Artwork #2: Appropriate

Games Rules:

Each turn the Art Critic chooses 3 cards from the themes pile. They choose their favourite and shuffle the remaining 2 back into the deck. Then the Art Critic tells the other players, The Artist, the theme for their piece of art. The Artists have 3 minutes to create a piece of art using images from magazines or news papers that fits the theme. Once 3 minutes is up, The Artists stop working and present their piece of art to the Art Critic and talk about what they made. The Art Critic, then, chooses their favorite piece of art and that Artist gets a point. Lastly the role of Art Critic is passed to the next player and the game repeats. First to 5 points wins.

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Artist Statement:

My game was heavily inspired by the collage artwork that was very prevalent in the DADA movement. The piece that I enjoyed the most and that I drew the most inspiration from was Hannah Höch’s, Bouquet of Eyes. I love this piece because I find the human eye extremely fascinating as it is incredibly complex and beautiful at the same time, and this bouquet made up of eyes interested me a lot. Another thing I took inspiration from were DADA heads; they took old hat racks and added ordinary objects to them and they became something so different. I really enjoy the idea of taking something simple and plain and adding things from your environment to make it unique and extraordinary. Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head is one of my favorite DADA heads because all he did was add normal objects to this hat rack but it made the hat rack so much more. While I was making my game I also took inspiration from some already existing games, mainly pictionary and cards against humanity. I think Pictionary is such a great game because it lets every player be creative but also unique at the same time. I wanted to capture that feeling in the game I was making; I wanted my players to take a central theme and put their own twist on it, that way they had to be creative. Cards against humanity works really well in my opinion because it lets the players choose what they like and don’t like. This lets the players have more fun because they are boxed in by rules and complex instructions, which is why the winner of a round is just chosen by a player. The reason I wanted the players to make a collage is because it gives the player a sense of creation, something that I think was integral to the DADA movement and it lets the player have fun and be creative.

“We were against the pacifists, because it was the war that had given us the possibility to exist in all our glory. We were for the war, and today Dada is still for the war. Things have to collide: the situation so far is nowhere nearly gruesome enough.” – a cheeky statement from a speech Richard Huelsenbeck gave that would describe the characteristics of the Dada movement in Berlin

Superfight is a game similar to Cards Against Humanity, but instead of answering a prompt, players design heroes by assembling different fantasy, superhero, sci-fi, historical, and pop culture characters as well as powers and debilities, and then argue about which one would win in a fight. I saw this extremely varied character creation process and had the idea to turn it into a tabletop roleplaying game. The players would design their characters and I would design enemies for them to fight. Keeping with the theme of the very loose and almost limitless possibilities for character creation, the rules were very loose as well, where action mainly ended up consisting of rolling a d20 and deciding how well the attempted action went based on if the roll was above or below 10. As the game was played and tested, I decided to implement health for the player characters as not a number that goes down until the character dies, but I would just slap their character with new and wacky debilities until the player decided that this character was now dead or at the very least incapacitated. Debilities and powers were also acquired by the players on their turn if they felt like playing an additional card on their character or an enemy. It was a very fun seeing the wacky characters the players and I built, and actually playing out what they would do in a fight, something the original game only teases at.

But what does it all mean? Antonin Artaud, a playwright who was briefly part of the Surrealist movement said in an essay The Theater and Cruelty “This is why we shall try to concentrate, around famous personages, atrocious crimes, superhuman devotions, a drama which, without resorting to the defunct images of the old Myths, shows that it can extract the forces which struggle within them”. He was very interested in the forces contained in mythology and how they are not done justice in modern times, as he says in The Theater and Culture “The old totemism of animals, stones, objects capable of discharging thunderbolts, costumes impregnated with bestial essences—everything, in short, that might determine, disclose, and direct the secret forces of the universe—is to us a dead thing, from which we derive nothing but static and aesthetic profit, the profit of an audience, not an actor”. I can’t help but agree with him a bit in how a lot of old myths have been watered down to purely aesthetics in how we portray them and their derivatives in our culture, whether it be in fantasy, sci-fi, or superhero genres of books, games, and film.

While that is a whole other conversation, it is from this premise that I decided to include the Huelsenbeck quote at the beginning of this post. For it is this reduction to purely aesthetics that allows these mythological stories to be industrialized and mass produced, similar to how warfare was in the first world war. And just as Dada would not exist without the collisions of the grotesque aspects of the war and societies that it spawned from, so too would my game not exist with the mass commodification and production of myth that the game Superfight serves as a Library of Alexandria of. I am not sure that there is media today that would satisfy Artaud in his quest to express the human mind and spirit as he imagines the myths of ancient times were able to, but until that happens, I will continue to collide the vast majority of what we do have to create new characters and story that are at the very least fun to mess around with in all their absurdity.

This came off a lot more serious than I intended it to and doesn’t fully reflects my beliefs on modern culture, but again that is a whole other conversation. Documented below are some of the zany characters created while playing the game in class.

Adding the pictures I took of the game and the wacky zany characters created from playing it directly into the blog results in them being too low resolution to see clearly, so they’re documented in this google drive folder instead. But I have been informed I need them in the actual blogpost for it to be graded so here they are

Requirements for Speak Fighter:
A fighting game (this specific version uses Street Fighter 2 for the SNES)
Two controllers
Four players, these players do not need to know how to play fighting games, it is possibly better if they do not

Rules:
The players will divide into two teams. One member of the team will be the fighter who uses the controller but is not allowed to see the screen. The other team member will be the coach who can see the screen and gives the fighter information in order to win. The coach and fighter can only give information to each other in coded language. For instance, the coach can say, “you need to do the right thing,” in order to communicate that the player needs to move right, but the coach could not say, “go to the right,” as that makes the information too obvious. I suggest asking for examples of movie genres or television shows before the players compete and using one of the suggestions as a theme for how the players can communicate. For example, players could only be able to communicate as though they were in a western and would need to speak in an accent and use language associated with westerns.

Artist’s Statement:
This piece definitely change a lot from what I had initially intended. My original inspiration was based on a thought I had about how I found that using fighting game terminology to refer to things that had nothing to do with fighting games was incredibly funny. This thought spawned the concept of a fighting game that you played only by speaking, possibly using syllables as a means to simulate frame data or requiring players to complete a full argument to win. This idea proved to be far too abstract and complicated for this project, so I changed the concept a bit. My new goal was to create a fighting game with a verbal component, possibly requiring players to talk to each other while playing or only being able to attack while speaking. I had been watching speedruns of blindfolded Punch-Out!! for the NES which made me want to add a hidden information element to the game. I was also inspired by the boxer/coach relationship present in that game which made me consider adding other players to guide the fighters. Additionally, games such as the version of Tekken where taking damage was simulated using actual pain impacted the thought process for designing this project. This project, however, was intended to be a new way to experience trying to play Street Fighter rather than feeling a more literal impact from having played Tekken. This culminated in the original prototype of the game and also informs the language I use to refer to the players. The coded language was an attempt to maintain a verbal detachment from fighting games where now instead of fighting game terminology would be applied to non-fighting games, non-fighting game terminology would be applied to fighting games. Additionally, the sit down and play environment and improvisation required reminded me of the show Whose Line Is It Anyway. This directly inspired the optional rule to ask for a communication theme for the players to abide by in the same way that the host of the show would. In the final iteration, players and coaches sat facing each other which came about organically, as it was not a requirement for play in any of the rules. This solidified player groups as a team due to the direct contact that they had.

Speak Fighter: The Movie

It’s also worth noting that the players were instructed to speak as though they were in a Marvel movie in the attached video.

Game rule/modification on Monopoly:

Start of the game, the three players play rock paper scissors to determine the role of upper class, middle class and lower class.

• Lower class starts with $500 Cash and no property
• Middle class starts with $2500 Cash, both water and electric companies and properties from Valtic Ave all the way to New York Ave.
• Upper class starts with $5000 Cash, all the Railroads and properties from Kentucky Ave to Boardwalk.

Upper class moves first, followed by middle class and lower class. The opportunity and chest blocks are just blank spaces. 

When stepping onto the tax block, the upper class will have to pay double, the middle class pays the same amount, and the lower class do not have to pay.

During their turn, the players can choose to donate to other players, there is a $1000 donation cap. Only half of the donation will be able to go through, the other half goes to the bank.

When facing a big amount of rent the lower class can choose to go to jail to avoid rent. 

Passing through the starting square means going over one generation, the players will gain ⅕ of their total savings. 

The game ends when one of the players goes bankrupt or the leading player is two generations ahead of the last player. 

Artist Statement: As Dada started as an anti-war movement, many of the artworks during this period are created to protest against social issues. My project took inspiration from Yoko Ono’s White Chess in which she modifies the traditional game chess to make it more similar to actual warfare where there is no clear distinction between friendlies and enemies. After learning about the Dada movement and Yoko Uno’s piece, I want to create something that reflects contemporary social issues: class conflicts and the poverty cycle. Using the existing game Monopoly, I was able to modify it to make it simulate the actual economic situation of upper class, middle class and lower class. In the hope to evoke the players’ strong emotion towards the unfair social phenomena of the poverty cycle. 

City Guesser 2-Players

My appropriation game is a modified version of a very popular game online called City Guesser. In the game City Guesser, players would observe a video playing on their screen and based on the video that’s playing, try to guess the location of the video. There are buttons on the top right of the video that can help players by controlling the video so that they can get more information. After guessing where the location may be, the game will tell the players how far they are away from the actual location of the video. There is no score or map limit, so players are free to continue guessing and playing however long they want.

My Modified Version of City Guesser:

Players:

• 2 Players

Rules:

• At the start of the game, position the players so that Player 1 cannot look at the video and Player 2 can. Player 2 must give as much detailed information as possible to Player 1 about the video, however, Player 2 cannot make the guess about where they think the place may be. They can give suggestive guesses but ultimately, Player 1 makes the decision about where they think the place is.

Modifications/Setting Changes:

These are additional rules that the players can add to make the game more challenging

• Limited Amount of Questions
• Time Limit
• The Player describing may not suggest any country
• The Player describing may not say what language is spoke or shown in the video

Artist Statement

Throughout the process of forming an idea of appropriating a game, I was mainly focused creating ways to make an original game more frustrating, difficult, or unique. Yoko Ono’s piece, White Chess, really inspired me to somewhat appropriate a game where there was a loss of information. In Yoko Ono’s game, the lost of information was what game pieces the players control where if the players do not completely remember all of their piece’s positions, then this game essentially becomes impossible to play. Likewise, when appropriating my game, I realized that by taking away a player’s vision and hearing, my game creates the same type of challenge as White Chess in terms of a mental challenge where that player must constantly infer about the given information to formulate and achieve the goal of my game. Unlike Yoko Ono’s piece, the difficulty in mine comes from the coordination between players and whether the descriptive information correctly leads the other player to the destination or that information becomes too opinionated to the point where other player wrongly infers about the location. These types of interaction between players interests me where I believe in the idea that enjoyable or good friction within challenging games creates some sort of satisfaction or euphoric feeling when overcoming these hurdles. Although the players might not get the right location or be remotely close during their first attempt, after multiple attempts, the players would start to understand certain tips or tricks that would help each other, possibly forming some interesting way of communication exclusive to both of them, overcoming each obstacle until they finally have a guess that is close to the location. However, to constantly facilitate these challenges and feelings, I felt the need to create more modifications or settings to my games that would ultimately create more obstacles, which once again, create the sort of interactions that I would like to see in a my game.

Documentation:

Peers in my class playing my modified version of City Guesser.

One player is describing the location to the other player.

The player choosing the where they think the place may be.

The final result of the video’s location.

This game was first inspired by Yoko Ono’s white chess. After seeing this work, I wanted to start with a board game, so I chose to learn from the simplest tic tac toe game. On the other hand, due to the central idea of “anti-art” of dada doctrine, I decided to make some reverse modifications to the core game mechanism of tic tac toe – but the finished product will still be a game, just as dada art is still art.

First, I expanded the chessboard from 3 * 3 to 5 * 5. The reason why tic tac toe is an easy and fast game is largely due to the size limit of the chessboard, and I want players to spend more time “hesitating”. Secondly, I modified the two core mechanisms of the game: how to proceed to the next step and how to win. In the process of the game, players should not only think about their next step but also think about how the other party will take the next step. The key is not how to control your own actions, but how to control your opponent’s actions. Finally, in the traditional tic tac toe, three in a row means victory, but in this game, it means failure. I think this is the most interesting part and can also bring the most novel experience to players: everyone will find ways to avoid the victory means they are used to.