Jacqueline Fairbrother

For my intervention, I put a dozen beach balls on the ground of the freshman quad and watched to see what people’s reactions would be.

I sat with them for about 25-30 minutes and people mostly just ignored them. There were around 25 people out of the maybe 50 who walked by that actually interacted with them. Many of the people just walked by without even glancing at them, and most others just kicked at them a bit as they walked.  There was also a truck that just kind of drove through without making any effort to go around them. Luckily none of them were particularly in the way.

There was one girl who was walking with a friend and she stopped to kick a few of them. She yelled for her friend to wait, but he kept walking, so she moved on. A different girl however, was REALLY into the beach balls.

She made a game where she wanted to see how far she could kick them, but didn’t get any of them too far due to the fact that a lot of them had deflated a bit and the wind kept them from going in a straight line.

One guy simply picked one up and walked away.

I think for the most part it would have been better to get bigger beach balls, and maybe to get more of them. The place I bought them from said they were supposed to be 14 inches in diameter, which was obviously a lie. I also would have waited for a less dreary day. Over all though, it was fun to watch people walk by and just absent-mindedly kick at the beach balls, and it was funnier that so many people just ignored them.

My game is an appropriation of comic book/manga panels. A group of players takes turns putting down out of context panels to create a new story.

Rules (for 3-5 players):

• Each player begins the game with 7 panel cards. Another panel is chosen from the deck as the starting panel, and from there, any player who thinks they have the right panels to pick up the story may start the game.
• On each turn, a player may play up to 2 panels, assuming they can link both of the panels to the story.
• The first player to run out of cards is the winner.
• If players wish to make the story longer, they can start the game with more cards in their hand, or they can play until there are no cards left in the game, removing the possibility of a winner.

My inspiration for this game was a game I played a few weeks ago, called Story Wars. I liked the ability of the players to take the game mechanics in their own direction. I wanted to make a game with that element to it, but with a more of a focus on story (despite what its name implies, Story Wars incorporates little story). From there, I thought it would be interesting to appropriate moments from a several different stories to create something new. And thus, this game was born. I originally had more mechanics and rules to this game, but during the in-class playtests, we found that they simply were not necessary. Additionally, I initially had the manga panels resized and pasted onto index cards, but after those were ruined, it turned out that the mismatched sizes of the panels actually fit the manga aesthetic.

Take your friends outside to build a snowman. Note- make sure the man has a bottom, middle, and a head.

Make sure to give the snowman a big, happy smile.

Pour red snow cone syrup onto the snowman.

With a spoon, try to eat the snowman from the middle and bottom, without letting his head fall to the ground.

Whoever takes the bite that causes the head to fall is the loser.

Variation:

Place a hat on the snowman’s head, and play not until the head falls but until the hat falls. In this version, you may eat the head.

If there is no snow with which to make a snowman, you may make a mud man. Do not eat him.

Artist’s Statement:

I first got the idea for this score when I was walking around in the snow with some friends, and one of them began to eat some of the snow. I found this to be really gross, since the snow was dirty with salt and dirty and other city gook. I then was thinking of a way to make the snow less disgusting, and thought it would be fun to use that concept for my score. My friends thought eating a snowman was a bit morbid, so I decided to make it more so by adding red flavoring (to look like blood) and making it a game to keep the snowman’s head from falling off. I added the bit about the mud man while watching Avatar: the Last Airbender, thinking it would be a funny addition, and I added the part with the hat while thinking about Celia’s hats, as a less morbid and more comical version of the game.