Artwork #2: Appropriate

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

Rules:

Click on the gallery to view the rulebook in full size

Artist Statement:

The main thing that inspired me to appropriate chess is Yoko Ono’s White Chess. I loved how just changing the color of the pieces she could turn a war game into a protest of the Vietnam War. I wanted to do something similar with my work, I wanted to turn the competitive atmosphere around chess on its head to make a game about cooperation and building relationships. While thinking about chess I was reminded of Backgammon. I remember a lot of the boards I played chess on as a kid had a backgammon board on the back. I never learned how to play, but I always thought they looked like bridges. This reminded me of the idiom “build bridges, not walls,” which would inspire me to use the backgammon board as a bridge between the two sides of the chess board. The players would have to work together to make the pieces on each side of all the bridges match in as few turns as they could (chess pieces move the same way they do in a normal chess game). I playtested this iteration and found what the players did to be really repetitive and boring. Because all pawns moved forward the simplest way to win was just to move the pawns forward until all the bridges were filled with just pawns. I realized this pretty early on in the playtest, so I introduced a die the player had to roll (in this case I used a four-sided die). They would roll at the beginning of each turn to decide how many pieces they could move that turn. While this did cut down on the repetitiveness of the game, it caused another problem. Since the die numbered 1-4, if a player rolled a bunch of ones, the other player would finish first and then just have to wait around while their teammate figured it out. Furthermore, at this point, it did not feel like chess and backgammon combined. It was just a weird take on chess with a backgammon board slammed in the middle. To fix these issues before the final presentation I implemented new rules and mechanics. I added the pucks from backgammon, which could be moved by rolling a die (a six-sided die this time). These pucks would act as rafts, and they could carry pieces from the bridge the raft was on to a bridge to the right. This allowed for new strategies and made it harder to make a mistake that would lose the players the game outright. Furthermore, the die roll also displayed how many pieces the player could move, but in this case, if the number was even they got to move two pieces and if the number was odd they got to move one piece. This change made the die serve more than one purpose and decreased the time players spent waiting for their teammates to move. Finally, I made a rulebook with lots of pictures to clearly communicate the rules of the game to the players. In this rulebook, I added a scoreboard so players see how they did compare to other teams.

Initial Playtest Photos:

Final Playtest Photos:

Artist’s Statement:

The game was inspired by Cory Arcangel’s “Super Mario Clouds” and other modded games with different skins. This was my first time focusing on only the sky and clouds in Super Mario Bros. With no other disruptions, it feels slightly different from the original piece. It becomes free, fresh, and slow, which I totally ignored in the original. So, I come up with an idea of what would happen if I only change the skin in Space Invaders.

I choose Space Invaders because it was one of the games that influenced the following game market a lot (also the one that shapes Shigeru Miyamoto, the father of Super Mario Bros). The game has many basic components like a controllable individual, enemies, and projectiles. Some subversive ideas jump into my mind: What if I try to switch the colors and figures of different alignments? Some common traits of enemies that players do not recognize may be revealed in the character of the player.

What I changed in this game was the color and firing rate of the enemies. I made the enemies green and the player red. I felt a little bit weird because usually, the color of the player was green or blue and the enemies were red. This time, I felt like I was controlling a bad guy fighting against a good group. Originally, the story was about a group of aliens invading the earth, and the player needs to protect the earth. With different skins, this version becomes an alien trying to protect its homeland from humans.

During the playtest, one interesting fact is that when the player faces the missile rain, the player prefers to hide behind the shelter rather than take down the plane. It turns out some habits of players that if they directly meet a risk, they would try to avoid it first. The shelter was used to protect the player when the player made mistakes in the original one, so the player could focus on killing enemies. It showed another strategy in this version that the player focused on surviving.

Appropriation Game Rules:

Collect toys or items intended for your pet’s use, which either your pet does not use, or has used to a point of destruction.

Sit with another player (they are welcome to bring their own objects to incorporate) and lay out all of the objects in front of you.

Collaborate with the other player to repurpose the objects by using them to create a new pet toy.

Take turns with the other player, each either incorporating one item at a time, using your turn to change an existing item’s position or to change an item’s shape (cut, break, or other). Order can be determined beforehand or organically by whoever is inspired first.

Once all of the items have been incorporated, the game is over.

If your pet plays with your creation, you win!

By Sophie Uldry

Artist’s Statement:

In my continued journey to conjure artworks, projects, and games somehow related to cats, I have turned to the toys associated with them. Though I later generalized it to be a game playable with any pet, “Better Toys” is a game partially inspired by my cats’ favorite and least favorite toys, and my urge to throw the unused toys away. The said unused toys are still perfectly usable, so what better way to reuse these toys than to transform them and give the new toy back to the pets? To better explain, “Better Toys” is a game in which two players collect items of their pets (unused or disliked items are encouraged), work together to combine all of the toys or items into a new toy, and put the new toy to the test against your pet. If your pet plays with the newly made toy, you win! The point of the game is obviously to have fun with friends and pets, but also to bring attention to the fact that anything can be a toy, and buying fancy ones is often unnecessary for your pet’s purposes. For example, I had bought a puffy bell toy for my cat which never got used, instead she tore the shoelaces off of some old pair of converse I was planning on throwing away which have since become the preferred toys by far.

Now that I’ve sufficiently accredited my cats as my inspiration, I turn to my main inspiration for this game: Duchamp and his ready-mades. For his ready-mades (like the Hat Rack from 1917 and Bottle Rack from 1914), Duchamp would take completely common or uninteresting industrial goods, and display them in a boring, “useless” and non practical way. He contested beauty in this way, which frustrated him as he found over time all of his displays would end up perceived as beautiful. I’ve strived to use Duchamp’s same process for a different inverted purpose of turning the useless into something useful. The finished product should turn out to be unique from other pet toys, but still share the same initial purpose of the toy, transforming it in the opposite way that Duchamp meant to transform his works. See below for some examples of iterations for this game!

New toy created by classmates given items my cats show little interest in.

Cat immediately interested, sniffing, and scratching.

Cat integrating himself into the finished product created by classmates… They win!

Second iteration, items collected, setup completed.

Cat interacting with second completed toy… Victory here as well!

This game is called Draw Something (ART version). There are many Draw Something game you can access online, but this project is related to ART.

Inspiration: Ursonate by Raoul Hausmann.

In Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, Paris, the author indicated the poem created by Raoul Hausmann and how did Schwitters take Hausmann’s phonemes and “arranged them in new groupings, repetitions, and variations.” Therefore, I was thinking about to make a game that players “arrange” and “recreate” the artwork.

Rules:

1. Need at least 4 players in a group. There will be 1 guesser and n-1 drawers.
2. All players should line up in a straight line and face to the other’s back.
3. The player at the begining of the link checks the picutre and starts drawing. They got 10 seconds to check the picture, and they are not allowed to draw anything until the picture is put away. They got 30 seconds to draw, because they need to draw the main point of the picture so that the drawers could try to get the information and draw on it.
4. The players in the middle of the line continue drawing and pass it to the next player. They got 15 seconds to draw.
5. When the drawing is passed to the guesser, they should guess what artwork/artist/game character it is.

 Additional Infomation:

• NO cheating
• NO written words
• NO talking
• NO drawing after time’s up.

During the class, I got 4 people for the gameplay. I chose Mona Lisa as the picture that the players need to “re-depict”. When the game started, I set up a time for 10 secons and showed the picture of Mona Lisa to Player1 who stands at the beginning of the line. When time’s up, I covered the picture, and gives them 30 seconds to draw the main point of the artwork. When time’s up, I asked them to pass the ipad to Player2. I set up the timer for 15 seconds, and they got 15 seconds to draw. When time’s up, Player3 repeated the step that Player2 have done. After Player3 finished, they passed the drawing to Player4 who is the guesser. Finally, they immediately got the right answer, which is Mona lisa. Amazing!