Artwork #2: Appropriate

StickPin is a casual mobile game that focuses on quick reflexes and precision. The gameplay involves a mechanic known as literally “stick the pin in the gap”, where players must strategically place pins onto a rotating circle without letting them touch other pins. The challenge intensifies as the circle speeds up, testing the player’s reaction time and accuracy.

My game is based on the traditional *StickPin* game design, where the gameplay and mechanics are similar. The player clicks the left mouse button to stick a pin into a rotating circle, and the objective is to avoid sticking the pin onto an already placed pin. However, in my version, the central circle has been replaced with a whale, and the pins are now harpoons. After the player throws five harpoons, the previously stationary whale starts to struggle, and as more harpoons are thrown, the whale struggles even more. I hope that at this point, the player realizes they are no longer playing a simple relaxing game. With technological advancement, human hunting of whales has become as easy as a player clicking the mouse to throw a harpoon, but the immense suffering inflicted on these intelligent and spiritual creatures is overwhelming. The cost of hunting is far outweighed by the damage it causes, and this is what I want players to take away from the game.

Playtest & Iteration

Playtest 1

At first, I designed the game as a Mario version of *StickPin*. While it looked novel and didn’t align with traditional expectations for a Mario series game, I didn’t feel that it had any meaning beyond being “fun,” which wasn’t what I wanted. So, I redesigned the game’s elements and initially replaced the Mario theme with whales and harpoons. The logos for the whale and harpoon, as well as the ocean background, all came from the *China Whale and Dolphin Conservation Association*.

Playtest 2  

I received a lot of constructive feedback, such as the message I wanted to convey about whale conservation wasn’t effectively communicated. So, I reflected on this and considered several possible ways to enhance the impact of the game.

Playtest 3  

In this test, I added a new animation effect: after the player throws five harpoons, the previously stationary whale starts to struggle, and the more harpoons thrown, the more violently the whale struggles. This mechanism added a stronger hint toward the game’s message, and it received the best feedback from players, who thought it was the most effective version.

This version effectively merges gameplay with a deeper message about whale conservation, making it a meaningful experience for the player.

By Ruby Harkness

Geolistenr:

Geolistenr is based on the well known game Geoguessr. Geolistenr acts the same as Geoguessr in the sense that the player is trying to figure out where in the world they are. Instead of google earth images, Geolistenr uses 10 second audio clips from around the world. The player will hear 5 different audio clips and attempt to match each clip to a country in a word bank. 

How to play: 

The Idea: Geoguessr with audio clips

• Geolistener can be played with as many people as you want
• One person acts as the game master, and uses the spreadsheet to access audio clips 
• The game master will choose 5 audio clips coming from 5 different countries
• They will write sound 1, sound 2, sound 3, sound 4, sound 5 next to a list of the 5 country names that go along with the sounds  (the game master should shuffle the countries around so they do not line up with the sounds) (see playtest image below) 
• The game master will then play each sound for 10 seconds, and the player(s) will try to match the sound up with the country 
• When played with more than two people, players are allowed to collaborate and talk about where they think each sound is from 
• The player(s) win if they get all of the countries correct 
• The spreadsheet is pictured below and shows how the game master keeps track of the sounds and countries 

Artists Note: 

Appropriation is using something someone else made to create something new. Geoguessr is a game in which the player is dropped into a random location on Google Earth and asked to decipher where they are based purely on their surroundings. I think this game is heavily based on appropriation, and uses maps, or Google Earth, to create a very enjoyable game. I thought it might be interesting to take a game based on appropriation and appropriate it further. (I also just enjoy playing Geoguessr.) 

I wanted to take appropriation of maps in a different direction and utilize sound as the main recognizer. It is based on DADA performance work. Before taking a deeper look into it, I was under the impression that DADA was overall a visual art movement. I have since learned about the intersection of visual and audio performance that was utilized in DADA after learning about Sophie Tauber and Hugo Ball’s collaborative performance project. While Ball performed a sound poem, Tauber danced. I thought this was interesting, and wanted to explore sound as a DADA theme. The original idea was for the game master to say outloud the name of a city and have the rest of the players guess what country it was in, but during a critique someone suggested using real audio from different places, and so I went digging for a source of audio clips. Finding the sounds was one of the most difficult parts of creating the game, but I ended up appropriating an artistic project titled “Cities and Memory.” This site is a project based on providing different sounds in different places all over the world. I went through and hand picked 25 sounds I thought would provide enough information that the player(s) may be able to tell where they are, but I didn’t want to make it obvious. In a perfect world, I would find a way to automate this process, but for now 25 sounds leaves enough room for 5 play-throughs of the game. 

I did three play tests of the game, one with a game master and one player, one with a game master and 2 players, and one with a game master and around ten players. The first play test done in class with one player was super fun, and it was interesting to see what the player thought of the sounds and how they interpreted what they were hearing. With two players, discussion was a big aspect of the game, and the collaboration between the players as they tried to figure it out was interesting to see. The final playthrough, done with the entire class was even more interesting, and made the game a lot more time consuming, with people going back and forth between answers throughout the entire playthrough. After much discussion, they eventually ended up getting all the sounds correct. It was interesting to see what assumptions the players made about places based on audio, and how language could either help or hurt them. Most of the audio clips I played utilized language, and watching the players try to decipher which language was being spoken and where it is commonly spoken was very intriguing. It was mentioned in a play through that this game could also provide a commentary on colonialism, and how that has altered the way language has evolved in different places. This is an idea I think the game could really utilize, and it could definitely be explored further with different game modes and groups of countries. If this game does anything, I think it provides players a bit more knowledge of the world through having to solve a puzzle. I am very interested in the world, and spent a lot of time lurking on “Cities and Memory,”  It is linked below if you would like to check it out. I love Geoguessr and in the future want to expand Geolistenr even more by adding more countries and sounds to the reference sheet.

Spreadsheet Link

Cities and Memory Link

Playtest and Spreadsheet Images: 

The King’s Cards – by Tim Doyle

The Rules:

• 2-4 Players allowed
• Play a game of Uno, only the objective is to collect as many cards of the same color by the end of the deck
• By the end of the game, whichever colored card you have the most of is your designated color, and you gain 1 point per card you have
• All special cards maintain their properties (skip cards, reverse, wild cards, etc)
• If by the end of the game two or more players have been collecting the same color, they all lose
• If by the end of the game you have cards not belonging to your color, you must subtract points from your score

I originally centered the game around the rules of King’s Cup, where whichever card is drawn dictates some action the players have to complete, but those rules didn’t transfer over very well to the context of this class. I was suggested to try and use Uno cards to make the game more intuitive, by using the numbers and colors to dictate certain actions and make it easier to remember what it is the player should do, but that was still too complicated. After my first play test outside of class, I found that it was still difficult and confusing to use rules dictated by King’s Cup using cards that weren’t from a standard deck. Eventually, I decided to scrap the rules of King’s Cup entirely and chose to appropriate the rules of Uno instead. I wanted my rules to emphasize division and segregation, so I used the different colors as the centerpiece surrounding my appropriation. The original game of Uno already plays with this idea of using a card’s color to dictate the player’s options, where you can only play one color card per turn unless you meet some specific scenario, but I decided to turn up the use of the colors in my appropriation. Instead, you are forced to collect as many of the same color as you can.

The play tests were simple and easy, as the game of Uno is not very difficult to comprehend. What I noticed is that it was difficult to gather a large amount of cards because of the nature of Uno, but that was alright in the end because you technically didn’t need a lot of cards to win the game.

The game isn’t made to be super balanced, but it was crafted to be a more artistic take on the use of the cards themselves. I drew a lot of inspiration from some of the works in Dada, and more specifically the simple creativity that the artists used in their works. My favorite art pieces from the book were very derivative of the original piece, where they heavily used the source material in their appropriated work, focusing more on putting a simple and creative twist on the work instead of completely warping it. This is what my game has in common, where the game fundamentally feels the same as a regular game of Uno, but the simple change in win conditions completely changes how the game is actually played by the players. 

The Game:

Super Mario Bros.: Just-Like-You-Remember-It Edition! features five levels of memory-deteriorating fun!

Built upon “Super Mario Bros” by Github user Gold872

…which is recreating some old video game from the 80s or something.

Artist’s Statement:

If you’ve ever played the game Super Mario Maker, or its inventively titled sequel Super Mario Maker 2, you’ve perhaps encountered the many remakes of Super Mario Bros.’s first level, 1-1. These are plentiful and unavoidable when playing this game online. Some people twist the level, adding traps and fire bars everywhere. Some remakes are perfectly accurate, but most aren’t. Many of these remakes get small details in spacing wrong. Some of them miss entire parts of the level. As time passes, which details of the games we play are we still able to remember?

I’m not sure I remember it like this… (pictured: Super Mario Maker 2)

This game project was primarily inspired by the plunderphonic works of Daniel Lopatin (AKA Oneohtrix Point Never, AKA Chuck Person), James Leyland Kirby (AKA The Caretaker), William Basinski, and various artists in the vaporwave genre, as well as the appropriation works of the Dada movement.

Daniel Lopatin in 2010, under the pseudonym Chuck Person, released a limited-run cassette tape of 80s pop songs looped, slowed down, and distorted into what he coined “eccojams”. By taking somber lyrics of songs out of context, Lopatin creates a haunting reinterpretation of these once-hits. These eccojams are heavily concerned with the idea of memory. They feel like distant memories of one part of a song, randomly getting stuck in one’s head years later. Lopatin re-released several of them on his audiovisual project “Memory Vague”. He approaches the idea of memory deteriorating at the end of the tape’s first side, where it gets more and more distorted and noisy until the original sample has been fully drowned out by a pulsing harsh noise.
Another artist even more concerned with the deterioration of memory, specifically in relation to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, is Leyland Kirby, who produces music as The Caretaker. The Caretaker’s most well known albums, “An empty bliss beyond this world” and “Everywhere at the End of Time”, are based on a study where people with Alzheimer’s were able to recall associated memories from the music of their youth. Both albums feature 1920’s music scavenged from record stores, looped and echoed into distant memories. “Everywhere at the End of Time,” Kirby’s final project as The Caretaker, is comprised of six stages reflecting the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Kirby’s work is often compared to William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops”, an album of tape loop experiments where the tapes continually deteriorate as they’re played.

The Dada movement saw many artists (although they themselves at the time may have rejected the term, time and Wikipedia have come to know Dada as an art movement) appropriating found objects, twisting their meaning and purpose into new subversive works. While these artists were very interested in specifically using found objects, I am mostly interested in the way these repurposed objects lose or alter their meaning. When Kurt Schwitters repurposes machine parts, old newsprint, or bus tickets, they lose their ability to function as intended. Using these appropriated works in collage puts them in a new context and assigns them new meaning. When Marcel Duchamp creates a readymade statue out of a bicycle wheel or a urinal, he assigns it new meaning as a work of art. I love this idea of assigning new meaning to existing things through selection and transformation.

These projects got me thinking about applying the idea of memory deterioration to games. Artists like Basinski use the decay of physical artifacts to create their art, but digital games don’t degrade in the same way. I wanted to capture the idea of a poorly-remembered level, such as that seen in Mario Maker 1-1 remakes. I wanted to loop one piece of a game into infinity, like Daniel Lopatin or Leyland Kirby did with their music. I wanted the entire thing to collapse in on itself by the end like the Disintegration Loops, because at some point, everyone’s memory runs out.

I originally wanted to use a game other than Super Mario Bros., but it was the easiest to find an accurate recreation of to modify for this project. It also worked well to work off of a game with wide familiarity, since the game should ideally be concerned with a level the player actually does remember. I took the structure of 1-1 and created five levels from it.

The first level is exactly 1-1, recreated perfectly, in a fairly accurate recreation of the original game.
The second level is slightly off. The spaces between key moments of the level have been altered, and powerups may be in different locations. The music has been slowed down slightly. This level is meant to represent misremembering the small details of the level design, as many Mario Maker recreations do.
The third level begins repeating key structures of the level, or forgetting some entirely. The music does something similar, repeating portions of the iconic overworld theme and skipping occasionally.
The fourth level repeats the beginning of the level over and over again. I consider this the “eccojam level”, as one moment is repeated again and again. The music is inspired by the second eccojam on the tape, called “angel”. It loops one section of the song, speeding it up and down in a disorienting manner. One moment it resembles the original bouncy track, and the next it briefly slows to a chiptune dirge.
The fifth and final level represents the final deterioration of a memory of this level. The level design and background elements repeat and glitch in nonsensical ways, only vaguely resembling the looping beginning of the level. The music is slow and drawn out, randomly pausing for large amounts of time and twisting into sounds the NES would not be able to replicate. Eventually, the iconic features of the level vanish, and the empty land soon gives way to an uncrossable abyss, as the memory eventually fades away.

At some point, everyone’s memory runs out.

Originally, I wanted to appropriate the movie Blue Giant which came out recently, its about teenagers who want to play jazz and one wants to become the best jazz musician in the world. This movie has an incredible soundtrack and I wanted to appropriate it for this project so that people could feel that excitement of playing together as the teenagers did in the movie and the same way I have in previous bands. I started out with a concept about jazz music where each player would be playing a different instrument and after learning the play their instruments in the gamified way, they would be able to play together. Upon presenting this idea to my class, the lack of enthusiasm made it clear to me that my idea for the mechanics was uninteresting and the concept too confusing so, I scrapped it and started over. At its core, I wanted people to enjoy making music together when I remembered that during a vacation I went on, the staff of where we were staying, gathered us for a drum circle night of playing and dancing and I remember, despite never having played with these people, you could still have fun however in a much more casual way than jazz typically is. So, for my in class playtest, I brought in a multiplayer rhythm game where players learn to play quarter, eighth, and sixteenth beats. Once learning all these types of rhythms, they had an opportunity to play together. It was during this playtest that I realized, many people who have never experienced reading rhythm notation may struggle with this game so I simplified it for the final version.
In the final version, after each time they learned a new “skill” ie. a quarter beat, eighth, silent or free square, players each got a part and had an opportunity to play together! This minimized the pain of learning each new type of rhythm because players had more opportunity to play together than the previous iteration which kept players more engaged.
I think if I were to continue working on this game, I would add in the sixteenth beats next for players that want a challenge and also allow each player to pick different difficulties so more complex rhythms can be created for those with more experience, and simpler rhythms for players that are new to drumming so they are not overwhelmed.

While I don’t think that my appropriation of drumming circles here quite parallels the readings about artists during the dada era, I think in the general concept of artists stealing parts from things that inspire them and want to use those things to create some emotion in their audience or share their perspective, we are similar.

View the final project here! –>https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1LicYVpAYDTwsX63m1Ydw8YuLkEHwAmsqyqm5RDUIaz0/edit?usp=sharing

First draft of project party game–> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EhXa9rFqUOjQU7nrzzBMya-cqFzBVC-i0yMby5fO33A/edit?usp=sharing

playtest notes–> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AVBal4TWfIEXbFqE30LrdEDK59G3CI8ElFbTVnnq1RY/edit?usp=sharing

Game Rules:

Preparations

1. 4 sudoku tables labeled A – I horizontally, 1 – 9 vertical
2. Each player marks 3-in-a-row on each 3-by-3 grid on the board as a means of winning, Make sure your opponent cannot view your board.

Playing

1. On each turn, players would “attack” the board to see where the enemy has placed their markers on the blank board. When attacking, announce to your opponent the grid you are attacking.
2. The opponent must tell whether the attack hit or missed. If the attack missed, the player that attack may go again.

Goal

First to find 3-in-a-row of the 3 x 3 square of the opponent will win.

Artist Statement 

Initially, I started with a Yoko Ono inspired work where the tic tac toe game would create an infinite game of tic-tac-toe. I wanted to create a distinctive art piece through a game with the only added rule being “add a line anywhere on the page after you play your move in tic-tac-toe”. The games became messy and interesting as people were forced to think outside of the box about their next move until realizing that they would never win. The best part was seeing people coming to this realization and seeing the way that their strategic play-style from before changed into pure chaos. It was a creative spin to the game however, it wasn’t as climatic as I expected it to be. (Playtest result see below)

As a result, I decided to do a mashup of different games together to create a intensive game of tic-tac-toe using a sudoku board and the gameplay of battleship to create a fun and different spin to the game. Initially with this iteration, I started with a basic tic-tac-toe board, but I feel like the game would be too brief for players to feel the fun before it is over. Thus, I adopted the idea of using the sudoku board as it is comprised of 9 tic-tac-toe boards together while also creating a larger 3 x 3 board.

Overall, I felt that artists during the DADA movement were having fun with their work while trying to iterate on previously-created works of art. Iterating on my own idea reminded me a lot of Marcel Duchamp as he has appropriated his own works so many times. In a way, iterating and improving upon an idea could be appropriation as I had changed the ideas and made it into my own. Like artists during the DADA movement, I had fun trying to think of various ways to iterate and add more to a simple game of tic-tac-toe that I’ve known all my life.

In a world of conflict, the Dada movement developed as a daring response to the war, embracing the bizarre and senseless. The chaos of World War I provided fertile ground for the Dadaists’ revolutionary spirit, as they used art to transcend reality’s darkness into a realm of absurdity, satire, and amusement. Using inspiration from this, I appropriated the board game “Headbandz” to craft an experience that serves as a playful counterpoint to the somber undertones of the Dada movement, infusing it with a sense of light-heartedness and pure enjoyment.

My journey began with a desire to harness the Dadaist spirit of rebellion and absurdity, transforming “Headbandz” from a game centered around objects into an ensemble of diverse video and board/card games. Rather than appropriating the tension of war, I aimed to infuse a sense of lightheartedness and fun into the experience. Through the reinterpretation of cards, I have provided a platform for players to escape the weight of reality and immerse themselves in a world that they are familiar with, by reminiscing about some of the most popular games in recent times.

The game works similarly to how “Headbandz” originally works, but instead of guessing random objects players are guessing popular games within recent times. Since this is a games course, I thought appropriating the “Headbandz” game to be about video/board/card games would be fun. Since I wanted the game to fit the lighthearted feel, I tried to think of popular games that everyone would know so players could reminisce once they figured out what their game was. I play-tested it in class as well as in the final iteration and everyone seemed to enjoy guessing and talking about popular games that they played growing up. I got some suggestions about making it a bit faster since it took a decent amount of time to play so I decided to have two game modes, one for a quicker game and one for a longer version. The quicker one would be timed and each player would have 30 seconds to ask as many yes or no questions about their game to try and figure it out. Once the 30 seconds was up, it would move to the next person and repeat the process until someone guessed their game correctly. For the longer version, there would be no timer involved and each player would ask a yes or no question about their game. If the answer to their question was a yes then they would keep asking questions until the answer was no and then it would be the next person’s turn. This process would repeat until everyone guessed their game correctly.

To play the game, first, you need to know about a regular Texas holdem. Texas Hold’em’s a card game with four times to bet. Everybody gets two cards, and there are five more cards on the table. You can choose to drop out, match the bet, or raise during the betting times. The point is to make the best hand you can with your cards and the ones on the table. The person with the best hand wins. The dealer button moves around the table, and your goal is to win chips from the others.

But in this version:

Alongside the regular number cards, there are also “action cards” mixed into the deck, in order to add a twist to the gameplay.

Players have the freedom and are encouraged to use these action cards at any point during the game. when a player decides to play an action card, they must draw another card from the deck, to keep the same number of cards in their hand.

Betting:

Also, in this version, you are not betting with chips. Instead, you are betting with the parts of your body. For example,  If I have a good hand, I may raise the bets to 1 eye. At the end of the round, the one with the strongest hands can keep his/her bets, while the other players can’t use one of his eyes for the rest of the game. The player loses the game when the player is unable to continue playing with no eyes or no fingers.

Artist statement:

This project is inspired by the appropriations in the Dada movement. This project reflects the Dadaist approach of taking existing objects and recontextualizing them to create unexpected art. There were lots of appropriations about chess during the movement, for example, Yoko Ono’s Play It by Trust, Takako Saito’s Sound Chess, and Spice Chess. My initial idea was to combine poker with UNO, so the cards dealt were UNO instead. But when I searched “Poker * UNO” on Google, I found someone in this class had a similar idea and already posted it in 2016.  Therefore instead of UNO, I combined it with action cards. Those action cards brought more randomness and strategies to poker. Players in this game can also use action cards at any time, altering the gameplay in unexpected ways. This is also a kind of appropriation as Dada art often featured unexpected and irrational elements.