Sammy

Score:

Wake up
Draw a line on a piece of paper
Line length is based on how long you slept
Line straightness is based on how well you slept
Repeat the process every morning on the same piece of paper.

Artist Statement:

I was inspired by Yoko Ono’s Painting by Hammer and Nail and former student Justin Brady’s Dream Paper. In both, of their works, a person repeats an action every day in the morning. I wanted to do something similar, and the idea came to me one morning when I had a terrible night’s sleep that I wanted to make a visual representation of how my sleep went.

The main purpose of the art piece is to ritualistically document your sleep and give the quality/length of your sleep some kind of physical form. The first 2 photos are the month of September-October, and then October-November. The last one (the reason why this is so late) is finals week. The first month is substantially more erratic, as my sleep schedule was really messed up, and I wasn’t sleeping well/going to bed at reasonable hours. The second picture shows a much more reasonable sleep schedule. At the time, I was going to bed around midnight and waking up at like 7-9am. I slept very consistently during that time when I wasn’t sick. The final picture shows finals week (or like this past week since most of my finals were due this week.) As you can see, I only slept 5 out of the 7 days, and the sleep mostly was bad quality and short, except for Wednesday where I took a day off to rest.

Artist Statement:
The game originally started from my experience this semester. Being my first semester away from home, and also just really struggling with my own problems mentally, it was a very challenging semester for me. It was hard to get the work I needed to do, and it was hard to find the motivation and energy to do what I needed to do. I

I was then inspired by the idea of affordances that showed up in the book World of Game. I wanted to have a mechanic that you knew intuitively was supposed to be about moving forwards, but the mechanics of the game made it so that you didn’t want to. I decided to go with a dice roll. In most board games, you use a dice roll to decide how far forward you go, and you’re constantly waiting for your next turn to roll the die. I wanted my game to mess with that perception and make it so that you constantly dread having to roll the die.

The final game ended up being played on a calendar. You could play it on a screen and just keep track of the days, or just play it on a normal calendar. The month does not matter but playing on months with fewer days is easier than playing on ones with more. There are also 4 “stats” that you have on your character. You have happiness, motivation, stress, and energy. You start off with 5 happiness, 5 motivation, 0 stress, 5 energy. Each stat can range from 10 to -10. You can take actions that will allow your happiness, motivation, energy to exceed 10 (the number will remain at 10), but you cannot take actions that will allow them to go lower than -10. The opposite is true for stress (can go below -10 but not above 10).

Every turn your roll a six-sided die and you move forward a number of days equal to the roll, and you get an event depending on your roll. The event is divided into these ranks:

• rank 0 (roll of 1)
  • rank 0 is a special rank where it is meant to simulate a break. It has no options but just gives you an overall boost to the rest of your stats.
• rank 1 (roll of 2 or 3)
• rank 2 (roll of 4 or 5)
• rank 3 (roll of 6)

You then have three options for each of these events. Options 1 and 2 have a motivation requirement, meaning that you cannot do that action unless you have high enough motivation. Option 1 is the best option, which has a heavy energy cost but has positive effects on the rest of your stats. Option 2 is a gamble that has a smaller motivation requirement, where you have a certain percent chance (based on the rank) of success. If you succeed, you get a slightly negative consequence to your actions. Failure, however, has a more substantial negative effect. The third option is almost completely negative, but it is the only option that gives you extra energy other than rolling a 1. Unlike the other two, the third option does not have a motivation requirement, so if your motivation is too low you will have to choose this one.

There is a mechanic I call “fake motivation” that’s also implemented. Basically, you can sacrifice 1 energy or 2 happiness to get one point of fake motivation. This point of fake motivation does not change your current motivation numbers, but you can use it to use an action that you normally wouldn’t be able to do because your motivation was too low. For example, if you had 6 motivation but wanted to use an action that requires 7, you could use 1 energy to let you use the action. However, if you were to lose motivation because of the option you took, you would subtract the number from 6, not 7.

You win the game if you were able to finish the month, and you lose if you are unable to use any actions without one of your stats going below -10 (or above 10 for stress). The game is very hard to win, and even if you do win you often end up with many values in the negatives. The game is designed so that you value motivation and energy over your happiness and stress levels.

The game succeeded in what it was trying to do. Most players struggled to finish the map, often losing before the final stages. Even those who ended, often ended with many negative values. The best result I saw was the following:

Motivation: 1
Happiness: 0
Stress: 3
Energy: -7

Scenario link: https://northeastern-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/elsayed_s_northeastern_edu/EZZIohBIl0dJoyXRiSypb1EBs4tyD6bSSw6IjJ56sot-3w?e=CkD5QR

Requirements:
A keyboard that is remapped so that the keys are laid out as abcdefg like in the picture below (both keycaps and the actual inputs).
Some typing test website (monkeytype.com for example).

Rules:
Perform a 60-second typing test with the keyboard.
You may restart as many times as you would like.
Try and get the fastest speed you can with this new layout.

Artist’s Statement:
The game is meant to critique how as a society we sometimes implement things without considering why they were done that way just because “it’s always been that way.” We currently don’t know who or why the qwerty layout was invented. A common theory is that it was to slow down typists so that a typewriter wouldn’t get jammed, but there is no supporting evidence for that theory. There are other layouts that have been invented since, such as Colemak or Dvorak, that are more efficient ways of typing on a keyboard. Unfortunately, we don’t pick up these layouts simply because its not worth relearning how to type, and most of us already are accustomed to the qwerty layout.

This game is meant to poke fun at that by asking you to type in a comical layout: the order of the alphabet. It was heavily inspired by Yoko Ono’s White Chess, which is where the idea of taking a game and making it more challenging by messing with the components to drive the message across came from. I think the game ended up being actually very fun to play. It provided a lot of friction but felt very possible and that the next time you attempted the challenge you would do better than the last. The game itself felt fair, even though it was very difficult to get a good time, which ended up making it quite popular among other students. I was also inspired by a video I watched called “How I went from 10 to 130 WPM in 3 months” from YouTuber pinguefy in which he talks about swapping to a different keyboard layout. The initial struggle he showed of learning it and having to retrain the muscle movement in his hands played inspired the keyboard aspect of this piece

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For my intervention, I decided to try and go into a game of Valorant deathmatch and make friends with people by peacefully running around and not hurting anyone.

This intervention project was initially inspired by a YouTuber named Ymfah who is well known for his challenge runs of games such as Skyrim and the Dark Souls series. One of his most popular ones is to complete these games “pacifist,” in other words to complete these games that the developers designer around the idea of you killing enemies, He would intentionally find ways to bug out the game so that he would be able to beat it without having killed anyone himself. One of the jokes that he makes about this concept while he plays is that pacifism is having other people do the killing for you. I’ve attempted pacifist runs of these games in the past, and it’s a very fun additional challenge. I like the idea of trying to play the game with an added rule included to make it incredibly difficult. Combining this idea of “pacifism” and also inspired by previous posts such as Pacifist Apex, I wanted to try making friends with people I encountered in the game. I was also a little inspired by the Jejune Institute by trying towards the end to get people to basically “sign up” to being pacifist by joining me in the act. It felt similar to the way the Institute would rope in random people who were just getting on with their day into something else, even though this was on a  much smaller scale than that of the institute.

The original concept for my intervention was to go into the standard 5v5 mode for the game with a bunch of friends and try to get the enemy to act peacefully towards us. However, this idea was quickly scrapped, because the enemy usually didn’t care for making friends and would just steamroll us to a very quick victory. So instead, I tried to do it in a game mode that people cared less about winning: deathmatch. In Valorant, deathmatch is a 14 player free-for-all where the first to 40 kills wins in an 8-minute timespan. If 8 minutes pass and no one has reached 40 kills yet, then the player with the most kills is decided as the winner. People take this mode a lot less seriously than the normal 5v5 game mode, and most people use deathmatch as a way to warm up for the real game. My plan was simple, I would run around with my knife out (a kind of accepted way to show that you’re not hostile) and spam crouch/jump as a way to try and communicate with the enemies that I’m friendly. I didn’t want to use the all-chat, as it felt like it would be too easy and would defeat the purpose of the intervention.

The results were much more interesting. Every game, there were a couple of people that would join me and act peacefully.  In one game, there was a moment when two other people decided to be peaceful and friendly, and we jumped around in a huddle for a few seconds. There were also some people who would pretend to be peaceful by pulling out their knife, only for them to attack me with it and get a free kill. There were also a couple of people who became invested in the idea of “protecting me,” which was also very interesting. Overall, this turned out to be a fun and surprising intervention, and I enjoyed playing it.

Gameplay footage of some games:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sWp0FKs4NqSKF_NddaDbRJRJdchunka9/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16dAMieakv56i1rzQl6NGy0XNVi_0ophJ/view?usp=sharing