The non-verbal artgame UNSPOKEN requires players to convey and understand emotions through restricted body language. The player who expresses an emotion through restricted body movements receives no verbal communication from other players who try to understand what they see. The interpretation results from each performance session will determine how the physical structure develops. The Expressor receives brief control over the game after successful emotion recognition by at least one player so they can purposefully add physical elements to the forming cube. The game introduces random fragment placement when players fail to understand the expressed emotion. All additions made to the structure become permanent. The game records emotional understanding and misinterpretation through the accumulation of fragments which create an unstable or unfinished cube structure. The game lacks any scoring system and winner designation, and players can stop at any point. The game creates a visual representation of how communication affects shape development through time.
The first iteration of the game allowed players to discover non-verbal emotional signals without any established framework. The game required one player to show a selected emotion through limited body movements while the other player tried to understand the expression. The playtesting results showed that players failed to match their intended emotions with the emotions they thought others felt during most attempts. The iteration achieved its goal of creating emotional discomfort through miscommunication, but each play session ended without creating any enduring impact. The system required a mechanism to store ongoing misunderstandings because this need led to the development of physical fragments in subsequent iterations.
Iteration 2 introduced a playable prototype that translated emotional interpretation into physical accumulation. Building on the findings of Iteration 1, this version added fragmented pieces that could gradually form a cube over multiple rounds. When an emotion was correctly interpreted, players gained limited control to place a fragment intentionally; when interpretation failed, fragments were placed randomly. This iteration revealed how misunderstanding did not stop the game but actively reshaped its structure. Emotional alignment became rare but meaningful, while misinterpretation accumulated as visible spatial distortion, clarifying the project’s core mechanic.
The system evolved through Final Iteration into a dependable expressive framework which generated permanent structural changes after emotional interpretation. The system established clear boundaries between its potential cube components while it improved its ability to distinguish between purposeful placement and accidental placement. The system allowed brief control through correct interpretation, but permanent instability resulted from incorrect interpretation. The cube developed through time as an imperfect and frequently incomplete shape which served as a physical manifestation of emotional discrepancies rather than a targeted artistic goal. The system evolved from an emotional prediction test into a unified artgame platform during this iteration.
The references for UNSPOKEN derive from artistic practices which use instructional methods to create conceptual art and process art and expressive games that utilize rules and constraints as their creative elements. The project draws inspiration from Yoko Ono’s Instruction Pieces which establish execution and interpretation as the core elements of art and Sol LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes which guide the project’s cube structure that exists independently of completion. The artwork follows Mary Flanagan’s critical play theory and employs expressive game elements from dys4ia and The Marriage and Walden a game to express personal and social experiences through abstract representations and restricted gameplay.
