Artwork #2: Appropriate

What you need: at least 2 players, a deck of poker or more. 

Inspirations: The basic rule of RPS and Chinese card game

Rules:

Two or more players, holding evenly divided cards, keep their hands face down and take turns playing cards in clockwise or counterclockwise order, with each player playing only the top card of his or her hand. 

Each player may only play the top card of his or her hand. The cards are stacked up in the order in which they are played, as long as the numbers on the face of the cards are visible. 

The player who finds that he or she has played any card with the same number as any of the cards stacked up on top of it will win all the cards starting with the one with the same number as the card he or she played up to the middle of his or her own hand, and then place the winning card at the bottom of the pile in his or her own hand, and that player then proceeds to take a card from the top of the pile and play the card.

 The game continues until one player has won all the cards in the other player’s hand, and the game ends with the player with all the cards in their hand winning.

Rock, Paper, Scissor

• After a player place a card  have numbers that  matches the number of the card on table, another player can challenge him by RPS, if he lost he has to take back the card and place it under his own deck 
• before placing the card, one player can can challenge another player first using RPS, if he/she wins, the player will not be able to be challenge by another player at his turn.)

Example:

,if the next player place a card that is either A,K,10,3,7,8- He can take all the cards in between the 2 matched cards.

Forexample, this player draws the Ace card from his deck, he wins all the cards between the 2 Aces.

These cards will needs to be shuffled and put it under the winner’s deck

playtest:

The play test went very well, my game is easy to understand and play.

Artist Statement:

Artistic appropriation is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation of them. Appropriation holds an important place in art history. Appropriation, similar to readymade object art, is “an artistic strategy of intentionally borrowing, copying, and altering pre-existing images, objects, and ideas.” Appropriation has also been defined as “the appropriation of a physical object or even an existing artwork into a work of art.”

In my appropriation project, I draw inspiration from the avant-garde movement “DADAism.”” DADAism” emerged in the turbulent early 20th century as a reaction to a chaotic and dystopian world.DADAism’s disregard for traditional norms and challenge to conventional art styles resonates deeply with my creative process. That is, to break some kind of rule or focus on destroying integrity. The notion of “appropriation” is also integrated into the structure of the game. Just as DADA artists often repurpose readymade objects and appropriate cultural symbols, the game itself appropriates and combines the rules of two classic games and works well to produce new game mechanics. Artists such as George Grosz and John Heartfield’s art is extremely caustic and cynical. But while my game also inspired chaos with players fighting each other. However, the game doesn’t deliberately try to provoke players, and players can choose not to disrupt others’ card winning actions. The game’s “rock, paper, scissors” challenges are a subversion of traditional aesthetics, much as DADA artists attempt to subvert social and artistic conventions. Here, players utilize a “game within a game” to achieve control, causing the player who could have won the card to take the risk of winning nothing. Just as DADA artists achieve control over artistic narratives through absurdity and deconstruction.

Overview

This game tackles the topic of appropriation by combing a medium that cannot exist without appropriation – AI generated images – and appropriating the rules of pictionary and the rules of drawing telephone games such as Gartic Phone. In this game however, the creation of pictures are completely left up to the AI with the players only writing the prompts and guesses.

Rules and Gameplay

• The game can theoretically be played by any number of players, but at least 4 players recommended. Additionally 1 person is needed to be the game master.
• The game takes place in a chatroom or a Discord server, and the game master is in charge of managing the players’ prompts and images, as well as stringing the final results together.

1. At the start of the game, each player writes down a phrase of no less than 5 words, and send it to the game master.
2. The game master then sends each phrase to the next player, and each player enter the exact phrases into an AI image generator (craiyon is used for playtesting). Each player chooses an generated image and send them back to the game master. The players must not alter the images in any way, and it does not matter if the generated image does not resemble the input prompt.
3. The game master then sends the images to the next player, and each player describe the content of the image as reasonably detailed as possible (they are also allowed to twist and remix their own interpretation of the image if they wish).
4. The players sends their new descriptions back to the game master, who pass them to the next player.
5. After at least as many rounds as the amount of players have taken place (the game can go on for longer if there are few players or if the players wish to), the game master presents the result of the telephone game.

Artist’s Statement

When I think about the word “appropriation”, my mind immediately jumps to the current hot and controversial topic of AI image generators and how all of them are based on the countless amount of harvested data from across the internet to generate new images based on these data. As a hobby digital artist, I definitely agree with the many ethical problems raised with generative AI, especially in how their data are overwhelmingly gathered and used without the original artists’ or photographers’ consent. However, I also think that there is one area that AI is almost perfectly suited for: making memes and “funny internet pictures”. Since memes already appropriate by nature, AI mashing them together to create something new is basically the next step in memes’ evolution. One particular game that lends well to this are the pictionary type telephone games such as Gartic Phone or Jackbox Civic Doodles, which is the other part of the game I appropriated. I think letting AI do the image making spoofs on the concept of a drawing game and also enhances the collaborative nature of telephone games – in this case collaborating with all the unwitting data used to make the AI image generation possible. While not explicitly stated in the rules, I trust the players will try to write the most ridiculous prompts and choose the weirdest AI generations. After all, to laugh at the results is the point of the original telephone games.

Originally, I wanted the players to draw the pictures themselves, but only closely following that the AI has generated; as I thought this would create extra variance in the game to derail the telephone chain. However, after observing that there are some aspects of AI generated images – the overall blurryness, the weird human hands and the smudged text – that cannot be easily conveyed by drawing in a reasonable timeframe; and the fact that the AI can and will misinterpret the input and generate something completely unexpected, I decided to let the AI completely take over the creation of images. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a online telephone game that allowed direct image uploads, I had to switch the setup to be somewhat clunky and require a game master.

There was another idea I toyed with when iterating with the game, that being instead of needing the players to input descriptions or prompts, the players would put the generated images into AI image identifiers and use that to generate descriptions for the images. I thought it would be a fun parody on the endless cycles of online data harvesting and the corruption of digital data and their meaning. However, currently the AI image identifiers can only use words and not sentences or phrases, this idea had to be scrapped. But I think this idea may be revisited with our current rate of advancement in AI.

Playtest Results

2 sample telephone game chains

How to Play:

• The game needs 2 people, one person plays as “Ike” or the Player, and the other plays as “Ashera” or the DM
• Ashera must place the board in front of Ike and place all the information and items face-down
• Lastly, Ashera shows the player the card that says that they are Ike
• Then the game starts
• Only Ashera can see the location of items and ensures that Ike is following the rules presented on the card
• Ike wins the game if he obtains Lehran’s Medallion

Artist’s Statement:

For this project, I had 2 initial goals: appropriate from Fire Emblem and make a game that is open-ended. I wanted to appropriate from Fire Emblem because I was heavily inspired by the series when coming up with the basic premise of the game. I had the idea to make a game where the player has a set amount of actions they can perform before they die so that every time they had a new life they were a little better off than before. Unlike a roguelike, I wanted to make the benefit of another life something more immaterial. With that, I settled on making lives useful because you would have more information about your surroundings. This is where the inspiration from Fire Emblem (specifically Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance) came into play. I could appropriate the grid-based movement system to make the player’s life equate to a number of steps, I could use famous items from the game to serve as tools to get you to your ultimate goal, and I could use lore from the series to contextualize your adventure. Lastly, I wanted to make sure that the players’ approach to the game was open-ended. This was inspired by the Dada Movement and from games like Super Metroid that emphasized trying new things and not explaining a lot. I wanted the player to interpret the board and realize what was happening on their own, so I did not give much information to the player.

This work relates to the Dada Movement for a few reasons. The first reason is that I used images from another artist and used them in a constructive way for my game. Dada artists often took images from other places and used them in collages, especially in cities like Hannover. Another way this relates to the Dada Movement is that I used lore or a story from another place to influence my work. The reading Dada artists in Cologne were often inspired by Christianity when making their works. My game took the story of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and adapted it. Lastly, I built my game to be open-ended and ordinary-looking. The game is made with simple paper and the only materials you need are your mind and the paper (though a pencil helps). The way the game is played is also very open-ended because there is nothing saying what you should do on a life, only an end goal and 1 restriction. This is similar to how Dada artists like Duchamp took ordinary objects like a chair and bicycle and transformed them into an open-ended piece of art.

Documentation:

• Game being Played
• Item & Information Sheets
• Documentation of Puzzle Solution:

Requirements:

• Minimum of one player
• No player maximum
• A modified digital version of the game Scrabble that could conceivably be played for an infinite (or at least incredibly long) amount of time

Rules:

• Players take turns playing Scrabble as normal
• The game never ends
• The victor is the last person playing with the highest score
• No turn timer
• Individuals players can take a long a turn as they want

Artist’s Statement:

My initial point of inspiration for this game came not from another existing piece of art from the Dada Movement or otherwise, but instead from a game design exercise undertaken in the second semester of my freshman year at Northeastern University. The first assignment I encountered in Professor Christopher Barney’s “Foundation of Game Design” course—or at least in the online experience I was treated to at the time—involved iterating upon one of the most basic physical multiplayer game ever: tic-tac-toe. This was my first experience with the core principle of recursive design, as we were tasked with adding additional rules to tic-tac-toe and thoroughly playtesting after each change. After a few slight changes, I was possessed with the idea of scaling the grid far beyond a simple 3×3, and accompanying this change the introduction of additional players in the forms of more unique shapes: triangle, star, hexagon, checkmark, hashtag, even pentagram—the possibilities are endless. This scaling would of course have to be accompanied by additional length requirements in what would constitute a full “tic-tac-toe”; unfortunately, upon playtesting, this iteration functioned much more as an endurance test than one of strategy and cunning. It was thus that when tasked with the opportunity of appropriating an existing game to create a new experience, I thought of a recent game of online scrabble played—quite foolishly—without the instatement of a turn timer; which understandably resulted in the incredible elongation of what should have otherwise been a brief game. And so I was given my concept, and the execution was fairly simple: bring together a group of friends, modify an online game of scrabble to posses the possibility of continuing ad infinitum, and see how long we lasted. The results can be seen in the photos below. I succeeded in gathering six friends—including myself—and over the course of five hours we lost players until only three of us remained, who elected to all end the game simultaneously. Over the course of these five hours each of our turns became progressively longer as the board become more cluttered and points became harder to come by. This resulted in the constant discovery of incredibly rare words containing some of the higher value consonants. This phenomenon can be seen in “xis” “dioxide” “djinny” “poi” and “zoarial.” Additionally, we discovered that the words were created in a uniquely procedural nature as over the course of multiple hours players managed to find ways to add one or two letters to a preexisting word. The 104 point “dolesome” is a fantastic example of this, as it started as “dol” into “dole” to “doles” which progressed all the way to “dolesome.” Myself and my friends had an incredible time playing this new and unique word-hunting experience; for despite it lasting into the wee hours of the night, our desire to be the last one standing—which also transformed into a level of dogged camaraderie—kept us going. Although, I despite any of ours are keen to repeat the experience any time soon.

Documentation:

State of the final board after five plus hours of play with a dwindling group of six players.

Final winner—myself—and the longest word.

In the introduction to Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, Paris, one of the lines reads: “The word Dada itself provides an overarching moniker for the raucous activities of its participants.” For my artwork, I want to call out the double edged sword that is alcohol. 

Alcohol is a substance you can easily find in any household; it is a substance that is used recreationally as a party or social drug but it also has its dark side which is abused by people for its sedating effect. Returning to the quote in the introduction, I want to create an artwork that uses alcohol on its participants to create a “raucous activity”. I want to appropriate the game “Never Have I Ever” as the basis for my artwork. How you play the game is people go around in a circle and say “Never Have I Ever”  with a specific activity and whoever has done it has to put a finger down. Whoever puts a finger down has to take a shot of whatever alcohol they have found in their area. I want the game to follow Macchab’s stance which states, ”tenacious yet mocking presence wants to transform tragic memory into skeptical consciousness, refusing therapeutic mourning by being seditious. As a whole, the leitmotiv of Der Ventilator is productive anxiety, indulging in the play between apparitions and realities, mockery and gravity, and feeding a culture of instability that forecasts Dada’s tactics of provocation in Cologne (220).” I want the game to take a dark turn by revealing something personal for each person, turning the game “raunchy” in nature. Alcohol “refuses therapeutic mourning” and “feeds a culture of instability”. Alcohol is a powerful substance that can bring out the emotion in people and makes the game like “Never Have I Ever” transparent in a sense. 

I feel my artwork is in line with the Paris Dada movement. According to the Dada text, “The cumulative effect of this first “Dada season,” as it became known, was to mark the movement as a nihilistic collective force leveled at the noblest ideals of advanced society. According to critical consensus, Dada represented youthful provocation, an adolescent destructiveness that (for those favorably inclined) should clear the way for a new intellectual engagement with art and the world at large (349).”  Alcohol use can be looked at as a disorder which is a form of self-destructive behavior. The point of my artwork is to expose the dark deep truths of our lives and to invite the somewhat “nihilistic” way of thinking similar to the Paris Dada Movement. I want the users to engage with the game with a different perspective and leave the game learning something not just about themselves but also other people.

A fan-art game about Onmyoji, focus on rebuild the Onmyoji game scene in Minecraft. Made for my friend Bella during last summer vacation. This game that mainly focuses on plot and performing. There are many NPCs in the game, but they don’t really exist on the map, their names and description will be given by text, and players need to “see” them with imagination. Clues and “ties” are collected through the “find button” method.
Production process: I found a Japanese-themed map on the market(the used map’s name: 沧海城）,remodeled some of its building, and built the dock and Liren(or Lee chin) cabin based on the game advertisement’s picture. I took screenshots from the original game, extracts the text, and then use command blocks to enter them in Minecraft.

My main challenges are to convert the third person of the original work to first person, to build and convert the scene, to build the time system (so that I can restore the in-game scene, for example, Yeecin saved Shiranui at the sunset on the third day in the original work, that correspond with “52” in Minecraft), money system, altered part of the prototyped plot and added some of my own(the whole fisherman thing, for example. Because in the original game it is with his monster friends’ help Yeecin fled Leechin Cabin. Monsters requires massive text description and thus is heavily relied on the player’s imagination. (There is no NPC function in the Neteast version Minecraft.), for this reason I deleted three of his monster friends. Also, this change make multi-ending possible, that I can set difficulties for the player with my original plot, while in the original game you don’t have chance to choose, the game just go to true ending)

I want to say that one main joy of playing this game came from the interaction of the hoster(me) and the player. The players are supposed to groan at and complain about the game’s unhuman difficulty level(which I set up on purpose to make fun of them), and also mock at all these bugs I have in my games. And I’m suppose to laugh when the players fail to reach happy ending again and again(only works for best friends).

I had two players. One is my best friend Bella, who spent eight hours playing and more hours testing the game for me so that I can debug it. Bella did exactly what I mentioned on the last paragraph. Another player is fom this class, Fred, who is Chinese and thus can understand the story and interact with me. Due to time limit I helped Fred to reach true ending with only one try. I enjoy the feeling of manipulating how difficlult this game is, as if, “I’m the producer…! I know everything about this difficult game!”.

Also, just to mention Dadaism for my grade. I can see now that one reason for why people of this generation is pursuing beauties, is that we really have a nice life now. The distorted and dispressed scenes from Dada art is fostered by the darkness of that society, while in our’s society we “beautiful-ize” monsters such as Shiranui. (The Shiraui in the legend is not a young beautiful lady but just mysterious fire on the sea).

The follow links, one is a walkthrough video, with translation and summary provided for the class. It shorten an one-hour process to 15 minutes. The other one is a performing scene, with two part(important!!), one is pure fanart version and the other clip with comparision to the original game. Guest that would be critical to grading.

Walkthrough video:【纯纯的交作业用-哔哩哔哩】 https://b23.tv/vAgriEW

【【阴阳师百闻牌不知火】作业用部分翻译版本我的世界同人游戏-哔哩哔哩】 https://b23.tv/7eOXtuy