The game can be found here: https://giacomo-mantovanelli.itch.io/accountability

Password: accountability

Originally I wanted to make a game that emulates the experience of holding yourself too accountable, where you set up expectations that are impossibly difficult to meet and punish yourself for failing to meet them. I think most people have had moments where they are beating themselves up over something that in a year they won’t even remember and doing this constantly conditions you to be disappointing in yourself regardless of how you are actually doing. This of course actually limits how you perform rather than makes you perform better as is proven from personal experience but also countless research into differing outcomes of punishment based conditioning vs reward based conditioning. This is also quite personal to me because my brother had a rough couple semesters in university and got academically dismissed. When he talked to his advisor it was apparently pretty standard to simply petition your dismissal and they will let you back in on probation. But the punishment of dismissal stuck around and every time he would go in to take an exam all he could think about was how failing meant he was risking getting kicked out and therefore couldn’t do well on exams that he could get A’s on not in exam conditions.

So, I was planning on making a typing simulator where when you mess up you shock yourself with a shock collar. This was pretty quickly (understandably so) shot down to keep the classroom safe. I still sort of wanted to bring in a shock collar but for the first play test I settled with making the players pinch themselves.

The first play test was a simple typing test from https://monkeytype.com/ and when the players made a mistake I would tell them to stop the game and pinch themselves. This worked fine and the feedback I got was that yes they felt that they couldn’t perform as well because I was sitting there holding them ‘accountable’ for their mistakes. However, on the last person that I was play testing with I had gotten extremely tired of repeating “please pinch yourself” every time they messed up and eventually just stopped saying it. But, the player kept pinching themselves. Every miss click they would stop the game and pinch themselves without me saying a word before continuing.

I became really interested with this aspect of my game (and totally lost interest in having players shock themselves) and wanted to make it part of the core experience. I felt it better reflected what I was getting at, not only are you performing worse by continuously punishing yourself but you condition yourself to punish yourself, exactly what I wanted to base my game on.

From here I built the actual game. It was a simple type test but every time you mess up a window pops up with a command which is your punishment. The player can at any point choose to click leave game upon which they are asked if they are satisfied with themselves. If they answer yes the game closes and you are done. If they answer no the game restarts. Once they have done their punishment they click a button acknowledging they have done it and then the continue button stops being greyed out and the can click continue. It is very important to note that they can always click continue regardless of if they have done the punishment and/or clicked the acknowledgment button. This was intentional to emphasize that you can just keep striving to to better without punishing yourself for making mistakes.

After reading the Works of Game book by John Sharp I was inspired and saw parallels between my game and both the games made by Brenda Romero and Gravitation by Jason Rohrer. Romero’s games are built around exploring complicity through games and although her games touch on much more serious and grave tragedies I believe my game explored self-complicity. Will you just allow yourself to continue on the path of punishment or not? I think the way that Romero’s games aren’t necessarily immediately obvious what the message they are trying to send is but rather through game play you experience the message was a big inspiration to how similarly on the cover my game looks like a simple typing test but as you play and mess up you are exposed to what I am trying to get across. Gravitation was also an inspiration for my game because it really explores the relationship between competing priorities as a game mechanic which is what I am also trying to do. To what extent are you willing to sacrifice one for the other? Gravitation also doesn’t explicitly tell you that chasing your creative urges is bad but rather shows you the consequences and lets you decide through it’s mechanics. Similarly, I am not trying to stop people from being upset they didn’t perform how they wanted to but rather trying to show the consequences of what happens if you don’t manage to balance it properly.

Finally here is a video of one of the play testers touching their nose even though the screen is simply blank as proof that yes it did actually condition players to perform the punishment (touching their nose):

Accountability Media

And some images from play tests:

This artwork was initially inspired by my previous struggles with public speaking. I believe I have gotten better but I have done presentations in the past where my legs are literally shaking*. The social pressure to speak and the absolute horror when nothing comes out is an experience I wanted to try and recreate/reflect on with my intervention artwork.

I also found inspiration from Yoko Ono’s cut piece in the sense that you are putting yourself in a situation that is comfortable/uncomfortable depending on how others react to it. You are allowing others to determine how the piece goes. I was also heavily inspired by Marina Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present although that piece is more explicit that the artist will be sitting in silence I enjoyed it’s exploration of human connection through silence and how people react to silence, both comfortably and uncomfortably.

My initial pitch for the project was as follows: Put yourself in a position where you are expected to talk. I.e. a pitch or a presentation but stay silent. Say thank you and then go sit down.

I was able to play test this during my initial pitch. I just went up there, set up my laptop and waited. I lasted around four and a half minutes before giving up and explaining my intervention. While I was up there I started thinking about how the artwork would be drastically different depending on the context surrounding it, in this class I felt comfortable standing there in silence, partly because I know a lot of the people in the class but also because the class expects artworks to be performed. Around 15 seconds in it was clear I wasn’t planning on talking and other students got up and started fiddling with my laptop or asking me questions, trying to participate in the artwork without knowing what it was. If I performed this piece in any other class this semester the results would be drastically different, I would not be in a comfortable situation and the other students probably wouldn’t be comfortable either.

Apart from my four and a half minutes of self reflection I got suggestions to try and gamify the artwork and have a clear end goal. I mulled these over for a bit and came up with my second pitch:

Prepare a stopwatch. Put yourself in a position where you are expected to speak. This can be anything from an important presentation to going up to a person and saying “excuse me”. Start the stopwatch when you feel that the expectation for you to speak has begun. Stop the stopwatch when you speak or there is no audience. Try to get the longest time.

The format is very much like a score and I added a clear goal, to get the longest time possible. I also expanded the examples a little bit to help people that perform the intervention know that it doesn’t have to be a presentation but can also just be a one on one conversation with a stranger. Furthermore, I clarified that there are two end conditions, when you speak or if there is no audience. I felt this was a clear distinction because there are certain situations where the social expectation doesn’t require the listener to just wait for you. For example, if you go up to a stranger and say “excuse me” but never say anything else they will most likely just walk away and you will be left with no audience.

After play testing and getting another round of feedback I felt my artwork itself was in a good state and even though I wasn’t directly inspired by it when I created the piece I like how the piece also explores the positions of power in social situations. If you are in the position with social power that changes the context of the piece and typically increases the time you can just stand there silently.

Here are the play tests I did and the times I got. See if you can beat them!

• This class 4:54
• Class I TA for (first time) 2:25
• Class I TA for (second time) 0:30
• Online call with friend 1:03
• Roommate (“Did you hear about…”) 0:00
• Roommate (Knew about it) 0:54
• Stranger (“Excuse me” strat) 0:20, 0:37
• Stranger (“Can I interview you for a class” strat) 0:25
• Cashier (“Can I get a uhh…”) 0:15

The ones that are most interesting to me are when I play tested twice with the class I TA for and when I play tested with a cashier.

Both times I play tested as a TA were during my typical beginning of class speech where I go over what we will talk about and what work they need to do. Both times I just said “Good morning” and nothing else. The first time the whole class just waited and waited with confused looks on their faces for me to give my typical speech. One by one they just started doing the work they knew they had to do until they all had started working and I had lost my audience. However, not a single student spoke up to ask if there was anything else from me, even though they were expecting me to give my morning spiel. I think this is because I was in a position of social power and because no one wanted to be the first person to think something was weird and risk the person with social power singling them out. I have been on the flip side of this social dynamic, being in a class where you are confused but you don’t want to ask a clarifying question because the professor hasn’t stopped talking and because no one else seems to be confused about it either. The second time I play tested (a week later) I got a dismal 30 seconds, not because I started talking but because the students already had the assumption that I would keep talking broken the previous week so just gave up on me earlier and started working.

When I play tested with a cashier I simply walked up to order a meal and said “Can I get a uhhh…” and stopped talking, pretending to think about my order. I cracked after 15 seconds and proceeded to order. This situation was interesting because in our consumerist culture the person purchasing would be assumed to have the social power (“The customer is king”, “The customer is always right”…) however that was not the vibe I was feeling at all while standing their silently. I felt awkward, embarrassed and a bit of shame for wasting this person time. Out of all the play tests I did this was the only one that I cracked and spoke because of how awkward I felt.

Overall, I think this intervention helped the performer to reflect on the social dynamics that they choose to interact in while exploring the expectation to speak. I am glad it is over and I don’t have to play test it any more.

Here are some audio files from two play tests I felt comfortable recording:

Friend Online Interview

Friend Phone Interview

Stranger Interview

*This was always funny to me because in Italian you can say “le gambe fanno Giacomo Giacomo” which is a saying that means “the legs are shaking/trembling” (For context Giacomo is my name).

War Box Rules

Assembly Required

Open the box and assemble your team’s pieces. (Rip pieces apart and place tape on the back to allow sticking to a wall.)

Set up your chess pieces on a wall consisting of rectangles and/or squares. Regular chess rules. Movement is agreed upon at move time.

When you take an opponent’s piece, take it off the wall and stick it anywhere you want on either of your bodies.

Assembly Not Required

Open the box.

Set up your chess pieces on a wall consisting of rectangles and/or squares. Regular chess rules. Movement is agreed upon at move time.

When you take an opponent’s piece, take it off the wall and stick it anywhere you want on either of your bodies.

War Box Pictures

War Box Write up

My initial inspiration for this project came to me while doom-scrolling on my phone:

Apart from giving me a decent chuckle it also was a clear example of appropriation and specifically appropriation with games. This also reminded me of Raymond’s Artwork #1 which similarly appropriates the space you are in as the game play area. On my way to class I looked around at different textures and tiles and decided that the white wall of Cabot was a good enough place to start appropriating. So my first play test was pretty simple, play a game of chess on a irregular brick wall.

During the play test the players starting doing something strange, when they took an enemies piece they grabbed it and stuck it onto their bodies. This was really interesting and was really a massive coincidence because I needed chess pieces that could play on a vertical surface so I had used paper with tape on the back.

This emergent behavior from the players made me think about chess’ relation to war (since it is a war game) and about artworks that explore this connection. Notably Yoko Ono’s White Chess Set and how it approaches anti-war from the ‘what is the difference between you and I’ perspective. The way the play testers were playing my game had an aspect of ‘war trophies’ as they stuck more and more of their enemies pieces onto their arms which I found interesting.

Since I was going with an anti-war message I decided to explore what message I wanted to convey with my piece appropriating the wall/space around the players. Sophie Taubers Dada Bowl and Poudrier to me look like bomb shells, the idea of the war coming home and not being some distant conflict struck me as important and I felt that my artwork similarly conveyed that message by having players appropriate the space around them to ‘play’ war.

For the second play test I experimented with forcing players to stick the pieces they captured onto the other players body, anywhere they wanted. This was inspired by Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece by giving up some bodily autonomy in terms of choosing where your captured pieces go. I was also trying to steer players away from the ‘war trophies’ of capturing a piece and placing it on yourself that occurred in the first play test. Players were respectful during the play test but I would assume that not all players would act like this especially if the players were strangers.

For the final piece I created two versions ‘War Box’ and ‘War Box (Some assembly required)’ the goal of the assembly required version was to add more player participation and increase the ‘loss’ when a player loses a piece because they had to assemble the set themselves so each lost piece is a bit of lost effort. I also modified it to allow players to attach taken pieces to either themselves or their opponent, I decided to leave this up to the player so the player is forced into an uncomfortable choice, do they take the war trophy or do they burden the other opponent with a physical token of their mistakes.