My Game:
My intervention piece is a real-world game of Where’s Waldo. The way you play this game is by dressing up as Waldo and going around and trying to discreetly get in the back of people’s photos; that way when they look back at their photos they will see Waldo in the background and hopefully chuckle.
Artist Statement:
My inspiration for my game came from several places but my main inspirations were a Halloween Costume, which was Where’s Waldo, and the Pac-Manhattan game. In my senior year of high school, I got to participate in my Elementary School’s Halloween Parade and as the parents took pictures of their kid in costume I would stand in the background that way the kids could “find Waldo” later. The Pac-Manhattan game really interested me when we talk about it in class but it took a game from a completely different medium and took it into the real world; I really enjoyed that concept because it took something that most people would only consider a videogame and made it tangible. The goal of my game was to take the fun of the picture book game and move it into the real world by taking the normal convention of trying to void getting in someone’s photo and turning it on its head, by having the main objective to sneakily and discreetly get in the background of photos. There are some challenges with this though, my biggest struggle was finding a place where people are taking photos where you can reasonably get in the background, some great advice given to me was to go to landmarks or museums as those places often have high photo traffic and tourist taking photos. Some common issues I ran into were that people would sometimes position themselves in ways where you couldn’t get behind them, ie up against a railing or wall, another issue was closing the distance between the people taking the photo and where I was. I of course didn’t want to run as that would draw unwanted attention to me and ruin the point of the game.
The photos Above are some of my attempt at this game. On the left was me “ruining” my friends photo of the statue outside the MFA. The center is me and some friends near the Boston Commons, they were helping me get photos of me playing the game but sadly I was very unsuccessful as I struggle a lot getting in the background of photos. On the right is a fun game for you, somewhere in that photo I am hidden, and I challenged you to find me, good luck.