’s kinda funny. Oh and I also won an among us imposter game as a painting of the Mona Lisa. All of that is documented in photoshop collages I made that can be found here. I’ll also include them in this post itself, but they will be lower quality. Maybe in the future someone smarter than me could do something to critique the relation of one’s avatar in vrchat to the social relations they have with others in it, but that’s an intervene project for another day.

Artwork 3: Intervene

by | Nov 11, 2021 |

In this assignment, I chose to intervene in the Dead by Daylight. Dead by Daylight is a multiplayer game. The player can choose to play as a human or as a killer. The human player needs to fix five motors and open the gate to escape. And the killer needs to stop them from fixing the motor and kill them. My intervention was to do something completely unrelated to the character. Humans are supposed to avoid killers, but I try to find them and taunt them to see how they react. I’ve tried many times, but basically the killer takes me down as soon as he sees me. After many attempts I finally met a killer who would knock me down without meeting me. I crouched in front of him and pointed at him. He didn’t kill me. He just looked at me and spun around. In the end he knocked me down and hung me on a hook. My actions also saved the life of a teammate. My teammate ran out while I was interacting with the killer. After seeing the killer’s reaction I decided to play as a killer and see the human reaction. What happens when killers stop killing people.I don’t use a knife when I see a human player. I just watch them. The human players would run away at first, but once they knew I had no intention of knocking them down, they started interacting with me. It’s better to see how other players react when playing as killers than when playing as humans.I gave the human player two knives at the end, but I let them go. I think this interaction is interesting, because the relationship between human and killer is completely different with my intervention. My inspriation comes from Stanford prison experiment. In this experiment, everyone is doing something relevant to their identity. The authorities in prison exert pressure on the people in custody, and the people in custody suffer in silence. My idea is completely different from this experiment. I wanted to see how people react when they do things that are completely contrary to who they are. The identities of the killers and escapees in this game are like those of the prison guards and prisoners in the experiment.It’s like a prison cop who never punishes a prisoner again.I wonder if the relationship between the two will change.

Intervention: It’s just a virtual game-Xinyi Ren

by | Nov 11, 2021 | ,

When I began to think about this intervention, The Jejune Institute I watched in class gave me some inspiration. I wanted to engage people in a kind of “weird” group activity. I chose the game Final Fantasy 14 as the basis. The process is like this. First, I recruit on the recruitment board and indicate that I hope someone can complete some of my strange requirements. I will pay them, but I don’t directly tell them what the specific requirements are. After players enter my team, I will put forward some strange requirements (usually embarrassing) to them. If they finish, they can get game currency in return. I conducted recruitment in the morning of three days (because my account is on the Chinese server, most players are active at this time). A total of no less than 21 players entered my team (a team of up to 8). In each test, players entered the team quickly, but most players said they join because of curiosity about requirements, and what attracted them was not reward.

I have made five requests:

Requirement 1: randomly find 10 Strange players to use emotional actions reward: 20W

Requirement 2: join in a random mission that has other players and quit immediately reward: 100W (no one completes)

Requirement 3: make no less than 5 stupid comments on the public channel reward: 30W

Requirement 4: take off all gears and dance in the main city for 5 minutes reward: 20W

Requirement 5: randomly find a strange player and chat with him for 3 minutes reward: 30W (no one completes)

Of the more than 20 players, only 3 successfully met my requirements and received remuneration (one of them completed tasks twice), while the other players said they just wanted to chat / thought the requirements were unreasonable / the requirements were very simple but did not complete them. It can be seen that players tend to choose activities that do not affect irrelevant personnel but reject activities that have a bad impact on others’ game experience (no one chooses the second item, even if it is very well paid, but this is a behavior despised in the player group). I think there are several reasons for this result. First, I didn’t directly show the requirements and remuneration in the recruitment, which made many players just curious and didn’t really want to participate. Secondly, players who choose to enter this “social recruitment” basically don’t spend a lot of gold coins in the game but care more about the social process, which also leads to their reluctance to destroy the game experience of unrelated players. In my imagination, it should be the reward that attracts players to the team, but in fact, it is their curiosity that drives them. This means that when curiosity is satisfied, they will not take the next step.

Homework 3 Intervention

by | Nov 10, 2021 |

My intervention was centered around the exploration of how products in the modern day are manufactured all across the world, and the process is very simple. In whatever room and with whatever amount of people, I ask the group of people to present however many items they have that are made in different countries, and I document the number of items. This intervention is vastly inspired by the class with the boxes, but I thought as to do something with what we carry everyday instead of asking people to specifically do something. I think this intervention is intriguing in that it calls on the participants to not just learn more about the global village, but to also think about specific memories they have with purchasing the item.

I attempted this intervention three times, once with myself, once with my roommates, and once in class. Alone, I documented 7 countries. With my roommates,  I documented 10. Finally, in class we documented 17. The final result in class was vastly different than what I expected. As the change between myself and my 3 roommates only differed by three, I expected the class to have a number much closer to 10. I had this expectation knowing most of the world’s products are manufactured by a few selected countries such as China and Vietnam. However, the class presented a great number of items from countries I didn’t expect to be included, some of which I knew way to little about to spell out. This surprised me because I wouldn’t even know if some of my belongings are manufactured in these countries.

While I, an international student from Taiwan, expected my intervention to open the eyes of my participants to things they don’t think about in this global village, it seemed to have opened my own eyes more than I anticipated.