Hex

Game:

first page of spring

http://www.philome.la/hexag0nal/april-showers-prototype

Artist’s Statement:

This game was the culmination of a lot of things. I think it has been in me for a very long time, but this class gave me the means and the confidence and the drive to create it.

Unavoidably, I was inspired by Porpentine Charity Heartscape – she has written so much interactive fiction that has changed my life and the way I view games in general. In particular, I had in mind “Their Angelical Understanding”. When I first played through it, I almost had a panic attack, because though the experiences were not mine, would never be mine, I felt the depth of the person behind the words and saw some of me in them as well. I wanted to make something like that. Another outside influence would have to be “Queers in Love at the End of the World” by Anna Anthropy, an interactive fiction game that lasts only ten seconds. It really overwhelmed me with a sense of possibility. Though I did not want something limited by time, I wanted something that could seem almost endless in possibilities and always ongoing. april showers ended up having 40 different ending cards.

From class though, I was greatly inspired by, as has held true ever since the first “unit”, Fluxus – and Yoko Ono in particular. The idea of art as an experience and experience as art really resonated with me. april showers turns my experiences into a game and hopefully what could be considered art. The pieces within Grapefruit felt deeply personal and sometimes almost nonsensical, which is, honestly, a style I love, like a secret you can only think you understand. Some of them also felt deeply cathartic, and I think catharsis through creation can be the cause behind a lot of great things. Making my own game certainly was cathartic in a lot of ways. There were also a lot of Dada works that inspired me – the aesthetic just did something for me. I think the sort of collage feel of many of the works definitely made me want to put together a narrative made out of scrambled bits and pieces. A word collage, I guess!

Reading through Schrank’s book, though I don’t think it did all that much to the development of my game, did help me focus my thoughts. Though obviously not a perfect structure, I concluded where my game lay on the graph and also where I wanted it to lay, which definitely affected my thought process for the rest of the writing. I knew that due to my own personal tastes, I would end up with a game that would be considered by the general populace as “radical”, but I definitely wanted to make a reflexive game with what could be interpreted as political undertones.

This class inspired me in a lot of ways. I’ve always loved games, but just getting the chance to talk about them more and think about them more and interact with people about the design of them more motivated me to push myself even further. This semester, I’ve played a lot of games off of itch.io. Some of them weren’t that great, some of them were practically unheard of even by indie fans, some of them satisfied an itch inside of me that I didn’t know was there. I spent a lot more time going through interactive fiction lists and the archive, and that especially gave me an idea of what exactly I wanted out of a twine game, an interactive fiction experience.

All I really want my style to be is to be creating games with a lot of heart in them, which I hope I have been achieving!

Materials:

• Conversation Options
  
• Quests
• A sick get-up to signal your NPC status

Documentation:

I had meant to do this on Saturday afternoon on Centennial, but due to personal circumstances and rather inclement weather, I ended up performing this piece on Sunday afternoon in the Curry Student Center. I brought my dear friend Mey along to help me photograph and also operate as emotional support. She ended up doing a lot more though, as she started to call people over. I figured that I had never given her instructions regarding that part, and that people could still ignore her if they wanted, so I let it happen. (It was also a lot more fun that way!) I ended up sitting on a table so as to draw more attention to myself.

Mey tried calling over some people, but some of them told us they were busy and kept moving.

Eventually, a pair of people came over. They were rather unfamiliar with the concept of NPCs giving quests, but I explained that they would have to choose a conversation choice. They chose option 2 – deliver an urgent message! From the message board, they selected the one that read “Let’s meet up soon”. As they came in a pair, the guy who had drawn the message turned to his friend and gave it to her. I had not prepared any of the rewards yet, so I offered them both a hug for their great effort in completing this quest. They seemed rather amused by the whole thing!

The next person who came by also chose option 2. He selected one that was supposed to be a user-generated message. He wrote “Hey! What’s up?” on it and delivered it straight into my hands. I gave him a hug and kept the message. 

My next encounter was rather humorous! Somebody walked up with very little cajoling, and with very little explanation selected option 2. He also received the user-generated message template. I laughed when he said that he was going to deliver it to his boss, then gave him a hug. 

Next was a girl who seemed very indecisive. She tried asking me which option she should choose, but I just told her that they were all available options. Eventually, she chose option 1 – to defeat the beast! I showed her the page, and she decided that she would level up a small sword to a big sword to defeat it. I hugged her, very proud of her. 

My next encounter was with a guy who chose option 2. He got the message that read “Have a lovely day”. He said he knew exactly who he was going to give it to and left immediately after I gave him his reward of a sweet drawing of a diamond I did.

There was a bit of space where I chatted with Mey for a bit and doodled some more future rewards, before a very anxious person came forward. She chose to defeat the beast and illustrated herself poisoning it to death. She received some precious stones (and a hug!) for her efforts. 

Next was someone who chose option 2 and received the last user-generated message card. She wrote “the girl sitting on the table made me do it” and delivered it to two people sitting a bit away. She walked away before I could reward her. (Didn’t correct her either.)

Then! There came a hero who selected option 3. She asked who “Hex” was, and when I said it was me, she gave me some Sour Patch Kids. I gave her a power-up in return and many thanks. 

Finally, a pair of girls were called over, though one of them seemed very reluctant and kept telling her friend she had somewhere to be. When the curious one asked if all of them were options, and I said yes, the reluctant one asked if even 4 was one. I said yes, and she told me she chose that one, and the two of them left.

Having spent about an hour and having gone through all four conversation options, I decided that I ought to go eat my first meal of the day at 5 PM!

Artist’s Statement:

When I first came up with the idea, I was reluctant to actually perform it because of my social anxiety and also because of my preconceptions of what an intervention piece should be like. I thought that I ought to make something more “meaningful”, something that felt more “punchy”. After the positive feedback I got in class though, I felt more confident with the idea. It suited my style, it was fun, and it was something that I felt like I wanted to do.

Reading through the assigned texts, I noticed that most of the pieces seemed to be for the sake of Art or for the sake of challenging some  common preconceived conceptions. Based on my own beliefs regarding art, the motivation behind this piece could fulfill the former, but I didn’t necessarily want to “challenge” people’s ideas of reality – I think that something like that deserves more behind it. If I did challenge anybody’s views, it’ll have been an unintentional side effect. What I did want, however, was to bring some uncommon fun into people’s lives. Originally, I was going to stand on Centennial, near the CAMD building, which would have provided me with a lot of people who would have known the context behind my piece. However, since I was doing it in Curry, I brought someone along who got people to come over, which was interesting in its own way. This meant I got some people completely unfamiliar with the concept of NPCs and who were confused with the undeclared mechanics I was operating on, so I got to give some people a quick ‘n dirty tutorial. I wanted to be both obtrusive and unobtrusive at once. Obtrusive enough to be noticed, but unobtrusive enough that I was not the main focus of the interactions. I wanted everything to be on the participant, or the player, the one undertaking the quest and getting a reward for their efforts. Hopefully, it was a fulfilling (if weird) experience for everyone who participated.

A lot of this still stems from the very Fluxus belief that art is experience mixed with my thoughts on NPCs – specifically stationary quest-givers – in games. I’ve always found the concept of an almost always static character created for the sake of furthering a player character’s growth very interesting and also very admirable. I hope I managed to do something like that!

Instructions:

To be done with two (or more) players.
Preferably to be done on a digital canvas such as Google Drive, so that players may use their own saved files. May also be done on a single digital device.

Select a concept.
Go around until every person has placed a found image that strikes them as relevant upon the canvas. They may overlap, arrange, and rearrange the images as they wish, so long as it is their turn.
Go around again until every person has placed a found phrase that strikes them as relevant upon the canvas.
Alternate until you feel the canvas is complete.

Play-throughs:

(Warning for gory, bloody stuff in the first image!)

I wanted to try out the game with more than one person, so during the class period, I tested it out again. This time we settled on the concept “horror” in celebration of the current month. I started off with a cute little ghost, but very quickly things escalated, which was actually surprisingly fun. The end result is a little horrifying, but that was the whole point, in the end.

(recent playthrough)

(original playtest)

Artist’s Statement:

While the style I wanted for this piece did not quite match up with the underlying messages and concepts behind Dada, I loved the aesthetic of it. Especially the collages of images and words removed from their context, such as Raoul Hausmann’s “ABCD”/”Portrait de ‘artiste” or Hans Arp’s “Untitled (Abstract Composition)” or others. These collage pieces just seemed like they would be so fun to make. And so, I made that one of the bases of my piece: to actually go through that process of creating a collage.

As might be obvious from my last piece, I am really interested in exploring interactions between different people in a creation process. I also love seeing how different people perceive what should be the “same” concept or idea. And so, I thought, why not have people work on a themed collage together? At first, I wanted it to be entirely physical – I wanted to be able to cut out images and phrases from magazines and books. However, there would have been some level of difficulty in staying consistent with the theme and might have limited people’s visions. (Besides, I have rarely been able to actually go through with cutting up a book.) But then I remembered – it’s 2016. We’ve got the internet, and boy howdy does it have a lot of stuff!

So, I came up with a piece that asks for the participants to use any image or words that they did not come up with specifically for this piece to illustrate some concept. Using the internet (and sometimes weird screenshots from a long time ago, or words from a short story you had almost forgotten about, or even screenshots of a salient portion of the current canvas) would result in what I hoped would be a very varied, fun experience.

I think it is in this back and forth growth and interaction that I also incorporate some ideas from Fluxus. Art is experience and life, and life is constantly changing. With this piece, the participants are constantly giving and receiving a stream of information from the other player(s). Just like regular communication, you give your own interpretation of a subject and wait to interpret someone else’s. People also feed off of each other’s innovations. For example, when I took a screenshot of a word in the “horror” piece, on Ilayda’s next turn, she did too. Incorporating transparency into the images used was also a fun twist that made for a really interesting final result. I like how fluid this process inherently is – how far from static it has the potential to be.

I really like intimacy in creation, but for this piece, the intimacy depends on the number of participants involved. The more people there are, the less individual connection you get with them, of course. But, either way, I want it to be a fun – or interesting, at least – experience!

Instructions:

To be done with two or more players.

Select a canvas and a concept.
Go around until every person has placed a found image that strikes them as relevant upon the canvas. They may overlap, arrange, and rearrange the images as they wish, so long as it is their turn.
Go around again until every person has placed a found phrase that strikes them as relevant upon the canvas.
Alternate until you feel the canvas is complete.

Playtest:

I did this digitally through Google Drive with one of my close friends. The word I selected was “bright”. It was really fun – we were video calling while doing this, but we ended up not talking much, as focused as we were. At one point she asked if she could take screenshots of portions of the canvas and use that as her image, which I thought was a wonderful idea. Then she asked if she could paste the same image multiple times for one turn. I said that as long as it was the same image, she could do whatever she wanted. At another point I used a quote from a story I’d written about a year ago. Through the playtest, the idea solidified further in my mind – I wanted people to come together to build a collage of a concept using only previously created things. Appropriate them.

Some screenshots!

Score:

To be done with one other person for the optimal experience. 

Share a happy memory with your partner. On the canvas, they should draw a flower in response.
Switch roles.
Grow your garden until the canvas is filled.
Exchange light touches.
Take the canvas with you on your way.

Artist’s Statement:

This piece was a culmination of many parts of the class. One significant inspiration was Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. A lot of the works contained within seemed to offer unconventional instructions for happiness. For example, I quite enjoyed “MAILING PIECE I”, which goes “send a sound of a smile”.  I liked the sort of intangible synesthesia aspect of it, and I wanted to take that sort of mixed up positive feeling and solidify it. Hence – envisioning memories as flowers. It’s here where I tried to incorporate the material I read in the first chapter of Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life.  “Art […] is experience” was a quote that I agreed with a lot, as well as how Fluxus as an “anart” phenomenon reflected the existence of an ever-changing self in an ever-changing world. I wanted my piece to have a self-reflection aspect to it, where the participants could take a moment to really think of what kinds of solid moments from their pasts brought them joy. I also wanted my piece to be able to bring people together, since I think that a piece of both games and art that is often overlooked is the interaction of people through them.

Positive growth from games and art is something that I really wish for others to achieve after experiencing any kind of artistic piece I create. I want people to be able to love each other and themselves more! And I thought, “Okay. Well, how do people grow closer?” Through shared experiences! So I decided that the participants of this score should share their best experiences with each other. I thought it would also be very interesting for the person listening to portray how they interpreted the event, since everyone experiences things differently. The storyteller may have thought of their own memory as a passionate red kind of experience, but the listener might connect it to a different color or texture. This is why I left the “canvas” portion of the instructions vague and unspecified. I hope that people who attempt to do this with each other will experiment with materials are used to create their shared memories.

Since I was so focused on growth, I decided that a good way to represent this piece was through flowers. Everyone can create a simple flower and can use the basic concept of a flower to create something new. I thought that it would be absolutely lovely to have a physical, tangible garden of happy thoughts.

I added on the second to last step, because I wanted to increase the intimacy of this piece. Throughout the enactment of “Growth”, it is unlikely that the participants would actively seek to touch each other, unless they already knew each other very well. I wanted to end the piece with a sort of culmination of the physical. From intangible thoughts to interpreted creation to simple touch between people. A closing of the distance, in a way.

Then, the last step. I myself am uncertain of all of the different ways that last step could turn out! I want to see how people interpret it, how people choose to part ways after such an intimate meeting, how people choose to bring this new memory with them. I really hope that this game piece seems full of love!

Documentation:

I performed this in class with Marina. We were limited by time restraints, but I was still very pleased with the results! I shared two of my happy memories (going to the beach this summer – leftmost flower, and Chinatown a couple of weeks ago – rightmost flower), and Marina shared one of hers (getting her puppy – center flower). She brushed my arm very lightly at the end, and I returned the gesture. Marina took the paper with her to keep.

Even without performing the piece in its entirety, it was still a very joyful experience!