Artwork #2: Appropriate

^ The initial setup of the game

^ The board after a short and quick playthrough

Unfair Monopoly is a version of Monopoly with modified rules:

• The player order is decided by a dice roll. (Highest roll = Player 1)
• Player 1 starts with $5000, Player 2 and 3 start with $500, and Player 4 starts with $2.
• Player 1 starts off owning every property on 2 sides of the board (of their choice).
• Players 2 and 3 start off owning 1 property of their choice.
• Player 1 starts off with 20 houses of their choice (5 houses can become a hotel).
• Players 2 and 3 start off with 1 house of their choice.
• Player 1 “has connections” and so can get a new property for free every turn.

I’ve always thought it was interesting how much some people hate Monopoly. I’ve always enjoyed it, but it feels like you can’t bring it up without getting some groans. I think that’s for a few reasons (its length, the jail system, the fact it keeps on going after the winner is almost guaranteed…), but ultimately, all these issues–to some extent–derive from the fact that losing at this game is painful. It’s awful to have almost no spaces, and almost no money, and just sit by as you spiral into bankruptcy. The thing is, this is–in a way–the most “realistic” aspect of the game. When you’re subject to the will of much richer, more powerful players, there are few tools at your disposal to recover from that. The fact that the original version of Monopoly was created as a statement (rather than being a game for the sake of a game) says it all.

Because of that, I figured it’d be fun to ramp up the most frustrating–and most realistic–aspects of the game. What if, instead of starting off on equal footing, the characters were split into classes (Player 1 being upper-class, Players 2 and 3 being the middle class, and Player 4 being poor)? Additionally, what if Player 1–on top of having far more property and money than anyone else–also had “connections” which let them gain properties without doing any work or spending any money? That’s realistic, too. Ultimately, these changes make the game nearly unplayable, especially for Player 4, but really for anyone who isn’t Player 1.

Making this game was a weirdly cathartic experience, despite how frustrating and hopeless it’s built to be. I think that’s because I’ve always been annoyed in particular by the concept of “connections” in getting people up corporate ladders, whether or not they have the skill/ability to warrant reaching the top. Because of that, it was satisfying to “vent” about it through this game.

In a way, this game’s style of appropriation derives from the way Dada artists took pictures and corrupted/distorted them to convey the violence of World War I and the shifting of culture in the early 1900s. In the same way their collages would cut up and combine their original photos in uncanny ways, this game takes Monopoly and distorts it into something unpleasant but realistic, while being fascinating in its own way.

The core of this game has generally stayed the same throughout development, but a couple things have changed. First, Player 1 used to select 20 separate properties at the start, but that dragged on for a while during the first playtest, so now they simply select 2 full sides of the board to own. Additionally, the game now uses a proper Monopoly board (with slight visual modifications) instead of a printed piece of paper, which was originally used for proving the concept.

Ultimately, I hope this game can serve as a quirky conversation starter for people who love, or hate, the Monopoly game we’re all familiar with.

Rules:

• The rules in each half follow the respective chess rules.
  • Western Chess Rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_chess 
  • Eastern Chess Rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi 

• Since the two chess sets use different mapspace, thus when crossing the border, players can decide which near line/grid they want to enter.
• Rooks, Queen, Chariots, Canons, and Bishops will need to take a turn to pass the midline, while knights and horses don’t.
• Western pawn can be promoted into any eastern chess piece besides the general when it reaches the end, and eastern soldiers can be promoted into any western chess piece besides the king when it reaches the end.
• King can no longer cross the middle line

This appropriation is inspired initially from Duchamps and his chess art pieces. The concept of this appropriation is to demonstrate aesthetic and cultural differences between western chess and eastern chess where both of them were adapted from the same origin. The game deliberately let the chess pieces follow the moving rule of the respective board space they are in because there is an old saying in both western and eastern cultures called “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” (or ru xiang sui su in Chinese). Both of them mean when visiting a foreign land, follow the customs of those who live in it. Also, taking an extra step to cross the middle causes it to be very difficult to move one’s piece to the other side because it will be relatively easy for the opponent to defend, which somehow demonstrates that it is very difficult for a culture to enter another. 

Gameplay wise, since these two chess sets have different pieces and different amounts of pieces, this game will be an asymmetrical PvP game. In respective of game balancing, for the western sides, it has 3 less special pieces (pieces besides pawns), but it has the queen which is the most powerful piece amongst all. Moreover, bishops & knights are similar but stronger than elephants & horses where knights will not be blocked by other pieces like horses do, and bishops can move in any amount in a diagonal but elephants can only move 2 grids in diagonal. For eastern sides, it has half of the amount of soldiers compared with western pawns, but they are a bit more powerful because they can capture forward or horizontal when they cross the middle where pawns can only capture in diagonal. Eastern chess has advisors and canons but advisors can only move in the 9 grids surrounding the general which has no use in offending, and canons are not as powerful as the queen. In short, western chess has less special pieces but they are more powerful and it has more pawns, whereas eastern chess has more special pieces but less powerful, and less pawns(soldiers) but a bit more powerful. Therefore, the gameplay is somehow balanced.

During the playtesting, I found that the game is relatively stagnant since it is difficult to cross the middle line, so I want to give more power to certain pieces to make the gameplay more engaging and offensive. The knights and horses are a good choice because they will not be overpowered like rooks or chariots if they can cross the middle line without taking an extra turn. Also, kings can no longer cross the middle line just to remain symmetric with the eastern general.

Disclaimer: There are no political implications in any form, anyhow, anywhere in this game.

Playtestings

Other Variation (Speed Chess + Extend the board by 4 rows, the middle line now is between 2-3 on the western board)

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.