Jackson

How to Play:

Each day, the player must perform a certain number of activities to fill their day with. There are 5 different activities to choose from:

Sleep – wait for 30 second timer

Eat – roll 2 dice until you get certain numbers

Exercise – spin a wheel to determine a random exercise to do

School – answer 10 simple math questions

Fun – play a round of Snake

Normally, players can do 4 of these activities per day. At the start of each day, the player rolls a d20. If they roll a 20 on a weekday, or an 18, 19, or 20, on a weekend, they can choose an extra activity on that day. If you choose not to Sleep, Eat, or Exercise on a given day, your Health will go down by 5. If you don’t do your Schoolwork, your grade will go down by one letter, resulting in a Game Over if you reach an F. If you choose to have Fun, your score will increase. The goal of the game is to make it to the end of the month while keeping your Health and Grades as high as possible.

Artist’s Statement

The goal of the game was to simulate the feeling of having to budget your time when you already don’t feel you have enough of it to do everything you want. The “twist ending” (for lack of a better term) of the game would be that the highest health possible you could achieve was 100, so your score didn’t really mean anything and if you ever sacrificed your Health or Grades for Fun, you lose. The only time when the player is supposed to be able to choose Fun and still win is when they roll high on the d20 at the start of their day, which simulated having extra free-time on that day. This game overall was meant to symbolize the experiences I and many other people (in particular college students) have had in which we have all of these things that need to get done in order to maintain a healthy and productive lifestyle, but the sheer volume can be overwhelming sometimes and when we choose to take some time and relax, the relief is only short term and is overall detrimental to achieving that “productive lifestyle”.

The biggest inspiration for this game was probably my own score for project 1 (even sharing its name), which involved slacking off on certain obligations and responsibilities in order to have “fun”, which in turn becomes an unhealthy cycle that is very much not fun. That piece was inspired by Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece and other similar works that involved something dangerous or actively detrimental to the one performing it. Another inspiration for my game was Brenda Romero’s Train, in the sense that you are working towards a goal throughout the game, but once it’s over, the true nature of what you’ve been doing is revealed, and you now should have a different view of what your actions have caused after seeing them in this new light. One final inspiration for my game could be Dadaism as a whole and the general nonsensical aspect of it. Many of the actions you actually take in my game are meant to symbolize activities that are really not that similar to them but still somewhat make sense, such as rolling dice to symbolize finishing a meal, or just watching a timer for 30 seconds to simulate sleep. It may have even been more subconsciously, but I think the abstract nature of the Dada movement may have played a role in how I landed on these ideas for how I would convey the feeling of the activities I chose.

Below are some photos of my game being played, as well as a Google Slides link where you can play it yourself

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1e25mprRlcHr-KDi4malghUmZz5g13p2J8x4Fi1S9WOA/edit?usp=sharing

For my Appropriation project, I was inspired by pieces such as Yoko Ono’s White Chess, Takako Saiko’s many chess variants, and Super Soul’s Open Source. What drew me to these pieces was they way that they took an established game and made one relatively minor adjustment that completely changed how said game was played and experienced. I decided that I wanted to use poker as my starting point, as it was something I knew well enough and enjoyed, and I also thought it would just be an interesting game to appropriate. My first idea was a version of poker where the rules for scoring hands were unnecessarily convoluted and nonsensical. I liked this idea, but after thinking about it, I realized that this would really just be like a new style of poker rather than a “unique” game built off of an appropriation of poker. I toyed with the idea of scoring being so nonsensical that players would have the opportunity to maybe lie about what is or isn’t a scoring rule and convince their opponents that their hand actually is the best, but I couldn’t figure out a way of doing this that I liked or that wouldn’t be negated by just playing a few times and becoming acquainted with the real rules. I realized that my want to make this game and call it “I Hardly Know ‘er” was really all I had in favor of it, so I went back to the drawing board.

One iteration I devised replaced cards with pairs of dice, with a d12 signifying the value and a d4 signifying its suit. The idea behind this was to make it so every “card” was entirely random rather than being drawn from a fixed set of 52 cards. I did have an opportunity to test this one out in class, and it was fun and seemed like it worked well, but ultimately is not what I would consider the “final design” for the project. Looking back at the pieces I was inspired by, I realized that the aspect I was really drawn to was the way that these games changed what information was given to its players and/or how it was given to them. My final iteration is one I called Omnipoker. It plays mostly like a standard game of Texas Hold ’em, except each player is able to see the hands of all of the other players, but not their own. It leads to a unique situation where players  have far more information at their disposal than usual, but are now missing possibly the most crucial part of the puzzle. This leads to a scenario where players need to determine their moves based on the information they know as well as what others know and they don’t. Not only did the game play surprisingly well, I also liked how, like many interpretations of Dadaism being “anti-art”, it ended up becoming a sort of “anti-poker”.

Dice Poker

Omnipoker

Don’t forget the most important rule: Make sure to have fun!

Play that new game you just got for hours at a time

Spend time with friends and family

What? Do your chores? Go to the gym? But that’s not fun. Why do something if it isn’t fun?

Put on an endless stream of online content to sort of watch

Pick up a new hobby for, like, a week or two

Start your homework? Send an email? You’re joking, right? Just do it later I guess.

Stress about all of the boring, important things you need to get done

Struggle to catch up on all of those things far past their deadlines

These ones must be fun because you’re going out of your way to make them happen

Do it again

This piece was partially inspired by some of the works we discussed in class, such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, where the art itself is somewhat dangerous to the artist. While not exactly “dangerous”, performing my piece would definitely be harmful for the artist. It was for this reason primarily that I didn’t explicitly carry out this score. However, I obviously drew pretty heavily from some of my own firsthand experiences, so I do have a bit of a sense of what doing it deliberately would be like. I was diagnosed with ADHD about a year ago, and I wanted to use this score to sort of show in a more understandable way the kinds of things that causes me to do when I let it get out of hand, as well as explore the idea of what giving in and taking it to the extreme would look like.

This also plays into the other main theme I wanted to explore, which was taking everyday things or lifestyles and turning them into art to give a new perspective. When taken at face value, this just seems like a set of unhealthy habits. However, I think looking at it through this lens shows it in a bit of a different light and allows possibly for a better understanding of the subject. Like I had mentioned before, this score was never really intended as something that should actually be performed, but more as a different way to think about some of my experiences for both myself and others to learn from.