BirdStrike by Daniel Rosenthal

At the start of the game, each player is dealt four BirdStrike cards. Each card, which represents a plane part (wing, body, tail, or engine) from different planes, has a hand-written “bird risk” number, which indicates how lethal the plane part is to birds.

At the start of each round, each player discards one of their BirdStrike cards. Then, four BirdStrike cards are drawn in the middle. Players each take one card from the middle, going in order from the lowest to highest “bird risk” sums of their current hand.

At the end of the round, two 20-sided dice are rolled. Each player “strikes” a bird if their “bird risk” sum is greater than the rolls. After a player strikes a bird, they take a Wingspan card and read its name and fun fact. They then show the other players the drawing of a bird on the card.

If a player has a full set (four BirdStrike cards of the same plane), they can choose to halve or double their “bird risk” sum. If they have one of each part, they can choose to add or subtract 2 from their “bird risk” sum.

At the end of ten rounds, whichever player has the most points wins. The players get a point for each Wingspan card they have. If a player has no Wingspan cards, meaning they struck no birds, they gain 11 points and automatically win.

Artist’s Statement:

I think that all art (and man-made creation, in general) requires a degree of appropriation from nature. Both the tools and media used to create art are made from natural material, albeit with varying degrees of transformation from its original “natural” state: wooden brushes and paints made of natural pigments are used to create paintings; the human respiratory system vibrates air to create vocal music; computers and hardware made of materials like metal and glass are used to both create and display digital art. Even “synthetic” materials like plastic were created from naturally occurring chemicals. I also think that the immaterial ideas that facilitate human creativity are appropriated in some sense, as I believe new ideas come from the synthesis of existing ones. Neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed, but they can be transformed, with works of art being a possible end result of this transformation.

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Pieces in Pieces is an art game about creating a new Dada-esque collage out of the world’s most famous paintings. Three players are each given a different tool (scissors, Sharpies, or glue sticks) and must cooperate to create a new piece in 10 minutes.

By Yonatan Catran

Setup

• I printed out 13 of the most famous and recognizable paintings and also their titles:
  • The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (1889)
  • Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh (1888)
  • Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer (1665)
  • The Kiss by Gustav Klimt (1907-1908)
  • Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David (1801)
  • Water Lily Pond by Claude Monet (1899)
  • The Scream by Edvard Munch (1893)
  • Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci (1503-1505)
  • The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli (1485–1486)
  • Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich (1818)
  • The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí (1931)
  • American Gothic by Grant Wood (1930)
  • Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci (1489–1491)
• I brought a bigger paper to use as a canvas (in the first test, I did not have this, so you’ll see the result is smaller).
• I also brought the tools: a pair of scissors, two glue sticks, Sharpies, and pens.
• Each player picks one of the items that they could ONLY use for the 10 minutes (except the pens, which everyone can use)
• Then, start the timer and let the players create their collage.

Pictures

First Iteration (Up ^), Second Iteration (Right >).

Inspirations

The first piece that drew me to this idea was Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q., which was him drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa, basically vandalizing the world’s most famous painting. So I extended that to the many Dada collages that were made, but for my game they would use other famous paintings and create a Duchamp-style collage. I added the titles as well as the paintings because I was hoping the players would reorder the words to say less nice things and cut up the paintings in out-of-the-box ways.

Brainstorming

For this project, I was thinking about the algorithms around us that constantly influence our worldviews and waste our times. I can’t think of a specific art piece in particular, but I really enjoyed the cornerstone idea of Dada making fun of or tearing down the status of technology and media. George Grosz’ paintings and Marcel Duchamp’s concept of “readymades” were good examples of this – depicting/using a technology in a ridiculous purpose. Back then, they had radio, TV, and motors, but today we have social media, the Internet, and these other invisible “algorithms” that influence us greatly. I thought that if I somehow “appropriated” these predatory algorithms into a game, I could get people to think more actively about how the algorithms influence them. I had an idea to borrow the idea of a Wikipedia speedrun (where players race against each other to use Wikipedia hyperlinks to jump from one random topic to another) and apply that to a social media algorithm. It seemed fascinating to use social media to get to a target endpoint while constantly battling a recommendation algorithm trying to keep you in a rabbit hole.

I chose YouTube because I felt it was a good balance between user and algorithmic control over the feed. Initially, I wanted to use a scrolling platform like Instagram or TikTok, but it was tricky to figure out what a target could be, since there’s so many niches and no public data from these apps showing what the public enjoys watching the most. It also provides very little user agency over what they see – all they can do is scroll and watch for a certain amount of time to game the algorithm’s parameters. Instead, I chose YouTube – its recommendation algorithm allows users to click on different options, allowing them some agency over what they watch, but they are also limited in their choices since the algorithm decides what they see in their feed.

At first, I was discouraged because I found out that this idea is not entirely new. Youtube streamers have done “YouTube speedruns” where they try to get to a certain video from surfing through YouTube recommended videos. However, I realized that these YouTube speedruners only tried getting to a topic that the player set for themselves. This was a limitation because inherently knowing that topic meant that the player would’ve had to have been introduced to that topic already from YouTube. I wanted players to experience trying to break out of their own recommendation algorithms into somewhere they don’t normally traverse or know about. Very fortunately, here is public data over the top searched YouTube queries on Google Trends, which I conveniently “appropriated” as well for my targets. I decided on a Bingo format, so players can strategize which YouTube topics to hit.

Playtest 1

For an initial viability test, I tried simply seeing if a player can get from one search query to another in a reasonable amount of time. I took the top YouTube queries and picked 2 at random, and tried to see if 2 players could get from one to the other. I gave people the option to use their own algorithm or start fresh if they were not comfortable, but people surprisingly were willing to use their own algorithm. So from their own algorithm, I assigned them to move to a baseball player. Neither participant knew who it was, so I gave some clues / similar queries, like the clue that he’s from baseball and which team he was on. While the playtest wasn’t long, the players were able to get pretty far from their search algorithm.

Playtest 2

In the second playtest, I tested out placing the Top 25 YouTube search queries in a 5×5 Bingo card. There were some questionable queries like “Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2025” that I debated leaving off the card. I ended up keeping it on to leave the queries as untampered with as possible. Even if the player is uncomfortable with the search topic, they have the flexibility to choose different topics to hit because of the Bingo mechanic. I had 3  playtesters Nysha, Joel, and Kenny. Here were each of their screens:

Joel:

Kenny:

Nysha:

Photos from the playtest:

Below was Joel’s documentation on the different YouTube topics he was able to catch. N

Unfortunately, nobody got a bingo, but it was interesting to see how each person strategized to make the algorithm give them something that they wanted. Whether it be cutting the video short to not encourage too much watch time, or rapidly clicking on new videos to trigger the algorithm to force something new. The players said they had a lot of fun trying to get out of a rabbit hole, and were surprised at how suffocating it can be sometimes if you are craving an escape. Overall, a very interesting playtest that I think successfully got people to think about the algorithms in a critical way.

Gameplay video

itch.io

Melodic Flight is a game where the player pilots an aircraft along a prescribed flight path, collecting points, without realizing that their movements trace the contour of a famous melody. Only after the flight ends is the melody revealed, and their recorded motion is played back to them. This game takes the familiar rhythm-game structure and misdirects the player’s expectations, turning a musical performance into navigational obedience.

The game includes three distinct levels, each with a different aesthetic and a famous classical tune that the player unknowingly transforms. The first level is military-themed and features Ode to Joy, in which the player pilots a fighter jet while performing a piece that embodies universal joy, happiness, and unity. The second level centers on Minuet in G major, a piece previously attributed to J.S. Bach and still widely known as such, but in fact a work by Christian Petzold, which aligns with the institutional and capitalist value of presentation over authenticity that the commercial airliner represents. The player “pilots” a bee in the third level, transforming the Flight of the Bumblebee. In this level, the player’s sporadic movement embodies the piece’s title – the flight of the bumblebee – and the result reveals that the player’s performance, although inaccurate, still reflects the core concept, if not elevates it.

In the first iteration, the flight path was not smoothed, and only the recorded version was played back at the end. Based on the feedback, I smoothed out the flight path and added separate buttons to play both the performance and original versions. I also learned that the flight phase can be confusing because players have no instructions or feedback from the first and second playtests. You can’t break expectations without establishing any, so I added a background track, the instruction text, and a score system. From my own playtests, I found it would be cool to have different themes for different levels, since the first background track I wrote was better suited to a war-themed level, so I created three distinct levels with unique assets.

Ode to Joy

Minuet in G major

Flight of the Bumblebee

This game relates to Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds and Yoko Ono’s White Chess Set in breaking player expectations in a familiar structure, and modifying an existing gameplay format is similar to mods made by Jodi.org for various digital games. The coins that spawn throughout each level break the familiar trope of collectibles and instead act as distractions for players, which conceptually aligns with Dada works that transform useful objects into useless ones, such as Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. It is also similar to Takako Saito’s Sound Chess in that players generate sound within an otherwise unrelated gameplay loop. The lack of explanation and the simple instruction of “stay on path” also draws from Fluxus scores.

Link to Final Appropriation Presentation: Artwork #2: Appropriation – Final Presentation – Google Docs

Link to Players’ Appropriation piece/process where they are adding a voice over to it(it really funny):Voice over of Climpchamp

Link to Players’ Process of cutting and editing up the clips in Clipchamp: ScreenRecording 3x Speed Made with Clipchamp 1

For my appropriation project, I put together short clips of Gary Oldman from different roles in movies for players to make a story or simply appropriate the editing software Clipchamp. Instead of recording anything new, I used clips that already existed, which connects to ideas from the slides. Dada artists like Hannah Höch used cut-out images from magazines to create new meanings by combining them, and I did something similar by letting players rearrange Gary Oldman’s clips in different orders. Because there was no sound at first, I had the players focus on facial expressions, body movement, and emotional tone, which relates to how Surrealist artists used visuals to create feelings without needing dialogue. Each time they changed the order of the clips, the story completely shifted.

Using simple editing tools also connects to Fluxus artists such as George Maciunas and Yoko Ono, who believed art should be playful and open to experimentation. By adding music, text, filters, and transitions to Gary Oldman’s clips, I changed how the audience felt about the scene, similar to how Marcel Duchamp changed everyday objects by placing them into new contexts. The slides also showed more modern artists like Cory Arcangel, who remix popular culture and video game media to create something new. My project fits into that idea because I took existing footage and transformed it into a different story instead of making everything from scratch. It was entertaining to experiment, try new combinations, and see how the players’ story changed. The playerswho watched their final short film enjoyed it and thought the process of building the story was interesting as well.

Concept

Instructions Not Included uses only packaging materials and product labels and instructions to create its absurd gameplay. The game reveals how our daily existence depends on numerous rules which people fail to analyze. The game requires players to perform exact actions from consumer instructions until their logical thinking fails and their understanding of meaning breaks down into complete disorder. The project bases its creation on Dada’s rejection of rationality and Fluxus’s use of event scores and playful absurdity.

Material

All materials are found or appropriated:

5 discarded product packages or labels

Optional: paper scraps or markers for players to record responses

How To Play

Players: 2 or more

Objective: Follow the printed instructions as literally as possible.

Setup:

Lay out all packaging pieces on the table. Each player selects one object.

Rules:

Read the object’s printed text.

Act out the words as commands.

Ex:

“Cold Water” → shiver violently

“Tear Here” → rip a paper or mimic tearing

“Recycle” → spin around and swap objects with another player

Continue in turn order, improvising responses and actions.

End Condition:

The game ends when a player hesitates, or asks, “What now?”

Instructions Not Included examines how people follow instructions in consumer society while also experiencing absurd situations. All products we purchase include instructions which function as subtle commands that control our actions and mental processes and behavioral control. People execute these instructions without ever stopping to think about them. The game converts our automatic obedience into theatrical performance to show the ridiculous elements which exist within consumer language.

The game follows Dada principles by eliminating both logical structure and purposeful direction. The artwork status of packaging materials stems from their new context rather than their functional value according to Duchamp’s readymade concept. “Recycle, Just Be A Box” is a game where players act like a box and then exchange items with other players, using the “Recycle” concept. Players then find “Doordash” on other players’ items and perform actions based on the meaning of the word. The another player depends on “Sport” to make basketball moves. The piece achieves its effect through both comedic elements and uncomfortable moments which create a break in the established authority structure.

The work implements Fluxus principles through its design which promotes active participant involvement and playful activities. Inspired by Yoko Ono’s Instruction Paintings and Brecht’s Event Scores, so the rules in this game are open-ended and flexible.The performance outcome depends on how players understand the materials and the unpredictable nature of discovered objects. The game experience consists of players interacting with each other through their individual interpretations of the game.

The game development process leads to a system-based analysis of human behavior. The game fails when players follow instructions exactly because their actions lead to confusion which demonstrates how systems of meaning become unstable when their original context disappears. Through strict interpretation of instructions players discover the ridiculous nature of complete obedience.

The project establishes a goal to transform commercial language into a time for people to think about their actions and fight against control. The game Instructions Not Included encourages players to break free from following instructions by creating a space where they can abandon logical thinking.