Cara

BUMP

Bump is a single-player crowd navigation computer game. The object of the game is to navigate through each crowd to the goal.

Documentation:

The source code can be found on my github repository for the game.

A Mac OS X app of the game can be found (compressed) here. (The download should begin automatically.)

Screenshots of Gameplay:

Sources of Inspiration / Artist’s Statement:

The idea for Bump came from a data collection game I played on my commutes when I worked downtown. This was a simple unnamed game where I incremented a counter (located on my pebble watch) every time another person made physical contact with me. This was almost always accidental, and usually as a result of rush hour traffic or crowded trains.

Consciously recognizing every time that I was bumped, pushed, or tapped by strangers very quickly grew to be quite stressful, and it was this experience that I aimed to capture with Bump.

While the mechanics of the game (moving around from Point A to Point B) are fairly standard, the game itself disrupts the player’s sense of flow by antagonizing them with a short soundbite. This soundbite is an appropriated clip of Imogen Heap’s song Hide and Seek, although its usage is in reference to the 2007 SNL skit entitled “Dear Sister”, which is itself a loos parody referencing a scene in the second season finale of television show The OC, which uses the song.

The heavy reliance on audio as a game mechanic was also partly inspired by Julian Oliver’s game Quilted Thought Organ, which plays music as the player navigates. Another somewhat less superficial inspiration for the game was Taylan Kay’s game Auti-Sim, which seeks emulate the auditory hypersensitivity aspect of autism spectrum disorders. Bump has a similar aim: I wanted to capture the anxiety that I feel in crowds, which is one of the more persistent struggles that I have personally had as an adult on the autism spectrum.

The game:

1. Pick a major Subreddit
2. Find someone who’s posting hateful things
3. Wish them well

Documentation:

Album of Selected Excerpts

• Most were ignored.
• A few received 1-2 upvotes.
• A few more received downvotes.
• Some parent comments were deleted.

I got three responses from Original Posters so far – the first two were both from people whose original comments were heavily downvoted. They both told me about their day and asked me about mine. The third was a post buried down in the bottom of a thread and just said “Pretty well so far, thanks!”

In true reddit fashion, someone else responded for OP in one instance: “I think he’s just having a ball!”
You can view all of them (and the greater context for them / the posts / etc) from the user page of the account I set up for this project.

(If you click “context” you can see the parent comments in the given thread)
Artist’s statement:

This work was loosely inspired by the subtle intervention of Keith Haring’s subway murals: I wanted to bring some positivity to people’s lives without interacting with them face-to-face and without inconveniencing them in any way.

I also drew some inspiration from various movements that have cropped up on the internet from time to time: I’ve seen posts in the last 5-10 years that people have put up sharing sticky notes with positive messages left in random places, like the mirror in public restrooms. Some of these messages reminded people that they are strong or resilient or that they matter. I wanted random internet strangers to get some sense that they are cared about and that even if they’re just an anonymous collection of text postings, someone is paying attention to them and they’re not just a digital face in a sea of digital faces. Particularly in the cases of people saying hateful things about other people or groups of people, I wanted them to consider humanity and human connection, even if only for a quick second.

The minimalist set of instructions for the game were inspired by the scores found in Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit.

HUNGER is a Tabletop RPG based on the Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins.

Zip Archive of Game Material

The Zip Archive of Game Material contains the Game Manual (manual.pdf) which contains the rules and instructions for gameplay, Reference Pages (references.pdf) which contains reference material for running a game, Character Sheets (char-sheets_doublesided.pdf) which can be printed out double-sided and cut in half for use as a character sheet for Player Characters, and a sample map that could be used for gameplay (sample_map.png).

Documentation

Forthcoming after playtest. (Scheduled for the weekend of 3/5-3/6)

Artist’s Statement

This piece is an offshoot of a passion project of mine, The Hunger Games RPG, which is an online collaborative writing RPG. Many of the Tabletop RPG concepts (rolling for initiative, skill points, stat checks) haver been influenced by various Tabletop RPGs, notably Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and Paranoia. The idea of using various household objects (standard deck of playing cards, coins, index cards) was first and foremost inspired by George Maciunas’s Flux Kits, which was itself inspired by the appropriation pieces of the Dada artists.

Remove:
– your shoes
– your socks
– your shirt
– your shame
Sit down until everything dies.

Documentation

Artist’s statement:

This piece was inspired by the nights that follow long days, by lazy Sundays when the idea of doing anything is deplorable, and by a certain amount of electronic device addiction. It was meant to capture the feeling of days when you feel so drained you can only watch as something else is drained of power.