MarkSavage

Overview  /  Rules

Public Circuit is an Intervention piece with a focus on putting play in a disruptive location. Two teams race in a 3 legged race, with standard rules. This race takes place on the circular walking path of Centennial Quad during peak hours before common class times, such as before 11:45, 1:35, and 3:15. The two teams race to complete the circuit 5 times from the same starting point. They must stick to the path at all times, and must do their best not to bump into anyone on the path.

Artist Statement 

This game looks to find meaning merely by transplanting one  activity into a different location. The piece focuses on re-contextualization, and how that changes the dynamics of the activity. This is inspired by many happenings and artworks by artists like Kaprow and Ono.  These pieces see artifacts or activities taken into different environments or contexts, even changing small things like the scale of an artifact. This piece is also very appropriative, as there are no new mechanics in the game. However, by putting this type of race where control and agility are limited in the context of a busy area, it adds obstacles normally not present. In this case, people become a barrier to your goals, and changes the dynamics and speed of the race. The race no longer relies on the strategies and physical abilities that are present in a normal three legged race, and it instead becomes about navigation, and how willing the racers are to be an inconvenience to passersby.

This games goals in terms of intervention are very similar to the freeze piece in Grand Central Station, where a focus isn’t on audience participation, but rather their perceptions of the event. Whereas that piece focused on mystery and audiences being confused, my piece focuses on more negative emotions. Actively being disruptive to people on their ways to class is an annoyance, and may result in people being upset or inconvenienced. However, this frustration that passersby may experience is directly juxtaposed with the playful competition present in the actual race. This dynamic is interesting, and acts as a break from the fairly direct and one-tracked peoples’ navigation to classes is.

Overview: 

New Games is an pervasive interactive fiction  game where the player is the newest friend in a friend group in college.  The player is given the numbers of several actors, who improvise as these characters. Throughout the game, timed events will occur that put pressure on the group. This is a format that can be adapted to any group of people, story, and time span.

Cast: 

For my run of the game, it was a 5 character story. The characters are as follows:

Alex Lahey: Alex is the straight man of the group. Hes a pretty confident charismatic guy who is pretty chill and kid. Hes had a fairly good upbringing, he has a younger sister, but his parents are recently divorced. He keeps his head up most of the time. Overall, he’s an optimist. He cares a lot about his friends, but he isn’t an emotional anchor in the group. he’s always down to listen but advice isn’t his thing. He also doesn’t talk a whole lot about his issues, but to be fair he doesn’t have a lot of them. Computer Science major with a music minor. Very knowledgeable about his passions, but sometimes can be pretentious about them and gatekeep a little.

Charlotte Web: Shes a long time friend of Krista, and found her way into the overall friend group.  She’s kinda jaded and standoffish, but she is fiercely loyal and cares a lot about her people.  At this point in the story, everyone is her people, even Jacob, who is kinda new. Sometimes she can get a little shrewd, but ultimately she is a good person, who can be very caring and empathetic. However, sh is also very competitive. She also holds a really high expectation of herself. This kind of intersects into the fact that she is a really devoted gymnast and has been from a young age. She often pushes herself too hard. She also has a lot of personal image issues, including an eating disorder that she has been living with since middle school. She never went through proper precautions to remedy the eating disorder, so its still very present. She’s also pretty closed off about her issues.

Krista Sartano: She’s an architecture major who is kinda cynical and goofy. She had a lot of medical issues all her life. There’s a lot of tension in her family because f it. So she kind of ignored a lot of her medical issues recently, trying to be independent. She is dating Kate.  Shes in the middle in terms of introvert vs extrovert. She’s strong willed and socially competent, but she’s very loyal and focused on small amounts of people. She’s not a large party goer, but enjoys medium sized social events. She can be very gentle. She also has minor depressive disorder and anxiety, but feels invalidated by other people’s pain, so keeps it to herself.

Kate Mulligan: Really sweet person. Very kind and selfless. She is a little bit straight edge, but tries not to judge others too much. Comes from a very sheltered background with a lot of privilege. She’s beginning to try and reform her perceptions and biases. Raised liberal in Boston, but lived in a very white neighborhood, so she has the paradigm that comes with that. She is a very happy person, who gets stressed sometimes from overwork  but stays chill most of the time. Sometimes lacks true empathy from lack of experience. Kind of has a holier than thou attitude when giving advice. She is dating Krista. She has an older sister, they’re pretty close.

Jacob Dark: His parents died when he was 9 years old. Lived with family friend (Mom’s old friend). He was a single father. He was kind. Two foster sisters, one younger, one older. Jacob was verbally and physically abused by his older sister, and even raped by her when he was 11. He moved across country for college to escape. Very quiet, highly depressed and introverted. Not many hobbies or friends. Reads and watches TV a lot. Really good artist, doesn’t show off art to anyone. Studies a decent amount, gets okay grades. Undecided major. Got into the friend group through Kate, kind of distant from the group, but cares a lot about everyone. Asexual, mild PTSD, beginning to come out of his shell. Doesn’t pick up on social cues, but is very careful about what he says.

Events: 

Before game starts: Kate and Kris have been fighting because Kate doesn’t listen well and just tries to fix Kris’s problems.

Thursday Evening: Game begins

Friday Night: Kris is admitted into the hospital from unforeseen medical emergency.

Saturday Morning: Alex learns that his Dad is now dating a family friend who he had been close with during the marriage.

Saturday Night: Kris is diagnosed with very aggressive Brain Cancer, probably terminal.

Sunday Night: Jacob’s abuser calls him.

Monday afternoon: Kris falls into a coma.

Monday 6:00: Game ends.

Process:

I gave the actors a lot of creative liberties to make the character their own. People stepped up to the plate, even role-playing with each other to work out character interactions. The game is reliant on frequent texting and competent improv. Many elements of the game were figured out on the fly, but the overall game became very cohesive.

The biggest issue in the game was schedules. This was a very hard week for a lot of people, meaning that people couldn’t text the player as much as they wanted, and there would be large gaps in time where nothing would happen. This game would work a lot better when people aren’t so busy.

Chat Logs: 

All conversations can be found in the following link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RYWYUXm0pWpQEpsNjlhYOKpJ52RykAsZ?usp=sharing

Inspiration:

This game was made in attempts to find a new way to tell a story. I love how games can be non-linear and player-guided, and I knew I wanted to tell a story about people. I settled on some sort of Interactive Theater, where I would use actors to interact with a player. But, inspired by a lot of pervasive games we looked at, I wanted this game to feel like something more than a game, and to take place over a longer period of time.

The game that I want to make is a pervasive roleplaying/interactive theater game. It takes place over text message, where several actors play characters in a college friend group. The player or players join their conversations, and roleplay as their friend. Through theses conversations, a story is told about these characters, which all have  backstories and characteristics the actors will play with. These stories will be told naturally through conversation, although events will happen at certain times that will put pressure on the group. The game would take place over about a week, although it  could be edited to have varying timelines. It is up to the player to be a part of this friend group however they see fit. They can act as a consoling friend when their friends are in times of need, or they can be someone to laugh with. The game would ultimately culminate into one large event that shakes the group. The players will then be pushed to take some action as a response to the event. This action would be some sort of real life activity, that may evoke some call to action, or maybe just something playful to make the lives of your friends better.

This game is inspired by many of the pervasive games we looked at in class, as well as some instances of large scale LARPS where the players take the role of a character for more than one day, with an emphasis on interaction and collaboration. This game also borrows elements from Uncle Roy All Around You, where empathy and collaboration is the emphasis. The game is also inspired by the Indie game Emily was Away, which is a instant messenger based interactive novel. It captures an element that I’m really interested in, which is the interplay of friendship in times of need. I really love the idea of taking some play that is private, and letting it extend to affecting your real life. I also love alternative and non-linear forms of story telling, where the player can decide how much they want to get out of it.

This game would require a large amount of writing and participation from talented actors, but I think that I could pull it off.

The Game of Love 

Rules:

In The Game of Love, you use the spring at the  bottom to attempt to launch a small puck into the three scoring spaces.  The player is able to manipulate the spring in anyway that they deem necessary, as long as it is attached to at least one of the anchoring nails. The  top space is harder to score in, and therefore worth more points.

Appropriations

However, there is no way to track points or to win in a conventional sense. This is partly because of what the game is appropriating. The style of the artifact is based on the old plastic handheld toys like Rings and Pocket Pachinko. These games had self imposed win states and play times, as there were no clear counters to determine points or score. It also takes elements of pinball. The idea is to make something very tactile and playful, where even playing with it feels good. This is to be juxtaposed against the content and building materials of the artifact.  The main board are two detached shelves, and the obstacles are made from old cardboard, dead batteries, electrical bits and bobs, and cheap craft supplies, finally covered in bright pink duct tape and paper cutouts of generic symbols and images of love and romance. It is designed to look kitsch and horrible as a whole and on the exterior, while also having a clearly fumbled together look.

Meaning

The juxtaposition between the kitsch love and romance aesthetic, the disheveled appearance and construction, and the very gamey tactility all come together to represent the worst parts of love in our culture. Society’s idea of love is commercial, it is skin deep, and it is seen in a lot of ways as a game. People and relationships are objectified into raw materials, where game-like tactics and materialism become the background to how achieving love is conveyed. To gamify love in any fashion is to be disingenuous and cynical towards the complexity of relationships and people as a whole.  And in this game, there is ultimately no winning. There is no reward, there are no systems tracking progress or skill. The game acts merely as an instrument for the players amusement, which captures the most cynical and deplorable outlooks on love and human intimacy.

Inspiration:

This piece is heavily inspired by the appropriation pieces in Gallery 360. A lot of them focused on a kind of playfulness that I think is enhanced by the idea of appropriation. There was one piece that was even a game in its own right. I also really liked the Dada appropriation idea of taking a useful object and rendering it useless. In my case, I had many of the artifacts that made up the structural elements of my piece be items that are involved in repair or electronics, such as a spare spring for machinery, batteries, and wire connectors. This also lends metaphorical meaning into the piece. The thing that inspired this piece the most is the Dada idea of anti-art, where one would make something so unpretentious and unappealing that it would subvert expectations in a strange and interesting way.

Original Prototype: 

This version was built with constraints of having to be attached to a table, meaning that the only way to play the game was horizontal. This takes out the gravity mechanic that not only makes the game more satisfying to play, but also properly alludes to the material the artifact is appropriating. Play-tests indicated that the difficulty was not properly balanced, and the nature of limitations made it almost impossible to score, which erases how misleadingly satisfying the final artifact is meant to be to play with it.

Cathartic Fruit Salad
 With friends or alone
 Go to a public place with fruit, a blunt implement, and a marker.
 Write something on a piece of fruit
 destroy it
 Repeat until no fruit remains.
 If someone asks you what you are doing
 Invite them to join you.
 

Artist Statement: 
This piece is based on the overarching ideas in a lot of happenings and fluxist pieces where playfulness is at the forefront. This score is focused on a very tactile experience, from the writing your thoughts or anxieties onto fruit, to literally smashing that fruit, often getting fruit juice all over yourself. But what it is most is fun. Its designed to be satisfying, whether its done alone or with an entire class, and it always balances the personal and the public. I feel like I combined the core ideas behind "Stone Piece" by Yoko Ono and Alison Knowles' "Make a Salad," where there is a personal element to the piece that you share with others without them getting to know the details as seen in the former, as well as the playful and fairly comical nature of things similar to the latter. The thing I like most about fluxist art is that artifacts don't need to be permanent, and meanings don't need to be vast or overly thought provoking. The simple joy of my piece is my favorite part. When someone reads it, they laugh. Its a silly idea. But when it's implemented, it gets to be cathartic. Despite the simplicity, you can ultimately find different experiences based on who is doing the score. For instance, when I performed it in class I used it as a way to clear my anxieties about failures. I would write hopeful or affirmative statements, and in destroying the fruit attached, I would activate the truth of those statements. Others just enjoyed the hammering of fruit, while a couple people I talked to used it to get out frustrations about people who have wronged them. No matter what the player puts in, the outcome is the same: a simple joy of smashing fruit. It activates a childish glee that I think many fluxist pieces thrive on, which is something that I think is very important to spend time on as we grow more jaded to the world around us. 

Watching people perform the score during class and in a session afterwards showcased exactly what I intended. People would start finding creative ways to destroy the fruit. Because the instructions are vague enough in how you go about destroying the fruit, it allowed people to choose to throw fruit into cement to destroy it, or even grab a friend and play baseball with a banana. It was very playful, and everyone would usually come out the other side with a simple comment:
"Smashing fruit is fun."