Month: October 2023

What you need: at least 2 players, a deck of poker or more. 

Inspirations: The basic rule of RPS and Chinese card game

Rules:

Two or more players, holding evenly divided cards, keep their hands face down and take turns playing cards in clockwise or counterclockwise order, with each player playing only the top card of his or her hand. 

Each player may only play the top card of his or her hand. The cards are stacked up in the order in which they are played, as long as the numbers on the face of the cards are visible. 

The player who finds that he or she has played any card with the same number as any of the cards stacked up on top of it will win all the cards starting with the one with the same number as the card he or she played up to the middle of his or her own hand, and then place the winning card at the bottom of the pile in his or her own hand, and that player then proceeds to take a card from the top of the pile and play the card.

 The game continues until one player has won all the cards in the other player’s hand, and the game ends with the player with all the cards in their hand winning.

Rock, Paper, Scissor

• After a player place a card  have numbers that  matches the number of the card on table, another player can challenge him by RPS, if he lost he has to take back the card and place it under his own deck 
• before placing the card, one player can can challenge another player first using RPS, if he/she wins, the player will not be able to be challenge by another player at his turn.)

Example:

,if the next player place a card that is either A,K,10,3,7,8- He can take all the cards in between the 2 matched cards.

Forexample, this player draws the Ace card from his deck, he wins all the cards between the 2 Aces.

These cards will needs to be shuffled and put it under the winner’s deck

playtest:

The play test went very well, my game is easy to understand and play.

Artist Statement:

Artistic appropriation is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation of them. Appropriation holds an important place in art history. Appropriation, similar to readymade object art, is “an artistic strategy of intentionally borrowing, copying, and altering pre-existing images, objects, and ideas.” Appropriation has also been defined as “the appropriation of a physical object or even an existing artwork into a work of art.”

In my appropriation project, I draw inspiration from the avant-garde movement “DADAism.”” DADAism” emerged in the turbulent early 20th century as a reaction to a chaotic and dystopian world.DADAism’s disregard for traditional norms and challenge to conventional art styles resonates deeply with my creative process. That is, to break some kind of rule or focus on destroying integrity. The notion of “appropriation” is also integrated into the structure of the game. Just as DADA artists often repurpose readymade objects and appropriate cultural symbols, the game itself appropriates and combines the rules of two classic games and works well to produce new game mechanics. Artists such as George Grosz and John Heartfield’s art is extremely caustic and cynical. But while my game also inspired chaos with players fighting each other. However, the game doesn’t deliberately try to provoke players, and players can choose not to disrupt others’ card winning actions. The game’s “rock, paper, scissors” challenges are a subversion of traditional aesthetics, much as DADA artists attempt to subvert social and artistic conventions. Here, players utilize a “game within a game” to achieve control, causing the player who could have won the card to take the risk of winning nothing. Just as DADA artists achieve control over artistic narratives through absurdity and deconstruction.

Overview

This game tackles the topic of appropriation by combing a medium that cannot exist without appropriation – AI generated images – and appropriating the rules of pictionary and the rules of drawing telephone games such as Gartic Phone. In this game however, the creation of pictures are completely left up to the AI with the players only writing the prompts and guesses.

Rules and Gameplay

• The game can theoretically be played by any number of players, but at least 4 players recommended. Additionally 1 person is needed to be the game master.
• The game takes place in a chatroom or a Discord server, and the game master is in charge of managing the players’ prompts and images, as well as stringing the final results together.

1. At the start of the game, each player writes down a phrase of no less than 5 words, and send it to the game master.
2. The game master then sends each phrase to the next player, and each player enter the exact phrases into an AI image generator (craiyon is used for playtesting). Each player chooses an generated image and send them back to the game master. The players must not alter the images in any way, and it does not matter if the generated image does not resemble the input prompt.
3. The game master then sends the images to the next player, and each player describe the content of the image as reasonably detailed as possible (they are also allowed to twist and remix their own interpretation of the image if they wish).
4. The players sends their new descriptions back to the game master, who pass them to the next player.
5. After at least as many rounds as the amount of players have taken place (the game can go on for longer if there are few players or if the players wish to), the game master presents the result of the telephone game.

Artist’s Statement

When I think about the word “appropriation”, my mind immediately jumps to the current hot and controversial topic of AI image generators and how all of them are based on the countless amount of harvested data from across the internet to generate new images based on these data. As a hobby digital artist, I definitely agree with the many ethical problems raised with generative AI, especially in how their data are overwhelmingly gathered and used without the original artists’ or photographers’ consent. However, I also think that there is one area that AI is almost perfectly suited for: making memes and “funny internet pictures”. Since memes already appropriate by nature, AI mashing them together to create something new is basically the next step in memes’ evolution. One particular game that lends well to this are the pictionary type telephone games such as Gartic Phone or Jackbox Civic Doodles, which is the other part of the game I appropriated. I think letting AI do the image making spoofs on the concept of a drawing game and also enhances the collaborative nature of telephone games – in this case collaborating with all the unwitting data used to make the AI image generation possible. While not explicitly stated in the rules, I trust the players will try to write the most ridiculous prompts and choose the weirdest AI generations. After all, to laugh at the results is the point of the original telephone games.

Originally, I wanted the players to draw the pictures themselves, but only closely following that the AI has generated; as I thought this would create extra variance in the game to derail the telephone chain. However, after observing that there are some aspects of AI generated images – the overall blurryness, the weird human hands and the smudged text – that cannot be easily conveyed by drawing in a reasonable timeframe; and the fact that the AI can and will misinterpret the input and generate something completely unexpected, I decided to let the AI completely take over the creation of images. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a online telephone game that allowed direct image uploads, I had to switch the setup to be somewhat clunky and require a game master.

There was another idea I toyed with when iterating with the game, that being instead of needing the players to input descriptions or prompts, the players would put the generated images into AI image identifiers and use that to generate descriptions for the images. I thought it would be a fun parody on the endless cycles of online data harvesting and the corruption of digital data and their meaning. However, currently the AI image identifiers can only use words and not sentences or phrases, this idea had to be scrapped. But I think this idea may be revisited with our current rate of advancement in AI.

Playtest Results

2 sample telephone game chains

How to Play:

• The game needs 2 people, one person plays as “Ike” or the Player, and the other plays as “Ashera” or the DM
• Ashera must place the board in front of Ike and place all the information and items face-down
• Lastly, Ashera shows the player the card that says that they are Ike
• Then the game starts
• Only Ashera can see the location of items and ensures that Ike is following the rules presented on the card
• Ike wins the game if he obtains Lehran’s Medallion

Artist’s Statement:

For this project, I had 2 initial goals: appropriate from Fire Emblem and make a game that is open-ended. I wanted to appropriate from Fire Emblem because I was heavily inspired by the series when coming up with the basic premise of the game. I had the idea to make a game where the player has a set amount of actions they can perform before they die so that every time they had a new life they were a little better off than before. Unlike a roguelike, I wanted to make the benefit of another life something more immaterial. With that, I settled on making lives useful because you would have more information about your surroundings. This is where the inspiration from Fire Emblem (specifically Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance) came into play. I could appropriate the grid-based movement system to make the player’s life equate to a number of steps, I could use famous items from the game to serve as tools to get you to your ultimate goal, and I could use lore from the series to contextualize your adventure. Lastly, I wanted to make sure that the players’ approach to the game was open-ended. This was inspired by the Dada Movement and from games like Super Metroid that emphasized trying new things and not explaining a lot. I wanted the player to interpret the board and realize what was happening on their own, so I did not give much information to the player.

This work relates to the Dada Movement for a few reasons. The first reason is that I used images from another artist and used them in a constructive way for my game. Dada artists often took images from other places and used them in collages, especially in cities like Hannover. Another way this relates to the Dada Movement is that I used lore or a story from another place to influence my work. The reading Dada artists in Cologne were often inspired by Christianity when making their works. My game took the story of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and adapted it. Lastly, I built my game to be open-ended and ordinary-looking. The game is made with simple paper and the only materials you need are your mind and the paper (though a pencil helps). The way the game is played is also very open-ended because there is nothing saying what you should do on a life, only an end goal and 1 restriction. This is similar to how Dada artists like Duchamp took ordinary objects like a chair and bicycle and transformed them into an open-ended piece of art.

Documentation:

• Game being Played
• Item & Information Sheets
• Documentation of Puzzle Solution: