Instructions:
- Designed to be played with at least 3 or 4 players
- The score is separated into two phases: construction and play
- During construction each player takes turn to add to the game – by drawing on the board, adding rules, pieces or other elements of the game
- During play each player takes turn to play the game
- Each construction phase lasts one round and play phase lasts two
- Existing rules cannot be overridden or removed, but can be appended
- The score begins with a blank piece of paper, during the construction phase
Materials recommended:
Pen, paper, RPG dice, cards and anything that can be used as pawns
The aftermath of a play session:
Author’s statement:
My personal inspirations for a game about making games traces back to my elementary school days: with us being obsessed with computer games but unable to play during the day, we spent launch breaks after lunch breaks turning our notebooks into interactive games with only pencils and imagination.
In relation to our class reading, I think my score is mostly inspired by the Fluxus’s focus of delivering the performance over the final product, and its collaborative but loose nature during the process of creation. Additionally, the score can also be seen as an exquisite corpse, since each participator contributes to the game in turn as the game progress forward.
While I originally intended for there to be a clear instruction about needing to have a winner or an end state of the game, I decided to remove the rule so the players can decide what happens at the end, or if there needs to be an end at all. I believe that sometimes, having the goal of a game to be perpetuating said game can be just as interesting as having an outcome. In addition, as the rule stated, players can only add to a game, not to remove them. as I view the game to be like a big canvas, where things cannot be erased even though newer additions would eventually overwrite older ones – even if they are no longer visible, they still make up the work. Finally, as the playtesting shows, there is an endless amount of possible product of this score, and I think this fits nicely to the themes of Fluxus and some of Yoko Ono’s scores, where the process of creation is constant, yet the same starting condition can turn into a chaotic amount of products.