xXx Throwback 2 Quizilla xXx

This game was made as an appropriation to the days of 2004-2010, when Quizilla was at its peak popularity. The website was used for mainly creating quizzes and writing stories. The site was used by many newer or popular fandoms of the time along with the emo scene. The game was made to mimic the quizzes of those times which were a series of questions and then a result in the end and the most popular quizzes had the taker get a result where they’re told that they have a certain power or end up with a handsome fictional character. The stories were all about a mediocre teenage girl who was stubborn and had attitude so instead of taking the route of those stories in which she gains 5-13 different powers, I made that all the questions would turn the player into a NPC in the interesting new world they were transported to instead of being a key player.

The game was made to mimic that style, but instead of having those happy endings or the instant suicide or cutting your wrists endings, I wanted to make the player always feel like they’re in limbo and thus never getting an end state that’s satisfactory or even considered an end state, but in respect to the medium I continuously gave the player commentary on their choices for some sort feedback even if it’s negative feedback.

The movement that I took inspiration from was the New York Dada movement because they had a focus on wit and humor using some sort of irony. However my main take away from the New York Dada movement was the movement’s criticism of forms of art by making fun of it with mimicry. Next are the works that I used to take inspiration from for my writing. The two that I used were Etant donnes and Fresh Widow by Marcel DuChamp. I used Etant donnes because Duchamp made a magical world over an impossible spanish wood door to point out war and the rise of fascism, but the viewer can only see it through a crack or peephole in the door and I used the idea of making a magical world, but only to block it off and have the players not do anything  to create a frustration in my players. Next was Fresh Widow, which was a play on French Window and was a way to point out war and the romantic idea of soldiers going to war and their wives waiting for them. The inspiration that I took from the piece was to remove the romantic idea of escapism from these quizzes and the idea that there is a happy ending in the end of all the effort of answering questions.

Documentation

For my playtests, I’d ask them if they had been on Quizilla when it was still active, Or if their only experience were with Buzzfeed quizzes as it would give me some insight if the participant knew the type of humor and style of the ‘choose your own adventure’ disguised as a quiz with the appropriated general style of 2006-08.

The first person who played my game didn’t use Quizilla, but was familiar with the style of humor that I was trying to emulate and during the playtest.

Observations: There were a fair amount of eyerolls and mutters of ‘why?” Some chuckles mainly at the beginning.

Feedback: It changes too quickly from being nice to being cruel and dismissive. I (the playtester) wasn’t into the emo scene or depression scene back in the day so I guess maybe try to make it more surprising by making the first 3 questions nice and then attack the player at the drink questions

The second player is someone I’ve known for more than 10 years. They did go on Quizilla when they were in elementary school.

Observations: A bit of staring back and forth between the screen and my face. A fair amount of skepticism in the beginning then an elongated ‘oh’ when the person figured out what I was trying to appropriate.

Feedback: Called me a loser in a loving way and then called me a sell-out. The person actually asked me “Why didn’t the player commit suicide as one of the endings?”. At first I took the feedback as a joke, but then I started actually thinking about it.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this feedback because back when this style of humor was popular, it was commonplace for an abrupt end or all of the ends in the game be that the character is brutally killed or commits suicide. I wouldn’t be comfortable writing these scenarios now. However if I had to completely mimic the style in the game, I would have added it in, but since times are different and thankfully evolved past depression memes, I kept with the humor and style of the game just with minor edits.

For my game featuring appropriation I chose to make a dress up game utilizing images from famous feminist artworks. While I chose the majority of my images based on the work’s expression of the artist’s own self-expression and relation to gender. overall I am very happy with the chosen works, especially with how harshly they contradict the traditional dress up game with the common inclusion of nudity or blood.

Initially I started with a physical version, scaling all of the source images to be comparably to scale, and had my classmates cut and clue parts of the images to create their own feminist artist. I was surprised with how well this activity turned out, with the flexibility of the physical medium offering unique combinations like different arms or feet that I hadn’t thought of for the digital version. I also love how the final products include the background of the various images, setting the characters in a scene. Initially I was conflicted on whether or not I should choose to cut the pieces out before hand, but found the physical act of cutting and gluing the collage to be powerful.

For the digital version of the game I chose to use unity, and make a relatively simple character creation in which you could customize the head, torso, and legs of your character. While I love the immediacy of seeing the different combinations, in the future I hope to continue adding to the game to polish it, eventually adding a submit screen that would show the original works behind the parts you chose and a brief explanation of each work and its artist respectively.

Overall I took a lot of inspiration from a number of different Dada artists and their appropriation. Hannah Höch was particularly inspirational. I loved the aesthetic of Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany in addition to The Beautiful Girl being an amazing feminist collage. Max Ernst’s Sacred Conversations, Man Ray’s Coat Stand, George Grosz and John Heartfield’s The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild, and Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2 all served as great examples of the abstraction of the female form using collage and assembly, in addition to the question of the objectification of the female form. Overall while the combination of the individual works is up to the participant, I hope the resource of works provided allow for some kind of education or curiosity about the artists behind them and all the work that they have created.

3-10 players
10 – 40 minutes

Play Rules:

• Have everyone start at a completely random Wikipedia article. This can be done through this link
• Choose a category in Wikipedia’s list of unusual articles
• Have everyone choose an article within the category. This a your goal page. This is the page you want to move towards. This is to be kept secret.
• Whoever got to the random page gets to be the first leader
• Everyone else chooses a link they want to go through and offers it to the leader
• The leader chooses a link from those offered by the other players
• Everyone goes through the chosen link and whoever offered the link becomes the new leader

How to Win:

• If you come to a page that links to your goal page, you win!

Optionally Tabletop-RPGesque Elements (for fun and profit):

Begin the game by having each player choose a person and place. (They must have a Wikipedia page) They will role play as that person and be from that place. The players should use this role as a way of backing up their link decisions. (Example: As Barbra Streisand from the isle of Jersey I think it would be smart if everyone else learned about my role in the film Funny Girl.)

Documentation:

So far 3 playtests have been run of this game. Here is the link history for the three of them:

The first play test didn’t use the category rule, so it took a bit longer. On the last playtest we ran out of time so we just saw who could get to their page first.

Here’s the document I used to design the game

Artist Statement:

The initial conception of this game came from a normal visit to Wikipedia. Knowing I had to make an appropriation game (and in some bout of desperation) I established Wikipedia as the medium of choice. A few games have used Wikipedia, the most famous being the almost poetic Wiki Game. That has simple rules: Start on page A, go to page B using links fastest. I adore the wiki game both as a concept and as an actual experience. Any game that uses the internet as its play space like the Wiki Game or GeoGuesser continues to inspire me. It’s from the basic concept of the Wiki Game that this game was appropriated from.

So that’s where the “materials” come from. The conceptual basis of the game is the Exquisite Corpse. The wiki game is an individual race; it can be done alone with no inherit difference in experience. I wanted to make that experience collaborative. Having everyone follow the same links that the group decides to go through changes the dynamics  of moving from A to B in Wikipedia. The mechanic of having every link decision decided by two people is another example of adding collaboration into the game. The effect of this is that the group creates a path instead of an individual. The path through links on Wikipedia might have less artistic merit then a drawing or poem that the Exquisite Corpse used but it’s a creation none the less.

The path that is created playing this game is something of a collaborative montage. Not in the sense of film but in the broader definition that the Berlin Dadaist worked in. A path is a collection of disparate ideas that miraculously have defined connection to each-other by the inherent fact that they are found within a path. The individual articles are just stepping stones to the next one, bereft of meaning beyond a name and a link. That same feeling is remarkably close to Hannah Hoch’s photo-montages that take letters and headlines from newspapers without regard for the totality of the articles. Cut with the kitchen knife is the first piece that came to mind when I though of the game’s product in this way. 3D montages like Grosz’s and Heartfield’s Elektro-mechan or much of the work of Raoul Hausmann is also conceptual similar.

Finally, this work is simple enough to be considered a score. I would be lying if I said that had an effect on the creation of the original game, but when I was simplifying the rules for quicker games the rules became more and more like a score. The game has shocking similarities with Ono’s Map Piece, something about the openness and use of preexisting mediums used in unintended ways lends itself to similarities with Ono’s and Fluxus as a whole… although it was not consciously made.

My game consisted of an analog version of The Oregon Trail, made on a Game of Life board, with Life pieces and money. I wanted to recreate a famous digital game as a board game; the fact that Oregon Trail was originally a text-based game was also interesting, as a board game seemed like an evolutionary step, between text and computer game, that didn’t exist. As I researched and read articles from the designer who helped make the text game a computer game, I realized how complicated the mechanics were behind the scenes, and I tried to simply them while also making the elements of chance visible.

This is part of my appropriated Game of Life board (in horrible phone-photo quality):

The rules are here.

Iterations:

I playtested first in class. This helped to work out some kinks, such as the options for moving, the too-small food denominations, and the ease of replenishing food through the minigame. (Since my dartboard had not yet come in, we played paper football, which was too easy, especially since you could Hunt and Move each turn.) Also, no party members died, which does not accurately reflect the Oregon Trail game, so I decided to make it more difficult. The guest teacher suggested that there be automatic death from dysentery, which I thought was a good idea so I changed those sickness tiles to death tiles.

I playtested the new game with my friends once my dart board arrived. It worked a lot better, but was still very slow, which led to the fact that you can move twice if you have 2+ oxen. This also fixed a problem we ran into where a player got stuck since they had to keep hunting for food and then immediately paying that food to the bank, leaving no room for them to move forward since they had nothing to trade. I also noticed that there was a lot of leftover money, so I changed the starting money to what it was originally.  I also removed the requirement to stop at every fort, because it became redundant and equalized where people were too much. This was a good playtest because they were constantly trying to push boundaries, asking if they could resurrect or eat their dead members, or eat the oxen, which forced me to make more explicit rules.

Statement:

This game came about by thinking of what to appropriate. Originally I wanted to make a game about appropriation, but decided that using actual appropriation would be better-suited to a smaller project. I decided on Oregon Trail because it’s iconic as a computer game, and also because I had recently played it and wondered at how and why things happened, and saw its potential as  group game because my roomie and I were playing separately at the same time and updating each other on our progress. I chose the Life board because it fit well with the cars and people, and the new version with pets was perfect for the oxen. I ended up painting over most of the board and covering all the spaces with my Oregon Trail text copied from the 1971 game (the text was shortened to fit and I changed “Indian” from the game to “Native American”). Since the hunting minigame was an important part of bringing the game from text to computer, I wanted that to be skill-based, and decided appropriating darts would work well.

The idea of taking something and using it against its purpose was an aspect of Dada and Fluxus, and I was especially thinking of Duchamp’s readymade Bicycle Wheel, which in combining two objects made them useless. In this case, the Game of Life board was no longer playable as that game, but as a new one (Oregon Trail) that was in a different format than it was created in. The collaborative way my friends and I added and subtracted rules mid-game also seemed to speak to the collaborative, sometimes spontaneous entertainment performed in the Cabaret Voltaire.

Original Version

In the original version of Shot-Pong-Chip, players take turns placing chips in the shot glasses. When they make a row of 3 continuous chips, they get one point. When they make a row of 4, they get two points. Each point gave the player access to one pong ball which they could use to block off shot glasses without having to “take a drink” (metaphorically, not literally). When the player “takes eight drinks,” they “black out” and must stop playing. The player with the most points wins.

New Version

The new version increased the power of the pong balls to inspire players to remember they do not have to drink every turn and to add more tactical choices to the game. Each player starts with 3 pong balls, and gains one extra one if they gain a point. This ball, if chosen to be used, is taken from a cup in front of the player, which gives them access to the ball but also opens up another shot glass to use on the board. As it plays similarly to a large tic-tac-toe, more chances to actually lock off board spaces allows interesting strategies.

Meaning

I wanted to create something that purposely played with known game mechanics and some game pieces. Similar to Yoko Ono’s piece White Chess, I wanted to have people feel familiar enough with the mechanics, and in some cases the pieces, but used in a different context than they were used to. The game is designed in a way that creates stalemates and/or so that players that choose not to drink much usually lose. This fits into the theme of the game which comments on America’s binge-drinking culture and how nobody truly “wins” in this culture. Because of this, the items of disposable shot glasses, beer pong balls, and poker chips are used in order to drive home the point of collegiate drinking patterns which usually leave people sick, miserable, or in dangerous situations. I purposely chose objects that are used commonly in “drinking games” in order to make a game about drinking, but not one in which the player is recommended to drink. I was somewhat inspired by the idea of “readymades” by using easily obtainable items that were already in form to be used, all they needed was to be put together in the correct context for this game. This also draws from different appropriative Flux-kits which commonly used approrpiated objects in order to present a sometimes game-like artpiece all in one box.

The Game of Love 

Rules:

In The Game of Love, you use the spring at the  bottom to attempt to launch a small puck into the three scoring spaces.  The player is able to manipulate the spring in anyway that they deem necessary, as long as it is attached to at least one of the anchoring nails. The  top space is harder to score in, and therefore worth more points.

Appropriations

However, there is no way to track points or to win in a conventional sense. This is partly because of what the game is appropriating. The style of the artifact is based on the old plastic handheld toys like Rings and Pocket Pachinko. These games had self imposed win states and play times, as there were no clear counters to determine points or score. It also takes elements of pinball. The idea is to make something very tactile and playful, where even playing with it feels good. This is to be juxtaposed against the content and building materials of the artifact.  The main board are two detached shelves, and the obstacles are made from old cardboard, dead batteries, electrical bits and bobs, and cheap craft supplies, finally covered in bright pink duct tape and paper cutouts of generic symbols and images of love and romance. It is designed to look kitsch and horrible as a whole and on the exterior, while also having a clearly fumbled together look.

Meaning

The juxtaposition between the kitsch love and romance aesthetic, the disheveled appearance and construction, and the very gamey tactility all come together to represent the worst parts of love in our culture. Society’s idea of love is commercial, it is skin deep, and it is seen in a lot of ways as a game. People and relationships are objectified into raw materials, where game-like tactics and materialism become the background to how achieving love is conveyed. To gamify love in any fashion is to be disingenuous and cynical towards the complexity of relationships and people as a whole.  And in this game, there is ultimately no winning. There is no reward, there are no systems tracking progress or skill. The game acts merely as an instrument for the players amusement, which captures the most cynical and deplorable outlooks on love and human intimacy.

Inspiration:

This piece is heavily inspired by the appropriation pieces in Gallery 360. A lot of them focused on a kind of playfulness that I think is enhanced by the idea of appropriation. There was one piece that was even a game in its own right. I also really liked the Dada appropriation idea of taking a useful object and rendering it useless. In my case, I had many of the artifacts that made up the structural elements of my piece be items that are involved in repair or electronics, such as a spare spring for machinery, batteries, and wire connectors. This also lends metaphorical meaning into the piece. The thing that inspired this piece the most is the Dada idea of anti-art, where one would make something so unpretentious and unappealing that it would subvert expectations in a strange and interesting way.

Original Prototype: 

This version was built with constraints of having to be attached to a table, meaning that the only way to play the game was horizontal. This takes out the gravity mechanic that not only makes the game more satisfying to play, but also properly alludes to the material the artifact is appropriating. Play-tests indicated that the difficulty was not properly balanced, and the nature of limitations made it almost impossible to score, which erases how misleadingly satisfying the final artifact is meant to be to play with it.