Experimental Game Design

wang.siwei1

Intervention – Detached

by | Nov 13, 2024 | ,

The theme of my intervention is the information cocoon, specifically the information cocoon formed by the U.S. election on various social media platforms. My target group is non-US citizens. This month, my social media is full of information about the presidential election. Although I am not a U.S. citizen and have no obvious preference for either party, I have more or less learned about the information of each party because of the information bombardment. Even on purely Chinese social media, I can still get information related. I am wondering if this is just my case or if other non-US citizens are also like this.

I set up a Google form and set the following conditions in the form:

Please open up your social media- any social media is fine. Please screenshot the first message related to Democratic or Republican information. The collected images will be used in an art piece.

To be specific:

1. If you see a celebrity that clearly in favor of a party, take a screenshot

2. If it’s a video, take a screenshot

3. If you are uncertain about the message, please scroll to another one

4. If your platform is not in English, it’s okay, take a screenshot.

Here is a result from Google Forms. Also, two screenshots are coming from private messages and all of them are republicans. Since the Google form was posted after the election results, almost all the post was biased towards Republicans.

The screenshots mainly come from English social media, but it is surprising to see news from Japanese and Chinese media because they have a tendency, including the Japanese news that although did not directly mention the biased party, indirectly strengthened the glory of the victory in this election.

I chose to make a collage of these screenshots, not an artistic collage, but with some meme elements. I tried to mock the election results and the bias that the election has caused in various media, even though non-U.S. citizens cannot vote, it still has an impact to some extent. I posted this collage on my social media, trying to make my non-US citizen friends realize how much they have been affected by the information cocoon of the US election on social media.

FlappyBirdCage

by | Oct 24, 2024 | ,

Flappy Bird is a mobile game that was once popular around the world. The game’s mechanism is very simple, players only need to tap the screen to keep the bird flying smoothly over the pipes. The game has no ending, the number of pipes the player crosses is the score, and there is a global score leaderboard to reflect your level.

Despite also spending hours getting high scores, I’m not too fond of this game because it made me feel very pointless. In a way, you waste a lot of time by going after a nebulous high score, as if you’re stuck in a pipe jungle all that time. I made a sarcastic appropriation in response to this point, my choice at first was to ditch the gameplay and just use two pipes to represent the infinite level, the player can press space to maintain flying but it just loops indefinitely in this game, even if it touches a pipe nothing happens, it just goes down and spawn from the top pipe.

Second Iteration

I took into account the fact that my initial game was too simple as an appropriation. I would like to add more playability, irony, and metaphorical symbols. I stuffed the pipes all over the scene, and I slightly calculated the player’s up-and-down range and the pipe’s distance so that after passing through the second set of pipes the player suddenly realized they couldn’t traverse the third one no matter what. This would make them think about how to escape this situation. During the playtest, everything happened exactly as I expected, the tester was confused after passing the second section, but after trying to change their mindset, it became clear that the only way is up. I was heartened when everyone found the ending interesting during the class presentation. Flappy Bird itself is a game that lacks relevance. Bird is symbolized here by anyone who is bound by the prison of thought. Thinking differently is sometimes more important than trying to break through that impossible crack.

 

Flappy Rainbow

by | Sep 25, 2024 | ,

The Score

  1. Start the game by uploading a photo(of your own)
  2. Use Space Only to draw on the photo
  3. Use the photo as your profile picture(take a screenshot)

Link to download on itch(windows version only): https://rexy77.itch.io/flappy-rainbow

Artist Statement:

One of the class readings that stood out to me was Music of Changes by John Cage, based on the I Ching. I had read the I Ching and am familiar with so-called Chinese fortune-telling: even though the coins you flip (which isn’t the formal I Ching way of fortune-telling) may seem random, it’s correlating as a result of your fortunes for the day, in another word, destined. This is why I used digital as the medium for this project; I limited the player’s control to a single key, which makes randomness values less, but also preserves the possibility of the player’s creative freedom.

I didn’t understand the concept of “score” very well at the beginning of the process and focused on random creations and existing assets. After figuring out a bit, my first score was created.

  1. Use space to draw with a rainbow trail
  2. After about 22 seconds, switch to another player
  3. Combine two players’ rainbow drawings.

The prototype is interesting and receives positive feedback in general, one of them is that it gives the player fuller playability, but it seems that the only player engagement is pressing space, and questioned whether there’s another way for the player to interact with this trail? Another feedback suggested to me that allowing players to go ahead and upload their own photos might be a very good interaction.

Thinking back to the Grapefruit by Yoko Ono from class reading, very interesting book because the whole thing is almost instructing the reader to do absurd things. Inspired by this, I chose to have the players upload their own pictures and eventually use the created image as their profile photo. This retains my original idea of creating something out of randomness and has continued to shift towards a more instruction-leading mini-game. The “flappy bird” is like a paintbrush, limited in direction and strength, not completely under the player’s control, but depending on the player’s intention whether to keep it stable or bouncing. This machine-based limitation I think sets it apart from other analog games in attracting players.