BirdStrike by Daniel Rosenthal
At the start of the game, each player is dealt four BirdStrike cards. Each card, which represents a plane part (wing, body, tail, or engine) from different planes, has a hand-written “bird risk” number, which indicates how lethal the plane part is to birds.
At the start of each round, each player discards one of their BirdStrike cards. Then, four BirdStrike cards are drawn in the middle. Players each take one card from the middle, going in order from the lowest to highest “bird risk” sums of their current hand.
At the end of the round, two 20-sided dice are rolled. Each player “strikes” a bird if their “bird risk” sum is greater than the rolls. After a player strikes a bird, they take a Wingspan card and read its name and fun fact. They then show the other players the drawing of a bird on the card.
If a player has a full set (four BirdStrike cards of the same plane), they can choose to halve or double their “bird risk” sum. If they have one of each part, they can choose to add or subtract 2 from their “bird risk” sum.
At the end of ten rounds, whichever player has the most points wins. The players get a point for each Wingspan card they have. If a player has no Wingspan cards, meaning they struck no birds, they gain 11 points and automatically win.
Artist’s Statement:
I think that all art (and man-made creation, in general) requires a degree of appropriation from nature. Both the tools and media used to create art are made from natural material, albeit with varying degrees of transformation from its original “natural” state: wooden brushes and paints made of natural pigments are used to create paintings; the human respiratory system vibrates air to create vocal music; computers and hardware made of materials like metal and glass are used to both create and display digital art. Even “synthetic” materials like plastic were created from naturally occurring chemicals. I also think that the immaterial ideas that facilitate human creativity are appropriated in some sense, as I believe new ideas come from the synthesis of existing ones. Neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed, but they can be transformed, with works of art being a possible end result of this transformation.
I think this perspective is best exemplified by the dadaists’ more blatant application of appropriation. They transformed existing, man-made (i.e., “unnatural”) art and artifacts by turning them into material for their own works, conveying novel ideas that were often at odds with the source material. It ascribes the “originality” of art to the ideal, devaluing the materialistic and technical aspects of art by placing the traditional artist’s material (say, paint and canvas) in the same category as the dadaist artist’s material (say, the traditional artist’s painting). If art isn’t “created” but rather the result of a transformation of something that already exists, then the ironing board made from a Rembrandt painting has just as much artistic integrity as the Rembrandt painting itself, even if the latter required more skill to bring into being.
Because all human art is ultimately the result of humans transforming nature, I wanted to make my game about nature. I walked around some green spaces in Boston for a while, hoping to get some inspiration, and eventually headed to the Charles River Esplanade. The Esplanade isn’t a very “natural” space per se, but it had enough trees that I thought I’d be able to find some birds or squirrels and watch them from a bench. After 5 minutes of sitting with no signs of animal life, a helicopter flew overhead. This made me think about how aircrafts now take up space that was once reserved for clouds and birds—until around the time of World War I and the Dada movement. From this thought, I started to ideate my game, BirdStrike.
I figured that Wingspan, an engine-building game centered around cards with beautiful drawings of birds, would be a good work to transform through appropriation. While I enjoy the game, the cards primarily have a functional purpose in service of strategic gameplay, preventing me from taking the time to appreciate the aesthetically-pleasant, non-functional card details, such as the art and the fun facts at the bottom of each card. I think there is some parallelism between the way that humans appropriated the physics behind bird flight for planes and the way Wingspan appropriates bird characteristics and behaviors for game mechanics, as in both cases, human knowledge of birds was transformed into something functional. Believing that birds (and nature) have value beyond the function they serve for humans, I wanted my game to remove all mechanical functionality from the representations of birds that appear on the Wingspan cards. In other words, the card contents are useless in gameplay, but they can still inspire players with their aesthetic beauty. A more in-depth explanation of the intended themes and meaning of my game can be found in the linked Google Slides presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Wl58bdAq0sF4gOtibEHXFsNX2dOg-S5Lvwb1ulYr-2c/edit?usp=sharing
My game was primarily inspired by nature, Wingspan, and the Dadaist use of appropriation in general. The piece Compass by Man Ray, which depicts a magnet attached to a metal gun, also inspired the themes of technology and violence portrayed in my game. The piece is a great example of a dadaist taking functional objects and making them non-functional, but I think its message is the most interesting component. My interpretation is that the piece makes a statement about how advances in human technologies, particularly those made of metal, tend to lead us toward violence, with the gun symbolizing this violence and the magnet being the metaphoric compass pulling us toward it. Like the dadaists, we live in an era of rapid technological advances with unpredictable consequences. I think it’s important to look at and reflect on purer forms of nature, such as birds, to keep us in touch with what matters to us as living beings. The proliferation of metal devices that change our ways of living will certainly continue, but being concerned with nature for its own sake is a necessity for ensuring we don’t doom the natural world, and as a part of the natural world, ourselves.
