Artwork #4: Experience

Artwork #4: Getting By

Artist Statement:
The game originally started from my experience this semester. Being my first semester away from home, and also just really struggling with my own problems mentally, it was a very challenging semester for me. It was hard to get the work I needed to do, and it was hard to find the motivation and energy to do what I needed to do. I

I was then inspired by the idea of affordances that showed up in the book World of Game. I wanted to have a mechanic that you knew intuitively was supposed to be about moving forwards, but the mechanics of the game made it so that you didn’t want to. I decided to go with a dice roll. In most board games, you use a dice roll to decide how far forward you go, and you’re constantly waiting for your next turn to roll the die. I wanted my game to mess with that perception and make it so that you constantly dread having to roll the die.

The final game ended up being played on a calendar. You could play it on a screen and just keep track of the days, or just play it on a normal calendar. The month does not matter but playing on months with fewer days is easier than playing on ones with more. There are also 4 “stats” that you have on your character. You have happiness, motivation, stress, and energy. You start off with 5 happiness, 5 motivation, 0 stress, 5 energy. Each stat can range from 10 to -10. You can take actions that will allow your happiness, motivation, energy to exceed 10 (the number will remain at 10), but you cannot take actions that will allow them to go lower than -10. The opposite is true for stress (can go below -10 but not above 10).

Every turn your roll a six-sided die and you move forward a number of days equal to the roll, and you get an event depending on your roll. The event is divided into these ranks:

  • rank 0 (roll of 1)
    • rank 0 is a special rank where it is meant to simulate a break. It has no options but just gives you an overall boost to the rest of your stats.
  • rank 1 (roll of 2 or 3)
  • rank 2 (roll of 4 or 5)
  • rank 3 (roll of 6)

You then have three options for each of these events. Options 1 and 2 have a motivation requirement, meaning that you cannot do that action unless you have high enough motivation. Option 1 is the best option, which has a heavy energy cost but has positive effects on the rest of your stats. Option 2 is a gamble that has a smaller motivation requirement, where you have a certain percent chance (based on the rank) of success. If you succeed, you get a slightly negative consequence to your actions. Failure, however, has a more substantial negative effect. The third option is almost completely negative, but it is the only option that gives you extra energy other than rolling a 1. Unlike the other two, the third option does not have a motivation requirement, so if your motivation is too low you will have to choose this one.

There is a mechanic I call “fake motivation” that’s also implemented. Basically, you can sacrifice 1 energy or 2 happiness to get one point of fake motivation. This point of fake motivation does not change your current motivation numbers, but you can use it to use an action that you normally wouldn’t be able to do because your motivation was too low. For example, if you had 6 motivation but wanted to use an action that requires 7, you could use 1 energy to let you use the action. However, if you were to lose motivation because of the option you took, you would subtract the number from 6, not 7.

You win the game if you were able to finish the month, and you lose if you are unable to use any actions without one of your stats going below -10 (or above 10 for stress). The game is very hard to win, and even if you do win you often end up with many values in the negatives. The game is designed so that you value motivation and energy over your happiness and stress levels.

The game succeeded in what it was trying to do. Most players struggled to finish the map, often losing before the final stages. Even those who ended, often ended with many negative values. The best result I saw was the following:

Motivation: 1
Happiness: 0
Stress: 3
Energy: -7

 

Scenario link: https://northeastern-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/elsayed_s_northeastern_edu/EZZIohBIl0dJoyXRiSypb1EBs4tyD6bSSw6IjJ56sot-3w?e=CkD5QR

Jackson Faletra Artwork #4: Good Luck, Have Fun

How to Play:

Each day, the player must perform a certain number of activities to fill their day with. There are 5 different activities to choose from:

Sleep – wait for 30 second timer

Eat – roll 2 dice until you get certain numbers

Exercise – spin a wheel to determine a random exercise to do

School – answer 10 simple math questions

Fun – play a round of Snake

Normally, players can do 4 of these activities per day. At the start of each day, the player rolls a d20. If they roll a 20 on a weekday, or an 18, 19, or 20, on a weekend, they can choose an extra activity on that day. If you choose not to Sleep, Eat, or Exercise on a given day, your Health will go down by 5. If you don’t do your Schoolwork, your grade will go down by one letter, resulting in a Game Over if you reach an F. If you choose to have Fun, your score will increase. The goal of the game is to make it to the end of the month while keeping your Health and Grades as high as possible.

Artist’s Statement

The goal of the game was to simulate the feeling of having to budget your time when you already don’t feel you have enough of it to do everything you want. The “twist ending” (for lack of a better term) of the game would be that the highest health possible you could achieve was 100, so your score didn’t really mean anything and if you ever sacrificed your Health or Grades for Fun, you lose. The only time when the player is supposed to be able to choose Fun and still win is when they roll high on the d20 at the start of their day, which simulated having extra free-time on that day. This game overall was meant to symbolize the experiences I and many other people (in particular college students) have had in which we have all of these things that need to get done in order to maintain a healthy and productive lifestyle, but the sheer volume can be overwhelming sometimes and when we choose to take some time and relax, the relief is only short term and is overall detrimental to achieving that “productive lifestyle”.

The biggest inspiration for this game was probably my own score for project 1 (even sharing its name), which involved slacking off on certain obligations and responsibilities in order to have “fun”, which in turn becomes an unhealthy cycle that is very much not fun. That piece was inspired by Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece and other similar works that involved something dangerous or actively detrimental to the one performing it. Another inspiration for my game was Brenda Romero’s Train, in the sense that you are working towards a goal throughout the game, but once it’s over, the true nature of what you’ve been doing is revealed, and you now should have a different view of what your actions have caused after seeing them in this new light. One final inspiration for my game could be Dadaism as a whole and the general nonsensical aspect of it. Many of the actions you actually take in my game are meant to symbolize activities that are really not that similar to them but still somewhat make sense, such as rolling dice to symbolize finishing a meal, or just watching a timer for 30 seconds to simulate sleep. It may have even been more subconsciously, but I think the abstract nature of the Dada movement may have played a role in how I landed on these ideas for how I would convey the feeling of the activities I chose.

Below are some photos of my game being played, as well as a Google Slides link where you can play it yourself

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1e25mprRlcHr-KDi4malghUmZz5g13p2J8x4Fi1S9WOA/edit?usp=sharing

Final Project

Antarctic Survival: https://yuren1027gmailcom.itch.io/antarctic

Controls: A and D to move left and right respectively. Left Shift to slide to gain speed, and Space to jump.

Game Genre: 2D platformer

 

Artist Statement:

My project is a 2D platformer named Antarctic Survival, where the player navigates a parent penguin and its offspring through a series of obstacles. The game was loosely inspired by documentaries I’ve watched regarding penguin survival, and the idea was conceived upon skiing. The levels are designed around testaments to parenthood, where the player can choose to opt to give up the baby penguin and the game is relatively easy. Certain levels require the player to put the parent in potential danger to secure the baby. Even when the two penguins are parted, the player needs to pay attention to the baby to avoid obstacles. As I am unexperienced with game programming and unity, much of the game is unfurnished in the sense of resets and winning. The game comments on the harsh natural environment and the cruelty of survival, as well as the difficulties of parenthood. As I’ve mentioned, I’m not proficient with unity, and I decided to put in more work into the level design to explore the topics I set out to incorporate and comment on in my game. While I personally have not been a parent, I’ve grown up as an offspring to wonderful parents that I know would do anything for me, and I am forever grateful for their love. I tried to tie the affordances of my game to conscience decisions players have to make as the parent penguin.

 

Nickerson’s final project

For my final project, I ended up making a YouTube video that can be seen below:

When I first imagined making this project, I thought back to a looooong time ago, back when youtube had a little feature called annotations. And Certain creators would use annotations to add little comments or links mid video to direct viewers. While the feature had long been nixed, I knew that there must have been some way to do it using youtube’s endcard feature. So I decided to make a little choose your own adventure type game within the boundaries of YouTube. As for the material in class that inspired me, the idea of affordances in “Works of game” Came to mind, where the idea only having semi restrictive tools to work with, forced the developer to get creative.

Henry’s Project 4: Express — Cooperate and Competition

Project4: Express – Google Docs

I’m so excited that I put the idea that I had before I came into college into this game!

When the first time I started to play cooperation game, I enjoyed it. I really loved how people did the teamwork and finally won. Even until now, the cooperation game I play is like purely cooperation. For example, Human Fall Flat and Minecraft. In these games, people can assign works for each other and survive in an easy way. However, when I start to read the novels and movies, I know that we can’t easily understand what the other people think in the end of the world. I see so many people betray their friends even families for a chance to be alive. They even kill the others to make sure that they have enough food. That’s the real cooperation situation under the end of the world.

Thus, I create my game like this. The background is in the end of the world that people live in the shelters. The 4 players are the refugees going from the original shelters to the next. They are a team, however, they get the informed that only 1 survivor who finally arrives at then next shelter will be accepted. If there are more than one survivor, the one who has got most money will be accepted. They need 10 days to go to the next shelter. They will meet dangers or treasures in the day and do somethings secretly at night — find food, money or assassinate (1 damage to any player). It’s a game of cooperation and competition.

In the first version of my game, it was a little bit mess. Assassinate didn’t have got CD and they have enough food so that everyone was just trying to kill each other. The robbers they met at day only take 1 money from them which was not excited. However, the treasure works well. There are two kinds of treasures — money and food. There’s a box named “4” or “5”. The 4 players should decide the sequence by themselves, and they could take any quantity they want from the box. It made the conflict in the team! It was a tragic that one played got assassinated in three nights by all teammates. That’s why I added the CD for assassinate.

In the second version, I changed something. “Robbers” need every player to pay 4 golds in total. However, every player secretly chooses how much money they want to pay. If there’s not enough money, every player loses 1 health! It works very nice! Additionally, since the CD of assassinate, no one tries to kill the target only by assassinate. Here’s some pictures from the second play test. I record what happened every day.

After the second play test, I had a new thought immediately! The idea is from Yoko Ono’s work “Cut Piece”. Ono sit on the stage with her best suit. There are scissors in front of her and the audiences were asked to use it and cut the suit into piece. I do the same thing. When the game ends, I add a new step. Firstly, if the final player doesn’t arrive the next shelter, all other three players sit together to see if the final player can survive by him/herself in the next days. Then, I take all records of the game (like the 4 pictures up there) one by one and read them aloud about what everyone did every night. It’s like I’m using the scissors to remove the disguise on their face. I’m also interesting to see what will happen when they see the true face of the other players.

 

Xuanshuo (Stone) Zhang – Cyclic

Pieces: 4 circle with the numbers 1, 4, 2, 8, 5, 7 printed on them in a clockwise sequence, cards (regular playing cards), 4 sets of labels (numbers 1-6 each in a cutout of the 4 suits in cards)

Players: 4

Mechanics: Only Ace, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8 cards are used in this game. All cards played or swapped will be face down so no one can see the card. Shuffle the cards, then deal 6 to each player. Each player needs to put their labels down in front of them in order. They can play 1 card each turn in any position in their own spots, or swap two cards in any positions (their own cards as well). They are not allowed to look at the card before a swap, but they can look at it once the swap is complete. If the player is swapping with another player, both players can look at the cards, but only after the swap. To win, the player needs to have a combination of any of the cyclic numbers in their slots (142857, 285714, 428571, 571428, 714285, 857142), which would be presented to them in the circle. Once a player thinks they have the winning combination, they can flip their cards over to show everyone. If they do, they win. If they don’t, the player can flip their cards back, but they would be at a massive disadvantage.

I’ve always felt I have a certain vicinity with numbers. Finding patterns in things, especially number related, has always been very intriguing to me, perhaps one of the reasons I like puzzles so much. There are a lot of numbers that demonstrate very cool patterns, and we see them all the time, but we do not really use or care about the patterns. One of these patterns is cyclic numbers, particularly 1/7. It is the only cyclic number in decimal, and we use it decently frequently because 7 is not an uncommon number. 1/7 = 0.142857 repeat, and these exact digits are repeating in all its whole number multiples, except the starting digit of the sequence is different. I’ve been talking to some old friends and new friends recently about their recent experiences, and I keep observing a same sort of pattern in their experiences as well. We came to a conclusion of sort that some things will keep changing, but as long as a core part of things stay the same, some elements will also stay the same. During quarantine and the spread of COVID, most of us have to stay in at different times, and we are all dealing with different issues that contact with each other just slowly fades away. Some of my old friends that are in college choose to study abroad or go on a mission with their church, and their communications would be even more limited. Some of my friends who are not yet in college but will be very soon fears that they might lose their old friends. But all in all, if we all try to remain in contact with each other, and our feelings are neutral, we can always be friends and support each other in our own ways. I think some of the game pieces that we learned about earlier in the semester could definitely convert similar feelings into a mechanics that can express such a feeling of everything changing but nothing changing as well. The scores we learned about, especially some of the Yuki Ono pieces that use extremely simple mechanics, and white chess, a game where it is extremely difficult to play because of the change of mechanics came to mind. I also wanted to feature things people have access to fairly easily in their lives in the mechanics, because this feeling is not something rare, but rather something that just comes up once in a while when I am alone or talking to someone I am close to. Therefore I chose to use cards, and their suits to represent the players. I really enjoy the suits of the cards because they are easily accessible, and trying to create a combination of the number with different suits and different colors can make the player feel the change more than just all cards in the same color. I wanted randomness in the game as well because I think a certain degree of randomness is very fun, and life is filled with surprises. In the end I think the game ended up at a good place, and the playtests went pretty well, and players even came up with different play styles.

Aaron Cai’s Express Project

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.

Artwork 4- Final: Dislecsic

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.

 

The Project to End all Projects

“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.

Artwork #4: Experience

No Pain No Gain Rules Document

Each game starts with two up to many players and each player starts with 3 gainz and 3 life. 

In the start of the game, each player grabs one of the deck of cards in the middle along with three gainz and three life.

Each deck will include three gym cards: Chest Day, Back Day, Leg Day, three socializing cards: Gathering,  Bar, Party, and one Rest Day card

After every player gets their starting cards, discard the extra decks of cards in the middle.

The game starts and rotates through Monday, Wednesday, and Friday where players can make their choices either to socialize or to work out or take a rest(can only take one rest day per week). After making their decision, players flip the card of their choice and put it under the weekday in the middle. After every player makes their choices, reveal the cards and collect rewards. 

Here’s the layout of one week:

  • Monday: 

Hit Chest Day: collect 2 gainz

or

Go to a gathering: collect 1 life

or

Rest day: do not collect anything

Every week on monday there will be an event where the players can choose whether to skip. If the player is doing the event simply put a chip next to their card and roll the dice after revealing their cards.

Monday event(can be skipped): roll a four and above trigger success, roll a three below to trigger fail.

If you are doing chest day, hit bench without a spotter

Success:+2 gainz  fail:-2 gainz

Or, 

If you are going to a gathering, participate in a Poker game

Success:+2 life  fail:-2 life

 

  • Wednesday

Hit Back Day: collect 1 gainz 

or

Go to a Bar: collect 2 life

or

Rest day: do not collect anything

 

  • Friday

Hit Leg Day: collect 2 gainz

or 

Go to a party: collect 2 life

or

Rest day: do not collect anything

 

By the end of each week, if a player has hit all three body parts, he/she collects 4 extra gainz but loses 3 life. On the other hand, if a player went to all three socializing events, he/she collected 4 extra lives and lost 3 gainz.

 

By the end of each two weeks, if the player has not taken any rest days, they will collect a mental illness card(which does not have a direct effect in the game). 

 

End of each Month (every four weeks):

The player has to compare life and gainz with his neighbors if his/her neighbor has more gainz lose 5 gainz to his/her neighbor, if his/her neighbor has more life, lose 5 life to his/her neighbor

 

Win condition:

During the game if any of the players have negative life/gainz, he/she gets eliminated, and the game ends as the remaining players count their total number of life and gainz, whoever has the most wins the game.

If none of the players gets eliminated, the game goes on till the end of a semester(3 month/12 weeks), and whichever player has the most life and gainz wins the game.

 

Artist Statement

For my final project, I decided to use my own experience as a college student and the way I see my peers spending their free time as an inspiration. Although college life grants the students a lot of freedom over their free time, it can be stressful when a student decides to never take a rest day and spend all their time doing activities. During the playtests of my game, I observed that most players will always go for activities(working out and socializing) which is the optimal way of playing the game even when they receive a mental illness card every two weeks. Just like in real life many people neglect the importance of taking a break, instead they would let their mental burden accumulate inside to live their life in an “optimal” strategy. Similar to Yoko Ono’s Blood piece: “Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint. Keep painting until you die.” Some people would live their lives with little breaks, and they spend most of their free time socializing and doing activities until they are mentally and physically exhausted.