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Artwork #4 : Overwhelming

Inspiration: My own personal experience since starting college. I wanted the player to feel an overwhelming amount overwhelming while playing the game through tasks. 

Jason Rohrer’s “Passage” helped me create the idea of trying to invoke a feeling/ experience from the audience.

Title: Overwhelming

This is a 1 v 1 style game.

Setup:

One timer set to 5 minutes

Each player recieves 8 task cards (each card should be different)

16 task cards

Task Cards:

  1. 2 Math cards (complete 3 math problems)
  2. 2 connect the dots cards
  3. 2 draft emails to your professor (prompt is different on both cards)
  4. 2 Send 3 messages
  5. 2 Choose cards (about exercising)
  6. 2 Check your emails
  7. 2 Write a to-do list (1 card is about a to-do list for today while another is for tomorrow)
  8. 2 Write down what you plan to eat later

Additionally each player is given a math worksheet and connect the dots pages.

Math worksheets were found here: https://www.crk12.org/cms/lib/DE01903180/Centricity/domain/529/unit%20one/order%20of%20operations/Common%20Core%20Sheets.pdf

Connect the dots pages were found here: http://cms5.revize.com/revize/franklinlifelong/Solutions/Solutions%2020-21/At%20Home%20Activities/Activities%20through%204-14/Extreme%20Dot%20to%20Dots%201.pdf 

Gameplay:

Once the timer has started, each player is recommended 30 seconds per task in order to go through as many tasks as possible. Every minute an event card spawns in which players must stop what they are doing to try and complete that task. Once the event card is finished, players may resume trying to complete their tasks. Each event card is different and the players are responsible for keeping track of the time. In addition, event cards that require you complete a seperate task (Registration and Billing) gives the player that completes them an extra completed task. The player with the most completed tasks by the end of the 5 minutes wins the game.

Event Cards:

  1. Re-do a task you just finished
  2. Registration has opened (look for 4 classes from different subjects) (Both players may win)
  3. Billing statement (pay $250) (Only one player can win)
  4. Time for a snack (take a 30 second break)
  5. You got an extension (you have 30 seconds to finish a task you didn’t complete before)

Items for event:

On the left, there is bills that add up to $410. So that way only one player can win.

On the right, there are papers with various classes written in them. Each class is different and also some are full which means you can’t enroll in that class and have to find another.

Artist Statement:

As you can probably tell by title, the theme of this game is being overwhelmed and stressed. I wanted to create an art game that simulates being a college student is a still fun kind of game. When I first started making this game, I had 3 things in mind: how am I going to overwhelm the players, what kind of game should this be (1 person, 1 v 1, 1 v all, etc), and how do I make it also fun in a sick twisted way. After reflecting on myself and my experience, I settled on a 1 v 1 style game because I constantly try to compare/compete with other people even subconsciously. Having the players compete against each other helps increase the stakes, and stress the players even more. In terms of gameplay, I knew having a timer would be a central element in stressing players out because time stresses everyone out especially when you don’t have enough of it, forcing players to complete tasks, keep track of event cards, and time manage everything. My game is an art game that allows the player to experience stress and being overwhelmed. I got this idea from “Passage” by Jason Rohrer. In the “Works of Game ” by Sharp the way he explained the game really pulled at my heartstrings,basically being the passage of time and how we all die in the end convinced me to try the same thing in my game. An art game is supposed to be an immersive experience that portrays what you want the players to feel. I hope I was able to accomplish that in my game. 

 

Fun-Sized Party TRPG

The link of the intial game lies here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Yp_ar11r5YD4KgCzbWW-UJo9-Me2pTxPWS2h1F9NL3A/edit

I tried my best to ritualize the procedure of the game in an Onoesque way that simplifies everything to the extent that the game is almost unbearably simple, and provided very straightforward and malleable insturctions for each and every step, as an Ono piece would radiate that sort of energy.

The procedure of playing this game extended into crazy and unrestricted interpersonal gameplay, which was my designated plan. That sort of freedom of interpretation took away some constraints of a traditional TRPG and made a fun experience that is easily understood and replayed. I did hope that the extensive usage of the d6 would also bolster that accessibilty and create a party game that would help people enjoy instead of feel constraint in almost any sense. I tried and the rhytm of the game was highly malleable, which also resonates with how simplicity was the central theme of Ono’s works.

Despite liking the sense of this artwork, I find that I would need to be better with people to have the best fun in this game.

Artwork #2: Monopoly: Aftermath

Monopoly: Aftermath

Game Mechanics:

  • Free Parking -> Parking Tax $150
  • Income Tax -> Increase pay to $400
  • Luxury Tax -> Increase pay to $200
  • Go To Jail -> Go To Just Visiting
  • All “pay” cards are doubled (chance/community)
  • Going to jail card takes you to Just Visitng instead

Fun Fact:

  1. The total cost to buy and upgrade everything to max is $14,850
  2. The total amount of money per Monopoly game is $20,580

Game Setup:

Do math: 20,580 – 14,850 = 5,730

  1. 2-players -> 2,865 per player
  2. 3-players -> 1,910 per player
  3. 4-players -> 1,432 per player
  4. 5-players -> 1,146 per player

Rules:

  • Regular Monopoly Rules except…
  • Everything is always fully graded and bought
  • Last player standing wins

Other ways to play:

Players agree on how much money they wanna start with and try to outlast each other.

Pretend all the properties have hotels...

Time to not go broke

 

Artist Statement:

When thinking of a game to create, I had my eyes set on Monopoly. The first concept of the game was called “The Landlord’s Game” created by Elizabeth Maggie. Her intention was to expose how property owners profit from impoverishing renters. I wanted to use that idea but modernize it, creating a game where you can “win” but come to the realization that you will never truly beat the game. In  Monopoly: Aftermath, you start the game with all the properties already being bought and fully upgraded (hence the “aftermath” in the title). You are given some money to go around the board and try to be the last man standing. I decided to also change some of the spaces and rules. All the tax spaces are doubled in cost, Free Parking now charges you, all chance and community chest cards that say pay are now doubled, and you can no longer go to jail(the idea is that you are not worth the police’s time since you are too poor to be significant). While I also wanted to edit the cards, I unfortunately had no time to do so.  My reason for these changes is to highlight the state of our economic system where people aren’t able to buy property,  cost of living has increased unlike our paychecks, and it’s only a matter of time before everything seemingly leads to you becoming bankrupt. After going through my two playtests, players loved the satirical aspect of how realistic. In the readings there was anti-war art, specifically in the Berlin chapter with John Heartfield and George Grosz who created art to not only express their feelings about the war but to also convey the detrimental effects of it. I wanted to create an anti-property owner game like Maggie did. I also had players suggest themes for this concept in actual places like Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, etc. But why not let someone else come up with that idea? In the spirit of DADA, I would love it if someone would appropriate my game and/or come up with a different interpretation with my game as inspiration.

Dinner Piece

Dinner Piece

Find a good afternoon
Walk to your favorite grocery market
Ask someone for their favorite course
Thank them for sharing
Get ingredients for that course
Hum and walk home
Appropriate that course in your favorite way
Enjoy it in the way you like

This score was designed to give the player a chance to have some simple time and just enjoy oneself. It does nothing difficult or aloof, which is something I want to erase from my artworks. It could be beautiful while serving a “purpose” that could aid a daily procedure. But again, I took my inspiration from Yoko Ono, and her artwork specialized in giving brief and elegant experiences. I didn’t aim to go as brief but there also was an element of trust that I took from her works, a bit of interaction with the world. It’s very important to feel not alone and content, I hope that this score could do something to help my audience understand this.

Score: Go Fish ?

Documentation:

  • Looked around my room for an idea
  • Saw deck of cards on my desk
  • Thought about what game to play with those cards
  • Then thought , “What if you can’t see your cards”
  • Immediately go fish came to mind

 

Go fish?

 

Get a standard deck of cards

Shuffle deck of cards

Give each player 5 cards

*They can not look at their cards

Instead pick up your cards and have them face your opponent 

The youngest goes first

Take a card from your opponent 

You can either ask if you have a card or 

You can ask if you have a pair in your hand

 

Notes:

After testing the game, we realized how you can easily get a pair but not even know it. 

Let’s say you steal an opponent’s card to make a pair, but they also have a pair of that card in their hand. What do you do? 

How far does your integrity go?

Making roommate play my game.

 

Artists Statement:

My goal from the beginning was to create a game that was simple yet had an interesting twist on an already existing playable game. I was inspired by all of the chess scores and some of the readings. I was especially inspired by Essential Questions of Life Chapter 3, when they showed artwork of objects that already existed but made it useless. I really liked the concept of re-inventing an existing idea but with an interesting spin. That’s when I looked at my deck of cards and thought “How can I introduce an interesting twist to a well known card game?” One of the first games that I thought of was Go Fish because it is a very simple game to play, and it is very important to know what cards you have to get the sets that you need. White chess was a big inspiration to me because it took a very well known game and added one simple change that completely altered the way the game was played.. Everything was white. Similarly, I wanted to change Go Fish. That’s when I had the idea; What if you were not able to see your own cards? I have to admit I thought that it was going to be impossible or extremely difficult to play, but my roommate and I were able to have fun playing the game. Although Go Fish? is a relatively straightforward game, there is still room for interpretation between players. Players are able to decide how they want to play the game and can even add their own rules or playstyles if they want. In creating Go Fish? My goal was to create a game that was both enjoyable and easy to learn and play. I really hope that my game was able to accomplish those goals, and will allow people to see more games in new ways, and create ways to change the game by adding or changing the fundamental rules.

Links

Game Controls

Use the mouse to move

Click to use items

Artist Statement

This game was inspired by RPG games from the early 2000s. Another major source of inspiration was White Chess by Yoko Ono. Once again taking the concept of who is considered heroes and villains and exploring how approaching these concepts from a different point of view will affect gameplay, the player’s experience, and the overall end goal of the game.

The player is spawned in Zelda Village and presented with the challenge of finding all the runes to save their family. During this journey, the player will run into several characters who are not described as friends or foes. It is completely up to the player’s discretion who they determine to be viable or allies or enemies. Although there is a set goal, which is to find all the Runes. This goal can be achieved through multiple routes and it is all up to the player. This relates to how relationships in real life work, and making certain characters in the game allies will affect your chances of developing bonds with others. In the end who you associate has its consequences. For example allying with a certain character can cause another character to be hostile towards you. In this sense not only is the player faced with how each character presents themselves when making a decision but also how this decision will also affect their relationship with other characters. In such a situation the player can either choose to stick with their judgement of the character solely based on their actions and what they said, or be swayed by the opinions of others about the character. This is similar to the way these situations pan out in the real world.

Although this is the current state of the game, I would hope to be able to expand it from a simple RPG to an MMORPG. Which would then have players interacting with not only NPCs but other players as well. This would still maintain the element of choosing which people to ally with or battle. To expand on this concept, there can even be “beef” between guilds, which would then mean that simply joining a guild could either create a whole set of new allies or enemies, and even in this situation players can decide whether or not they want to  align themselves with their guild in terms of the people that they associate themselves with or not.

Map

Score:

  1. Draw circles (which start and end at the same point) on a paper
  2. Don’t touch the lines
  3. Start imaging a world with shapes and add icons (modifiable)

Artistic Statement:

The idea was inspired by the process to create game art in Pearce’s “Game as Art”, which was to make the viewers enroll in the game. However, I think about it reversely: what if a player becomes an art viewer? Paper and pen are common tools used by the player to document the process of the game. The recorded information represents the whole adventure of a player. I recalled the memory with my friends when I saw the notes of the game. From then on, I realized that I viewed the notes from a player to a viewer aspect.

I usually search about how programmers achieve the visual effect with only code and basic assets. The logic sometimes is really simple, but nobody has this idea before. It is fun to see how the code runs violently, but everything looks fine on the screen. A map in a game is important but sophisticated to generate. Different developers use many kinds of methods. However, an interesting fact is that most video games with a generated world would like to generate the landscape first, then other content. The whole process is run by the computer with the rules, but I think it can be interesting if I figure out a way to generate a map physically.

In programming logic, everything related to graphs is about points and lines. So, a map is the result of patterned points and lines that seem like a “map” defined by people. Then, the problem is obvious, what kind of patterns make people think the graph is a map? From my research, contour lines are widely used in professional maps. Then, I find the common traits that all lines are circles and they don’t touch each other. With the lines, it is easy to imagine the world and stories. Finally, adding icons on the map for hints. This part can be modified with other rules.

The playtested result shows more than I expected. Different numbers of players can affect the process of the stories (players make their own storylines, and sometimes interact with others). I modified the third part of the score with guidance to help players imagine the contents of the world. The more players to playtest, the less guidance they need.

1 player / lots of guidance

2 players / no guidance

3 players / little guidance

 

 

Jackson Faletra Intervention: Post-Game Interview

Initial Ideas

For my project, I had decided that I wanted to something within a game whose community I considered myself a part of. Unfortunately, I don’t play a ton of online multiplayer games, which limited my options to pretty much just Hearthstone. The other problem with this decision was that Hearthstone does not have a built in chat feature to communicate with your random opponents, you can only chat in-game with people on your friends list. There is a feature that allows you to send a friend request to your most recent opponent, but most people who use that do it to trash talk or harass their opponent after a frustrating game. Thinking about that possible roadblock gave me the idea of creating a scenario with that expected/implied interaction, and flipping it on its head to see what would happen. From there, the Post-Game Interview was born.

The Process

The idea was to add my opponent after a game and, if they accepted, I’d ask a small series of questions about our game: “how long have you been playing today?”, “how much did you enjoy our game?”, and “did you feel we ere evenly matched?”. I wanted to be able to discuss our game in a calm, civilized manner, completely counter to what usually happens in this situation. I felt that this premise was simple enough to be able to do many times, but still be able to create a meaningful interaction. It’s a good thing it was so easy to repeat, because, unsurprisingly, not many of my opponents were willing to participate. Of the 20 or so games I played during this stretch, only 5 of my opponents actually accepted my friend request so that I could actually conduct an interview. The low participation was an interesting, albeit expected, point of data, but I was luckily still able to find out some pretty interesting things from the other data I collected.

Results

Firstly, I was only added back by opponents who had beaten me. This was a bit surprising, as I would’ve guessed that most players would expect a losing opponent to send a friend request with hostile intentions, but these 5 seemed to either not expect that to be my intention, or just not care. Another interesting thing I noticed about these opponents had to do with the in-game emotes. I, and many others who play Hearthstone, usually like to give a friendly Greetings to our opponent at the start of a game, but not all players do this. However, all 5 of my interviewees had returned my Greetings which I found interesting. Finally, from the interview questions themselves, most of these players had only been playing 1 or 2 games so far in this session, and they all ranked pretty highly in their enjoyment of our game and felt we were at least somewhat evenly matched. Overall, I would call this Intervention a success. It was fairly difficult to get participants due to the nature of my idea, but I feel that the people who did participate were given a nice experience in a usually hostile situation, which was really my whole goal. On top of all that, I was also able to collect some interesting data about a game I really enjoy, which was a nice added bonus.

 

One of my interviews

Aaron Cai’s Intervention Project – Squid Game in CS:GO

For my intervention project, I decided to intervene in the game of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO). The game the way it’s normally played is as follows: players face off against each other in two teams of five, fighting with guns and grenades over objectives. I wanted to turn that convention around by constructing games within the game that mirror the games in the popular Netflix show, Squid Game. Squid Game is a Korean drama about people in enormous debt being recruited to play children’s games for eccentric billionaires’ spectacle with the prize being the equivalent of millions of US dollars and the penalty of losing being death. It is an interesting critique on the failures of capitalism. There are three games I appropriated from Squid Game: Red Light Green Light, Marbles, and Squid Game.

Red light Green Light was played in the show with a giant automaton turning its head towards and away from the players while singing a song that translates to red light green light. When it says green light and the head is turned away, the players are free to move. When it says red light and the head is facing the players, players are not allowed to move. The ones who are caught moving are shot. The players have to reach a line near the automaton, which is some distance away from the starting location, within a time limit. Those who do not make it within that time limit are also shot. For my project, I took on the role of the automaton and would turn away from and turn towards the player while saying red light green light correspondingly. The players started with their backs against a wall and their goal was to reach the wall where I was standing. During the testing, I messed up a bunch of times, saying the wrong thing, like green light when I was facing the players or red light when I was facing away. Thankfully, the testing gave me enough practice that I was able to execute my part without a mistake during the actual thing.

Marbles was played in the show by pairing up the players and giving them ten marbles each. They were told to play whatever game they wanted, but one person had to end up with twenty marbles at the end of a certain time limit. The one without any marbles was shot. One pair in the show did this by betting all ten marbles on one game, they threw a marble at a wall, and whoever got it closest to the wall was the winner. For my project I had the players throw decoy grenades at a wall, and whoever got it closest was the winner. The decoy grenade was a good choice because it stayed around on the ground for a while, unlike the other grenades, so we could see where each one landed clearly. I did not have enough players to have them pair up (there were only three left at this stage) so I had them all do it together as a group. The player with the worst throw was shot.

Squid Game was played in the show on a pattern on the ground shaped vaguely like a squid. One player was the defender and one was the attacker. The attacker had to try to get to the head of the squid, and they would win if they were to do so. The defender has to prevent that from happening and try to get the attacker to step outside the squid. If the attacker stepped outside the squid, they would lose and the defender would win. The two contestants were also given knives and it basically devolved into a knife fight to the death. For my project, I had originally wanted to draw the squid on the ground with bullet holes, but the pattern proved too elaborate for the game system, which would erase bullet holes after a certain number of other bullet holes has been created. I would draw it partially and the first couple of bullet holes would start disappearing. So I figured just a knife fight to the death with no boundary restrictions was close enough to the show.

We played my version of Squid Game in Counter-Strike with four players. One player was eliminated from each game, resulting in a winner being determined by the end. Unfortunately, I had an issue with my recording software and my voice was not captured in the videos.

Video clips from the testing: https://youtu.be/pUd11SJNtK0

Video clips from the final iteration: https://youtu.be/_C9at8Deamk

Nickerson’s Score: Release

Imagine a creation, it does not have to be much, but it must be yours…

Now set to work

Build the spawn of your imagination piece by piece

Little by little witness the result of your focus come to life

Finish

Bask in the work’s glory

Realize that it is temporary

And destroy it

When finished, destroy this Score…”

This idea is stemmed from mainly 2 things. I wanted a score that was in itself, enjoyable to complete. It’s an experimental game design class after all, and games are meant to be fun. I wanted the first 5 steps of the score to make the participant connect to their creation. The final part of the score, is inspired by the Matchbook score meant to destroy art. Just burning any old art is one thing, but destroying your own art is a whole different thing. Now, the score here took the form of a goofy Picture + Video, but that’s just because that was the limit of my skillset. I’d find it more interesting if a person was to spend an even longer time on a piece, maybe music, maybe animation. I would love to see someone fall in love with their work, and then brush it aside like it was nothing. Almost like the sand mandalas that Buddhist monks make:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBrYUlOYK0U&ab_channel=WellcomeCollection