Experimental Game Design

Artwork #2: Appropriate

Appropriation Project #2

by | Dec 11, 2019 |

The Death Run Game

The objective is simple. You have One hour. Take any story game or sandbox game that has unique death animations for the main character or death text showing how the main character died. Within that one hour, find as many ways to reveal the death text or find as many unique death animations for the main character.  Both players must agree upon the game and have their own copy ready. The goal is not to die as many times but find as many different ways to die that reveal new animations for the character to die. Example of some games you can do that have multiple death animations: The Tomb Raider Series (from 2013 onwards), The Last of Us, and Dead Space.  For the ones with death text you can use Minecraft. In the sandbox games that are open world and potentially multiplayer, PVP death is not allowed (since it isn’t even beneficial for the player killing). For the story games one must start from the very beginning or a similar save point. 

 

What made me choose this game and its rule set is that I have always been intrigued by games that have made their main character suffer unique death animations, like the developer has done so much to build their character to then give them one of many very brutal deaths. I would love in the future to be able to make a mod out of adventure game that involves finding the unique death animations and put it as a score at the end of the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub2lv0XVCxk

Justin Brady Appropriation Project: Story Time

by | Dec 10, 2019 |

For my appropriation piece, I organized a story-telling game throughout the entire class. I acquired a small green notebook at the school store and wrote a basic rule outline on the first page. Then I wrote a few words on the next page of the notebook and handed it off. I explained the rules verbally to the player, which were such:

Once you receive the book, you must write a short story on the page that starts with the words provided to you by the previous player. DO NOT LOOK AT PREVIOUS PAGES FOR CONTEXT OR INSPIRATION. The only information players may utilize is the few words written on their page by the previous player. Once the player fill the page, continue the story for a few words on the next page, then hand the book off. The process repeats until each player has written in the book.

I was inspired by the sort of stream of consciousness-ness of Hugo Ball’s poetry which ultimately made no sense to the listener. I thought it would be interesting to replicate that concept but with the intention of making a somewhat comprehensible end product. These are the pages of the story I ended up with, from start to end.

Nico Ulloa Appropriation Post: Mute Trivia

by | Dec 9, 2019 |

My appropriation project was a trivia game in which the neither the host nor the audience where allowed to talk and the only way it was permitted to answer questions was using audio clips from the internet. The host would ask a question through a text-to-speech program (Google Translate) and the guests set off searching through the internet to find an audio clip stating the answer– however, they’re not supposed to find an audio clip of the answer itself but of someone saying the answer (e.g: “Who’s the owner of Tesla?” responded by a Rick and Morty clip saying “Elon Musk.”) Additionally, the guests are allowed to stitch together multiple audio clips to answer their question. When a guest is ready to answer they raise their hand, at which point the host selects them and nods or shakes their head to verify the answer.

The initial iteration of the game was simply having to answer with audio clips, but after a couple of rounds I decided to revise it to focus more on the audio since the conversation kept overriding it. As such, the mute part was introduced. The result was a surreal experience where multiple audio clips would overlap each other for about a minute until someone would raise their hand, the room would fall dead quiet, an audio clip would play, and then it would all happen again. It especially became strange when players would stitch together answers or when they’d answer wrong and the cacophony began again– the game felt like it had a strange rhythm. The resulting soundscape felt like something that would not be unusual presented next to Hugo Ball’s Karawane, if only a bit more coherent.

Exquisite Caption (Hastings)

by | Nov 20, 2019 | ,

My appropriation game has four players using four panel comic strips in a ‘New York Times’ caption contest/exquisite corpse mashup. The materials are simple: each player requires only a writing utensil, and comic strips are provided with the text blanked out. Each player begins with a single strip, filling in the missing text of the first panel with anything they want. The strips are then passed around the table and the process is repeated four times at which point the strips will be complete with text.

The game draws heavy inspiration of course from exquisite corpse–although each player is able to see all of the panels and what has already been written, the prompt was naturally open-ended enough to create a similar feeling of freedom and creative liberty. I felt that allowing players to work with this continuity was an integral part of creating the experience I was after; some of my favorite strips produced in playtesting are displayed in this post. However, in true exquisite corpsian fashion the setup certainly didn’t deter some truly baffling strips more akin to Hugo Ball’s nonsense poetry than anything else.

After reading ‘The Well-Played Game’, I was also determined going into this project to rethink the competitive experience I was creating. It was hugely important to me that this game played in more of a couch co-op style where elements of challenge still exist, but the players are in direct collaboration in facing those challenges together. There is no winner, only a series of funny strips everyone was involved in creating.

I manufactured the blank strips by photocopying them out of treasury compilations, and later editing them digitally to remove the text. In the first iteration of the game, they were all from ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ (a personal favorite), but the game was later expanded to include strips from other treasuries I had on hand: ‘Peanuts’, ‘Pearls Before Swine’, and ‘The Adventures of Tintin’.

The inclusion of ‘Tintin’ was based on a recommendation by our guest playtester, who suggested I appropriate potentially controversial material in order to transform it–notorious for problematic representations of people of color, ‘Tintin’ seemed like a good choice to test this out. It raised some eyebrows in playtesting, but didn’t have a significant enough impact to warrant keeping it in the final game.

 

Appropriation – Amaël de Betak

by | Nov 18, 2019 |

RPReplay_Final1574092704

 

My appropriation project came from the idea of making people create collaborative music using something that was not initially made to make music. I decided to appropriate a skateboard as the instrument as one of our guest speakers was telling us about his work which was all based around his habit of collecting toys. He took a look at Dylan’s longboard and started talking about the fact that the way he made art could be used for any hobby and used the skateboard example. Having tried to learn skateboarding since joining Northeastern and having already produced works using that aesthetic in 2D Fundamentals, I decided to try and use it for this project.

Another reason for the choice of the skateboard is that many people who do not skateboard themselves see it as an act of vandalism which tends to destroy the environment in which it is used. However, this is not the case, and skateboarding can even be considered as an act of appropriation in its self as it uses a pre-existing space and makes something new out of it by looking at it from a different angle.

My objective was to create procedural music through the use of a cadavre-exquis like approach where each participant would have to create a loop based on a metronome and the previous participant’s contribution using the skateboard. The previous loop acted as the end lines which are used in a cadavre-exquis to ensure coherence between the different parts.

My main inspiration from this piece was Duchamp’s The Fountain, as he uses an everyday object which many people would never associate with art and made one of the most recognizable pieces out of it. This idea of giving it a new life is linked to my own piece as the skateboard itself does not seem as though it could be used as an instrument, however, its different components all produce very varied sounds which could allow for diverse approaches when producing music with it.

I also took inspiration from the pieces Musical Chess and the Musical Tennis pieces as they also had this similar idea of creating music out of something which is not normally linked to it.

Overall, I was not entirely satisfied with the way in which the piece turned out as I came with the expectation that participants would use the different elements of the skateboard to create interesting sounds. However, they all took the same approach of using it as a percussion by knocking on the deck and scratching on its grip tape, even though I did show them the different possibilities prior to the recording.

Appropriation Piece: “Exquisite Build”

by | Oct 22, 2019 |

Exquisite Build
Rules:

  1. At the start of each round, one player will draw a card. For the first round, the first player drawing the card will be the one who has built a Lego set most recently. The card will give the object being built as well as suggestions for the topics of the multiple building stages, these topics can be changed as each judge wishes. 
  2. The person drawing the card will act as the first judge. As the judge, they will tell the players the object being built and reveal the topic of the first building stage. 
  3. The first collection phase will then commence, moving to the right, each player will draw a card to see the number of pieces they get for their first building phase. The collection phase will be limited to 30 seconds.
  4. Once each player has completed their collection phase, the first building phase will begin, each player has 30 seconds to build the given topic.
  5. Once the 30 seconds are up, the second collection phase will begin and will follow the same rules as the first. This will be followed by a second build phase, a third collection phase, and a third build phase. Each build phase will increase by an increment of 15 seconds.
  6. After the third build phase, each player will present their build of the topic to the judge, who will then select their favorite. The favorite build goes on the baseplate, and the winner gets a point. The rest of the builds are then returned to the pile
  7. The card is then passed to the next judge (to the left), who will determine what the next topic will be. The same process then repeats. 
  8. A round is complete once all players have acted as the judge. Once the round is complete, everyone will take a moment to admire their finished work.
  9. At the start of the second round, the player sitting to the left of the first judge will pick the next card and act as the first judge for the second round.
  10. The game continues either until each player has acted as the starting judge, or the players don’t feel like playing anymore. 
  11. At the end of the game, the player with the most points wins, and is crowned king of the exquisite build.
  12. (Optional rule): The final round is the modern art card, with which players are allowed to build whatever they want.

Artist’s Statement:

This piece was inspired heavily by the “Exquisite Corpse” piece, as well as games like Jackbox and Cards Against Humanity. During the appropriation show and tell, someone jokingly asked if Lego was a form of appropriation. Right when I heard that, I immediately latched onto the idea of using Legos as the appropriated material, but then came the question of what the game would actually be. In the past, Lego had a wave of Lego board games, and I wondered if I should do something akin to that, like a classic board game recreated in Lego, or something along those lines, however nothing really stuck for me. When I thought about my favorite games to play nowadays, I love games like Cards Against Humanity or some of the Jackbox games, where the players are all given one prompt, and each gives a unique response to be judged by the other players or another player. In particular, I really latched onto the idea of one player being a judge, and the rest building something to impress them. In addition, the Jackbox game, Civic Doodle (itself a sort of appropriation of the exquisite corpse formula) was a source of inspiration, as two players were pitted against each other to draw a subject, and then judged. The winner’s piece would then be amended by another two players, and that amendment would be judged, and so on and so on. My game sort of acts as a three dimensional version of Civic Doodle, as the players build upon the foundation set by the last round’s winner. While designing my game, I tried to draw from general concepts we’ve talked about in class, such as the transformation of an object’s purpose, collaborative creation, and creativity in the artistic method. In this game, players are forced to collaborate with each other as they build off of each other’s previous designs. In addition their piece selection and building time is limited, thus transforming the normal Lego building process, in which you are provided all the pieces you need and unlimited time to build the set you purchased into a competitive scramble to collect random pieces in order to build whatever you can in the given time. The Lego pieces act as the appropriated material despite being used as they usually are, as building blocks to make a model of something. Despite the Lego company encouraging creativity and collaboration, most Lego sets nowadays are designed to be built by one person following a given set of instructions. This game, though, uses the pieces to fulfill these values held closely by the Lego company, by encouraging the players to build more uniquely in order to win and contribute to the overall creation.

Documentation

For this shortened round, the card pulled listed:
Object: Wall
Topics: Wall

The first topic for the build was a wall with holes.

Photo 1: Here we see the two players in the midst of their first collection phase, grasping at whatever pieces they can get before the time runs out.

Photo 2: In the midst of the second building phase, the players designs begin to take hold as they put together what they can with the pieces they’ve acquired.

Photo 3: The first build produced, an artistic wall packed with a variety of holes of different sizes and shapes. A design completely white due to the players wishes. This wall ultimately wins the first phase.

Photo 4: The other first build produced. A worth opponent, filled with a variety of colors and a non-functioning door piece. The player used the door as a barrier, without its traditional hinges, and with an eyeball as the door handle. Is this an appropriation piece in itself? Makes one wonder.

Photo 5: The second stage of the building of the wall. This time, the topic was to continue the trend of the winning wall, and to build a white wall. Here we see the two players in this second stage in the midst of their collection phase, searching for pieces.

Photo 6: The winning build produced in this second stage. The player decided to stack bricks of varying color but same size and shape upon each other. He argued that since all colors of light together make white, that’s what is happening here. Truly a compelling argument.

Photo 7: The other wall built in the second stage. Despite its small size, the wall consists entirely of white or clear pieces, to uphold the white aesthetic established by the first build.

Photo 8: The two walls, placed together on the baseplate to create the final product. An artistic wall with an interesting juxtaposition between their colors.

 

Photo 9: Fun for friends and family!

 

Just Draw – Appropriation Game

by | Oct 22, 2019 | , ,

I originally intended for this game to be a single player experience, but after playtesting with an improvised multiplayer mode where each player would take a turn drawing, I realized that the multiplayer was the real source of fun for the game. There was a lot of emergent behavior I would never have seen in the single player game. The players began to play cooperatively and began helping each other out with their drawings. Some began to purposefully draw in a certain way as to help the other player with their next drawing. The game turned into this strange dialogue between the players as they were both helping each other turn the same thing into two different things. There were some other emergent behaviors that I didn’t expect for individual players. When I played the game, I drew very minimally to make the next drawing easier. Seeing others play, they added a lot more detail that I would’ve added. People became very attached to their drawings in a way that I didn’t necessarily intend. People overall seemed to want more control over their drawing, so I added the ability to move the camera and zoom in and out as well as undo drawings. 

 

For my appropriation game, the player is given a prompt to draw, which must be drawn by appropriating the previous player’s drawing. After the drawing is complete a new prompt is given to the next player. My original idea with this game was to somehow have the game mechanic be appropriation itself. In my pitch, the game mechanic was for the player to be able to explore their own creations that have been appropriated by the computer. I was inspired by a lot of the more theatrical Dada pieces, especially the earlier Zurich movement where the participation of the audience was a key part of the performance. In this game the player is key in the performance of appropriation. After making the game multiplayer, the form of appropriation transformed so that while the two players had the same object that they were appropriating, they were instructed to appropriate in two seemingly conflicting ways. With this game I saw the use of appropriation as a way to resolve these conflicts. When the players would need to turn a dog into a tree through only additional pencil strokes, there is an immediate conflict that arises. The message I wanted to send through this piece was that only through the act of appropriation by the player do they progress. Another interesting part of my game is scale. I was inspired by the use of scale as a tool for transformation such as the giant joystick or tiny hammer. I forced the player’s drawings to zoom out over time rather than just have them move along the screen.

Just Draw Zoom Out

Appropriation Game – “Star Corpse”

by | Oct 21, 2019 |

The final title of my game is “Star Corpse”. I appropriated some of the mechanics of Exquisite Corpse, such as each player contributes something to a final piece of art, but I wanted to use collage instead of drawing. I was also interested in collage based on the DADA collages. Originally I bought two magazines: Star and Downtown Abbey. I gave each of the four players a part of the body: head, torso (without arms), arms, and legs. I playtested with 3 different prompts, using both magazines and a piece of graph paper for the base.  

The prompt for this piece was “The Perfect Female Form”

The prompt for this piece was “An Abomination” with no body part suggestions.

This prompt was “The Ideal Male Form”

And this prompt was another “An Abomination” prompt with no suggestions for body parts.

What I found from this playtesting was that the abomination prompts seemed 50-50 on outcomes that matched the aesthetic I was trying to evoke. After talking about it with Celia and my peers, some changes that I decided to make are as follows:

Use stockier paper, always give a body part suggestion, and make the players name their piece when finished. Additionally I decided to broaden my prompts using found words within the Star magazine. I also decided not to use the Downtown Abbey magazine because I found that players tended not to use it when given the choice, and that the material within seemed overall less inspiring. I also made small changes to how the game was played, one prompt card for the group, with each person getting a body part, as opposed to each person getting both.

Here’s what we got:

The prompt for this piece was “CHILD.” They decided to name it Zero.

The prompt for this piece was “PAPARAZZI.” They named it big Hamds McGee, a play on big hands combined with hamburger something- it was a reference I didn’t quite get.

This piece’s prompt was “ACTION STAR.” They named it Aoun Jr.

Overall I was happy with the improvements made from the first playtest to my final playtests. I found that the players tended to name the character they created, not necessarily the “piece,” as I thought they would. The paper change really brought up the production quality of the final piece. I also felt that limiting the source to only the Star magazine also helped solidify somewhat of a theme. Other prompts that I created but weren’t able to playtest were: “Beautiful, stepson, and legend.” Looking back though, if I were to spend more time playtesting, I would try putting the collage on grid paper, and then putting the grid paper on the stockier black paper with a black outline. I do sort-of like the gritty, rugged look that came with the lighter grid paper.

Elena Kosowski Artwork #2 Appropriation: Mad Rock Paper Scissors

by | Oct 20, 2019 | ,

Something that caught my interest during class, was whenever someone took a very simple game and created an entirely new experience by changing one mechanic of the game. Some examples that come to mind are the giant joystick by Mary Flanagan and the Octopad by Patrick Lemieux, an 8-person game controllers where each person can only push one button. I wanted to do something similar with the very simple game of Rock Paper and Scissors. I wanted to see this game played with more collaboration and chaos.  So, I decided to merge the game of Rock Paper and Scissors with the game Mountains of Madness.

Mountains of Madness is a boardgame I discovered about a month ago. The aim of the game is to have a team of five players reach the top of the mountain alive with as much treasure as they can. To do so, the players must work together against a bunch of mini challenges. In order to beat these challenges, communication is the most important thing. If the team ever fails a challenge, one of the players gets a madness card. Madness cards impair that member’s ability to communicate in some way, which make the game progressively harder the more and more you fail challenges.  Each player can have up to three madness cards each, which make the game very exciting, crazy, and chaotic.

My combination of Rock Paper and Scissors and Mountains of Madness, called Mad Rock Paper Scissors, is best played with 6, 8, 10, or 12 players. The group of players is split into two teams. In order to win each member of one team must decide on an action to use on the other team, however, they must all perform this one action in sync in order to get the point. For example, if team 1 all perform “rock” and team 2 all person “scissors”, team 1 wins. But if 2 members of team 1 perform “rock” and the other 2 members of team 1 person “scissors”, that team automatically loses.

The game consists of at least three rounds. Before each round, each team has 45 seconds to discuss what action they will perform. During the first round, neither team has a madness card. During the second round, each team has one madness card that each team member shares. During the third round and onward, each team member will have their own madness card. The distribution of the madness card is random before each new round. Like Rock Paper and Scissors, it runs on a “best out of three, best out of five” method where the teams decide how long they want to play.

I do not own the game Mountains of Madness, so I was unable to use the real madness cards. Instead I made my own and formatted them to fit the game of Rock Paper and Scissors better. There are blue and green cards. Blue cards are normal madness cards. Green cards are more restricting. Green cards restrict what action a single player can perform. For example, a green card can tell the player that they can only do rock. This player would have to convince their team to person this single action. Each team can only have as most one green card, because too many green cards can lead to impossible outcomes. If two team members both have green cards and one member can only do rock while the other can only do scissors, then the entire team is doomed to fail.

When I presented this game in front of the class, it is interesting to note groups would perform fake hand gestures during the discussion period in order to deceive the other group. This interaction between players was a fun addition I didn’t anticipate.

Examples of Blue Cards:

Examples of Green Cards:

Artwork #2: Appropriate – Whack Gacha Card Game

Artwork #2: Appropriate – Whack Gacha Card Game

by | Oct 17, 2019 |

For Artwork #2 I decided to appropriate multiple different card games into one gacha card game. For those who do not know what a “Gacha” game is, here is a brief explanation and history. A Gacha game usually take form of mobile games. The core game mechanic usually having players using in-game currency to “gamble” for playable character base on luck. Because of this luck based system players can get duplicates and have grind for more in-game currency to draw the character they want. This is similar to loot boxes, however loot boxes usually give skins or items that is not essential to the core gameplay. What gacha differs from loot boxes is that it is the core mechanic and attraction. Many popular gacha game came from Japan as well as the term “Gacha”. The origin of this name came from gachapon machines that could be found all over urban Japan. Gachapon usually requires around 100 to 200 yen to draw a random accessory. The first gacha game is “Dragon Collection” on a Japanese social platform called GREE in 2010. Here’s some popular gacha games: Kantai collection, Girls frontline, Azure lane, Fate grand order, Onmyoji, Fire emblem heroes, Pokémon master and even Hearthstone count as a gacha.

During my planning phase I thought about what object that I appropriate and I thought of the Pokémon Cards that I had at my home. Which lead me to combining multiple different card games into a single card game. You can say this combination of multiple items are inspired by Kurt Schwitters. This use of random cards is like Schwitters’ use of random found objects in his collages. What inspired the gacha part is because of the gacha game that I am currently playing and the realization that Hearthstone is essentially a gacha game. The reason that I chose Pokémon, poker and Uno cards is because those are the most accessible cards to me. Pokémon cards fit perfectly as the central battling monster cards. Uno’s special cards provided interesting mechanic to the game. And the basicness of poker cards allowed it to be easily appropriated. During the development phase I have to think of the varies rule that card games have. Thanks to the already existing rule that came with the cards I just have to simplify it and adapt it into my game. Now for the gacha part, since all gacha game are virtual I have to think of a way to bring it to the physical world. I came up with the idea of assigning each card with a dice combination. In most gacha game there is a tier list where high tier characters have the lowest chance of getting. And as a gacha parody I decided to make the top tier Pokémon to be overpowered and have the lowest chance of getting. During the testing phase with my brother he suggested a extension to one of the mechanic: defending, giving it more purpose to take this action. After testing with him, I realized that this isn’t just appropriation of cards but also mechanic. The game has the mechanic of Pokémon, Yugioh, Uno and gacha games.

The cards

When it’s finally the time to test it in class interesting result appeared. The game is a one on one duel with deck that the player gets through rng. The game was played twice with different people both time and both time one of the player gets exceptionally good pulls, both getting the legendary Pokémon. This made it that in both game one player were up against another player that had good luck. However, the result of the 2 games were different. Through the creation process of this game I have one thing in mind and that is unfairness. In a game of luck like gacha game, people with good luck always had the upper hand. To recreate that feeling I made the best card ridiculously overpowered. The first game ended up as I expected, both players played well but the player with the better luck won. However, in the second game the luckier player lost. I concluded that it’s because the other player have the better strategy. And the second game proved to me that with strategy you can win against luck. You could almost saw the second game as an analogy to some real life situation. Some system are made unfair and people with the better luck generally have a easier time. But with a good “strategy” and hard work you can also succeed.

Game Rule and offering chart
The second games player’s deck