Experimental Game Design

Appropriation

Take Your F**king Meds

by | Oct 25, 2022 | ,

the original inspiration for this was a day when I was feeling kind of awful and when I sat down to try and figure out why I realized it was I had missed my meds not only that morning but also for the past two days! I got so angry that I picked up one of my pill bottles and threw it at the wall it bounced and rattled and hit my bed, It was an utterly unhelpful action. but throwing the bottle was rather satisfying. This may have been similar to the feeling the New York dada mush have had in their obsession with capturing motion. the soundness of the New York dada feels so satisfying because there are objects that are not art but by their combination and designation, they become art that is supposed to be played with. The kinetic sculptures are so interesting to me because if nobody touches them then it is not kinetic anymore. whether I was the sound or watching the bottle bounce I dont know but it made sense. It was very kinetically satisfying how the pill bottle bounced. In the spirit of experimentation, I threw it again, less satisfying due to the fact that the cap popped off and my medication went all over my bed (not my finest moment) however that did give me the idea to launch the cap at the bottle like a slingshot. this was not successful. On a table perhaps?  it was like bowling. in all this time I still hadn’t taken my meds. so I paused, took my various medications, and tried to figure out how to gamify this.

the rules are simple;

take your medications every day, on time until none remain in the bottle.

at your leisure separate the cap from the bottle and set the bottle up at the end of the table

place the cap in the launcher and attempt to knock over your empty pill bottle (preferably into a recycling bin).

 

 

Artwork #2: Musical Card Game

by | Oct 19, 2021 | ,

Instructions for this game (each player will go one at a time) :

  1. Shuffle your hand of 13 cards
  2. Draw the first three cards from the top to form a chord
    • If card is between 1-Q, the card’s note must be played in this chord
    • If the card is a King, you may select any note you would like to add to the chord
    • If the card is an Ace, you may replace the drawn chord with any chord you would like
      • Drawing an Ace immediately negates previously or future drawn cards for this chord
  3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 three times until you have your chord “progression”
  4. The player now has two minutes to create anything with the progression they have drawn
  5. All players will come together at the end of these two minutes to perform their composition to one another
  6. The players then decide on a winner

This musical game was greatly inspired by Takako Saito and her modifications to the game of chess. Pieces like her “Sound Chess” game got me to think about how I could manipulate traditional games into something that stimulates the senses. Similarly to that piece, I thought it would be a great challenge to incorporate something musical to a traditional game of cards. After having difficulty pairing instrumentation to an already existing game of cards, I decided it would be best to create a new one. I came up with this idea after sitting at my keyboard for a while and being stumped on where to start in terms of making a song. It then came to me that I could make a game where the deck of cards started the song for me. With this new random way of putting chords together, it is much easier to overcome writer’s block in a fun way.

Roommate playing this game:

Classmates playing this game:

Artwork #2 & Appropriation Game – Erik Ojo

by | Nov 2, 2018 |

I initially began my game with the premise of translating fanfiction, a popular and often created transformative work, into a visual novel. My idea was to take a popular franchise, mix it with a popular fanfiction trope to create an entirely new world, and create a VN from that.

I wanted to create a VN with a choice of three different tropes:

  • a coffee shop AU (an extremely popular alternate universe trope putting characters in the setting of a coffee shop/cafe, as either workers or customers)
  • a historical AU (putting characters in another time period, such as Ancient Greece or Rome, Victorian era, the 1920s, etc)
  • a science fiction AU (putting characters in a science fiction storyline – usually when the original story is not science fiction, or at least not the specific type of science fiction the fanfiction is set in)

The franchise that I chose to transform was the X-Men franchise, as I’m extremely familiar with it and it’s fanbase, and it’s a relatively well known property.

I planned to begin to write the VN in a Google document, and then transfer it to Twine, and if I had time, code it into Ren’py.

The first pitfall I came across was creating interesting stories for each of these worlds that work properly as VNs. In a way, I am attempting to write fanfiction – something that takes a good while to properly formulate and write out, just like any kind of fiction. I had trouble coming up with proper stories as the inspiration wasn’t quite there, and I was working off the idea of tropes rather than first having a core theme, and centering the trope around that theme. Writing it became more involved than I could realistically handle in the time I had, and I felt that it was becoming more about creating a world than about the concept of appropriation.

(Which in a way fanfiction is? I guess it’s logical that fanfiction itself is less about the concept of appropriation than the act of appropriation?)

The second pitfall, was that I was having a hard time making my game into a game rather than a story you click. I want to engage the players through choices that matter, but reflecting on it, fanfiction isn’t really about power of onlookers, it’s about the author’s power to do whatever they like with the characters they’ve chosen.

(I had a conversation with our guest about choices and how some developers put them there for no reason except for them to be there, and give them no real power in the game. She also mentioned how it’s not always necessary to give players a choice, and told me about VN-esque games that don’t, which made me rethink my game quite a lot.)

I decided I needed to scale down my game, and decided to create an analog game instead. I focused instead on giving players the power to change characters and stories in the same way fanfiction gives writers power.

I decided to use the Marvel Cinematic Universe instead of X-Men, because just about everyone knows it and it has enough high-profile characters for non-repetitive play.

It is a 4 player game.

The basis of the game is

  1. randomly picking a character from a deck of characters
  2. selecting 10 characteristic cards
    1. picking 5 of these characteristics to assign their character
  3. combining these transformed characters with the other players to create one big fanfiction synopsis
    1. synopsis is helped along by drawing 4 random plot cards

For example:

  1. Picks Steve Rogers from a Marvel deck
  2. Characteristics chosen from cards:
    1. works as a security guard
    2. has clinical depression
    3. does ballet on the side
    4. is secretly a vampire
    5. upset about the fact that he peaked in high school
  3. Players pick one plot-themed character action or character development for their character
    1. “your character has some tough lessons to learn”
  4. [depressed security guard vampire Steve Rogers, hipster fashion blogger Bruce Banner, nursing home volunteer social media influencer Natasha Romanoff, and anxiety ridden weed dealer closet furry Tony Stark]
  5. Players pick four cards (one of each kind of plot card) that create a framework for the fanfic
    1. story begins on a yacht (story begins… card)
    2. it’s a story about greed (story is about… card)
    3. a 30-year old murder case is resurrected (plot/inciting incident card)
    4. mostly takes place in the heart of a big city (setting card)
  6. and the players take it from there.
    1. (excerpt of a synopsis example: one of the senior citizens Natasha has taken care of is Nick Fury and everyone thinks Steve is the one who killed all those people because he’s an vampire with murderous impulses and was in the wrong place at the wrong time but it was actually Tony Stark’s (dead) dad and Nick Fury working in cahoots)

This is inspired in part by crack/crack-esque fanfiction

“Crackfic” is a term for a story which takes a ridiculous premise as its starting point, such as casting all the canon characters as My Little Ponies. It may or may not deal with this premise in a serious way. (Fanlore)

which is usually of questionable quality and very random, but can also be the basis of extremely interesting works with a lot of depth. There is a lot of fanfiction with generally weird premises that is like War and Peace in some fandoms.

It is also inspired in part by collaboratively written fanfic. Fanfiction writers (and fan artists) often team up to write and set up events to facilitate this as well (see: Big Bangs, holiday fic exchanges, etc)

And it is inspired also, by Cards Against Humanity. The random matching and player engagement bits.

Thoughts after playtesting:

  • Players keeping character roles concealed from other players could improve play and more surprising for other characters
  • Reducing the amount of cards on the table at once could help stop the game from becoming too complicated/confusing
  • Adding an “ending” card would help reduce gameplay difficulty/increase game cohesiveness
  • Less plot cards could help reduce the gameplay difficulty

Arthur Ganson Video Links

by | Feb 3, 2015 |

Arthur Ganson’s machines are on special display at the MIT Museum in Cambridge (in their “Gestural Engineering” exhibit). He hand-makes the machine aspects of these kinetic sculptures (even the gears are hand-made with welded wire), and they’re fascinating to watch in motion. Brilliant pieces of engineering as art.

Below are a few of my favorites that utilize found objects and create whimsical scenarios with common materials. There are many more, and I highly recommend going to see them at the museum in person.

Machine with Wishbone

Machine with Oil

Machine with Roller Chain