Artwork #4: Experience

Required Materials:
-Paper
-Money

Set-Up:
1. Tear paper up into rectangles. The number of rectangles should be at least double the number of players.
2. On half of the rectangles, write the words “success” or “failure.” Fold these rectangles in half so that the word inside is not visible.
3. On the remaining half of the rectangles, write either gun, knife, or nothing. The number of each type of weapon is up to the group playing, but it is recommended to not have more than one gun and knife. Fold these rectangles in half so the word inside is not visible. Mark the outside of the rectangles in some way to designate that they are weapon cards.

Playing the Game:
1. To begin, have all players draw from the success/failure rectangles. This determines how their job in the robbery was performed. A “success” means there were no issues, and a “failure” means that they failed to adequately perform part of their job. Nonetheless, the robbery was pulled off successfully, and there are no extenuating circumstances as a result of their success or failure. Players are allowed to discuss their success or failure, and they do not need to show their card to corroborate their claim to success or failure.
2. Players are then introduced to the money. The amount of money and where it came from are not significant. If players choose, they can have one player empty the contents of their wallet, they can pool the money they have with them, or do anything they want to obtain the money for this game. The money is then placed in the center of the table.
3. Players now draw weapon cards. The gun card allows a player to shoot someone at the table, eliminating them from the game. The knife card allows a player to stab the person sitting next to them, eliminating them from the game. To attack with a weapon, all a player has to do is say “I shoot/stab [player name].” After the card has been introduced and every player is aware of the weapon, attacks with that weapon must succeed on a coin flip. When the coin is flipped, the player calls heads or tails. If the player is correct, the attack succeeds and the targeted player is eliminated. If the player is wrong then the attack fails and the weapon is taken by the first player who call for it. For example, Player A has a gun. He tells everyone at the table that he has the gun. Now, every attack with the gun must succeed on a coin flip. If Player A fails a coin flip Player B says “I take the gun,” then Player B has the gun and all of their attacks are also subject to the coin flip. Had Player A not disclosed that he had a gun, then his first attack with the gun would have automatically succeeded, but every subsequent attack would have been subject to the coin flip. If a player with a weapon is eliminated, then any player but the one who eliminated them may call for their weapon. If the weapon card has nothing on it, then that player has no weapon. If a player is shot or stabbed, they are eliminated from the game and cannot engage in negotiations.
4. Once weapon cards are distributed, players now negotiate for money. The player with the most amount of money at the end of negotiations gets to keep his money, while the rest is redistributed back to where it came from. Negotiations end when all non-eliminated players are in agreement that the negotiations should end.

Artist Statement:
My major initial inspiration for this game came from a realization I had relating to guns in games. When players are given a gun, they are given agency over a situation. In most games with guns, nearly all problems can be solved by shooting the gun, and using the gun tends to be the best, if not only, way to resolve a conflict. Therefore, I wanted to create a game that focused on this core aspect to weapons in games by placing it in a semi-realistic environment. My first major inspiration was Mechanic is the Message by Brenda Romero, as that set of games is almost always an inspiration for me. Making players think about what game mechanics are trying to get them to do is what I find to be most interesting about game design, and the goal of this game was to get players to think about what having the gun did to their position in the negotiation. My second major inspiration was 16 Tons by Eric Zimmerman. After my first iteration of the project ended in peaceful negotiation with no mention of the gun, I wanted to find a way to make players more driven to win. The way 16 Tons made players pay other players to move their pieces with one player being able to consolidate power and win by making the most money made me realize that having real money in play was the best way for me to get players invested in trying to win. While the initial version of the game used quarters, I had requested for my money back at the end of the game. In my second iteration onwards, I continued to use the same quarters, but allowed the player who had the most quarters to keep them while the rest was up to me. This resulted in the violence and power imbalance that I had intended. However, the weapon was not used as a bargaining piece like I had anticipated. Instead, the weapon was used as a means of countering perceived threats. If one player suspected another of being armed, then they would attack, but they would not attack without that fear. When only one player had a gun in the first iteration, I believe that the lack of another threat in part discouraged the player from attacking, which led to the introduction of the knife.

My express/experience project is about how reaching out for help when you’re struggling with mental illness can be difficult. Often times, one can forget that it is even an option. To help players experience this, I’ve created what is essentially a score that asks players to sort playing cards from their hand into piles in front of them. The secret is that they can collaborate and help each other, but card game conventions makes them assume otherwise. The game always (in the two times I’ve playtested it) results in players reaching a point where they cannot progress forward but still have cards left in their hands. They would then ask about what to do from there. Eventually, they would ask a question along the lines of “can we trade cards?” or “can we collaborate?” This sparks an “a-ha” moment that results in the players quickly winning the game by working together.

A large part of the inspiration for this project actually comes from a critique I received regarding a different game I was designing. I was told that the other game was too much like “multiplayer solitaire.” It was meant to be a bad thing but I thought it could be turned into something more. I felt like a “multiplayer solitaire game” would be similar to how some people struggle through life alone, avoiding seeking the help of others, even though many would be willing to give it.

Another contribution to this project was the scores Fluxus artists have made. The way scores were very open to individual interpretation made me realize that I could essentially trick the player into thinking that there is a rule where there is none with my wording.

Since the rules and its phrasing are such a large part of what makes this project work, I will include the rules I read aloud to players during the playtest and during the final iteration:

Playtest:

This game is played with 2 – 4 players sitting in a circle. Use a deck of cards with the jokers removed. Start with seven cards in your hand. Allocate three spaces in front of you to place cards. The first cards placed in these three spaces can be any card. Subsequent cards have to be one rank different from the card previously placed (ie. 9 or Jack can be played onto a 10). Ace cannot be placed on a King and vice versa. Aces can be played onto a 2 and vice versa. You can pick up as many cards as you wish to reorganize. You can only draw cards if the number of cards in your hand is below seven. Your goal is to place as many cards down as you can. 

Final Iteration:

This game is played with 2 – 4 players sitting in a circle. Use a deck of cards with the jokers removed. Shuffle the cards thoroughly and distribute cards to each player so that each player has seven cards. Allocate three spaces in front of each player to place cards face up. The first cards placed in these three spaces can be any card. Subsequent cards have to be one rank different from the card previously placed (ie. 9 or Jack can be played onto a 10). Ace cannot be placed on a King and vice versa. Aces can be played onto a 2 and vice versa. You can pick up as many cards from the three stacks as you wish to reorganize. You can only draw new cards from the deck if the number of cards in your hand is below seven. You win when you place all your cards. You do not lose if someone else wins. There are no other rules.

I made some changes due to the questions that people asked during the playtest. I tried to reword it so that it answered any potential questions people had other than the essential “can we work together?” question.

I asked one of the playtesters what he thought the game was about. He said it was about helping others. I would call this a success in terms of conveying my intended message. Even though he didn’t mention the part about how it can be difficult to ask for help, I think the experience of the game made him understood that without me or him saying it.

My final game is a text based adventure game written in a way to emulate the struggles someone with dyslexia has. You play a silence protagonist who also struggles with Dyslexia and goes on an epic adventure to distract themselves for the bullies that often torment them, along the way you explore an abandoned school, fight monstrous beasts, and meet a great mentor.

Artist Statement:

My game was mainly inspired by my own struggles with Dyslexia and having to overcome the difficulties that come along with this learning disability. I wanted the player to understand what it’s like for someone with dyslexia to read even simple sentences or words, as it is hard to describe the struggle to people. Using a text based adventure game seemed fitting to me as it is much like a book but more interactive, fun and engages the player in the story and world. Another big inspiration for this piece was Yoko Ono, a lot of her works took some ordinary object and would changed, and use it in a way that was out of the ordinary. I tried to do that in my game by take words and misspelling them in ways where the letters would still produce the same sounds and hopefully confuse the player, as it is very reminiscent of being dyslexic in my experience. I also took inspiration from games like Grimrock and old text based adventure games; exploring a dungeon, fight enemies and getting lost is what made those games enjoyable to play and I tried to recreate that experience in my game as well by the way I layed out the map and how the play moves around. I also think my game explores the idea of affordances; words are meant to efficiently express information yet in my game they do the exact opposite. Most of the words are misspelled which only makes it more difficult to understand the story and what is happening, and this is also very true for people with dyslexia as word are more of an obstacle for them. I really enjoyed making this game; I hope you have a good time playing it and learn part of the small struggle that people with dyslexia go through.

Dislecsic

Video:

How to play:

You do need to have Java 11 downloaded on your computer in order for the game to run.

If it asks for an account when installing Java 11 you can use :

Username: uocrlowbtsksjqavyo@nthrw.com

Password: 123!Test

1. First download the file above to your computer
2. Next double click on the zip file
3. Then open the folder that was created when you double clicked on the zip file
4. After that right click in the .jar file named Dislecsic.jar and click run
5. It should run the program it might also prompt you ask if you want to run it click yes.
6. If you have any issues, encounter any bug or experience any difficulty please email me at pignataro.s@northeastern.edu.

“A big butcher’s bill was not necessarily evidence of good tactics.” – General Archibald Wavell in a telegram to Winston Churchill

A few months ago, the World War 1 game Beyond the Wire had a free weekend on Steam, and me and a couple of my friends wanted to try it out. When we got in game, we noticed that we were playing as soldiers of the German Empire in the year 1918. We proceeded to get absolutely destroyed by American and French forces and had no idea what we were doing. It was awesome. It truly captured the experience of being conscripted into the German Army in 1918.

While I originally intended to portray a fantasy version of the German Empire when I pitched this, I gradually became more interested in American involvement in the war the more I looked into WWI and what I wanted to do. The Battle of Belleau Wood stood out to me in particular, as it is viewed as the battle that gave the U.S. Marine Corps the fierce reputation they have today, and this was accomplished by charging into German machine gun fire through wheat fields and forests 6 times, the first 5 times just resulting in piles of dead marines. It was an interesting experience listening to the Sabaton song Devil Dogs, which focuses on the heroic bravery and ferocity of the marines which even at one point belts out the famous quote “Come on you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” while reading about how the marines were yet again slaughtered by machine gun fire after attempting another charge. It’s interesting to contrast the heroic and glorious nature of the song Devil Dogs with the other song on their album about WWI such as Great War and Fields of Verdun which portray the war as cruel and pointless.

I thought about how one of my friends once told me about how in challenging dungeons in older edition of D&D players would bring stacks of character sheets anticipating that they would often end up ripped in half at the DM’s feet. I felt that this would be a good mechanic to base my entire revised game around. I made and printed out mass amounts of simple character sheets that had a minimal amount of fluff attached to it to suggest players could try to put some element of humanity into the characters they are playing but ultimately it wouldn’t matter. I also brought some minis and a rudimentary map consisting of a grid players would try to charge through that would gradually fill up with the dead bodies (knocked over minis) of their previous character.

The rules were simple You needed to cross through 6 squares in order to charge the German position. On your turn, role a d20. If it is above a 10, move forward one square. If it is 10 or below, knock your mini over as it has died there, I rip your character sheet, then take a new character sheet and put a new mini on your starting square. This version of the game worked exactly as I wanted it to. Despite the simplicity of the objective, no one made it to the end of board. All there was to show for their efforts was a pile of ripped character sheets and a battlefield of dead minis.

Something I wanted to add to my game but couldn’t find a way to incorporate smoothly was the findings of the Nye Committee. In my opinion viewing American involvement in the war as simply pointless obfuscates the more horrific reason that additional lives were shipped across the world to suffocate in mustard gas. While Germany resuming the use of unrestricted submarine warfare was used as propaganda to mobilize the American population the Nye Committee uncovered a far more probable cause to explain American involvement. Before America officially entered the war, it had leant the Entente 2.3 billion dollars and the Central Powers only 27 million. It was therefore in the interest of American banks and finance, who had an enormous impact on U.S. formal policy as the committee also uncovered, to ensure that the Entente wasn’t the side burning a hyper inflated worthless currency after the war ended, not to mention the activities and influence of the arms industry who also stood to make massive profits if America was to officially enter the war. While I felt that this would be a good complement to the mass death I portrayed in my game, I couldn’t think of a way to seamlessly integrate this in a way that didn’t dilute what I wanted my game to express.

Ultimately, I drew a lot of inspiration from the Surrealist and Dada movements portrayal of World War I as pointless and cruel, and while one could portray a more modern version of that through contemporary wars such as Iraq, Afghanistan, or even Vietnam, I decided to keep the focus on WWI, not just because of my personal fascination with it, but because of its massive scale in which an almost unlimited amount of stories could be told, including the development of American imperialist ambitions and foreign policy that would shape its involvement in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq,

Attached are documentation of a character sheet from my first iteration of the game that was focused on a fantasy German Empire, a character sheet for my second and final iteration as well as a pile of them ripped up, a map full of dead minis, and a deep fried image of a painting of the Battle of Belleau Wood that summarizes everything I’ve tried to do here, as well as a google drive link where higher resolution version of these images can be found.