critical making

DISSERTATION: A general kind of exhaustion, but also hope

autoethnography, critical making, curious games, dissertation, playtest, Process Writing, reflective games, research

It’s been exactly one month since I last wrote an autoethnographic blog post, and let me tell you, it’s been some month. There’s still plenty ahead too — I’ll be traveling to Europe for Ars Electronica, Hamilton for a BTS Concert (yes, I’m a fan — it’s astounding how many graduate students in game studies are and how many of us de-stress [not relax, but de-stress] watching their flashy music videos), Montreal for QGCon (which I’m co-organizing!), Worcester, MA for Different Games, New York for my nibling’s christening, and home again in Montreal for Maker Faire.

From the end of July into the beginning of August, I continued my yearly tradition of participating in GISH (formerly known as GISHWHES). That finished August 4th, and I’ll eventually post some of the items and videos that I made — one video even featured Harle, Avi and Drake as puppets from the 1950s!

From there, from the 5th onward, began a nightmare move that I still haven’t seen the end of. To make a long story short, I have had to make insurance claims and the movers were very unpleasant. It’s left me with a lot of work in addition to my already-hectic schedule, and it’s pretty stressful. At times, it’s been overwhelming. I’m chipping away at it bit by bit, though, and hopefully things will keep shaping up. There’s still a lot of cleaning, renovating, painting, furniture-buying, furniture-building, and decorating to do.

I have run four playtests of Flip the Script in the past two weeks! It’s a game that takes up a lot of energy, and I’ve decided that in the future, I think that the best that I can do is run it once a day. The game relies heavily on the facilitating role, and the facilitation itself IS heavy.

As you might remember about Flip the Script!, one of the debriefing and de-roling exercises that I do with players is formulating a statement that we’d like to put out ot the world — it can be a statement of hope, advice, just something that the players would like others to know. I try to listen and facilitate this. There were four statements to come out of these playtests. I won’t tell you which statement is in relation to what topic.

“Please be attuned to the subtle signs of our inner experiences and invisible struggles (and thank you for your patience).”

“Each ‘small’ drop in the bucket still eventually fills it and can make it overflow.”

“Be critical of the information you consume; be a good observer, be a good listener, and go deeper than the surface.”

“In recognizing each other’s humanity within rigid systems, there may be potential for unusual alliances and creative solutions.”

Some things that I’ve learned from the playtesting: the microbit and LED technology isn’t pulling its weight as much as it could, although it’s not horribly mismatched, it’s a facilitator-heavy game, I need to help players connect to their puppets by making sure that they interact with them early and often and make things up about them, and I need to carefully shape scenes by regeneralizing any personal anecdotes that people tell, and ensure that the scene is robust enough to support multiple playthroughs. That means carefully setting up the characters and potentialities/story seeds. Also, the way that the game goes and how much is disclosed depends very heavily on who is playing (but I knew that would be the case).

Player reception has been generally positive, and people seem to get something out of the game on an emotional level, even if it’s not a perfect game. I guess it’s okay that it’s not perfect.

What I think I am realizing is that I do need to be careful about how much emotional labour the next project demands of me, because these playtest sessions have been very rewarding, but also quite draining. Given the fact that there are many draining situations in my life at the moment (this nightmare move, everything to do with Tom, just the general stressors of being a grad student with many things to do, plus community organizing and the things that come with it). That means I need to offload more onto the tech and interface and game rules and less onto the facilitator. That’ll hopefully mean that playtesting will be easier, even if initially there’s more work to be done with the tech (which is not necessarily my strongest suit — but it’s always getting stronger!).

With Flip the Script!, I spent a lot of time agonizing over the game idea and getting it to a point where I felt good about it. Then, a lot of my time was spent making the puppets and their interfaces. The rules themselves also took up a good chunk of that time. I’ll have to see where the next project takes me, but I think I need to be able to run the next game even if I’m not feeling at 100%. Maybe that means bringing back a screen. Maybe that means bringing in Raspberry Pi and pre-recorded things. Maybe that means more quick, written rules.

I would like to work more with costumes and theatre, but at the same time, with toys and tiny worlds. I guess I’m thinking of wearables and board games, or even of something like Polly Pocket, or, for a digital reference, Gnog. I want to embed a narrative into the interfaces and have players spend time exploring and discovering that narrative through the interface. I am also feeling inspired by Ida Toft’s Promises project, which I think is vibrant and alive in a very satisfying way, even though it’s quite stripped-down. There’s a suggestion of life within the vibrations in the river rock-like objects that the player engages with.

On another note, playtesting made me feel oddly “on-track” for my dissertation projects. I feel like this project, even if it’s imperfect, is a success. I think it engages with complex ideas that are coming through in the game, that the level of work that I put into it feels appropriate for a six month project, and I feel like I’ve accomplished something. It’s a nice feeling, amidst all this turmoil.

DISSERTATION: RHYTHMS OF WORK & PLAY

autoethnography, critical making, dissertation, playtest, Process Writing

The interesting thing about my dissertation is that I’ve managed to be both ahead and behind my schedule at the same time.

I expected to finish Flip the Script! at the end of August, and to start playtesting in September, but I think that the game is close to reaching its final form now (as I’ve done early playtesting and the concept works, but the design work I’ve done since then is to make better, more interesting use of the technology involved). In this period, I’m also supposed to be writing first drafts of my background and methodology chapters.

As I wrote the last time that I updated you all, I’ve spent a fair bit of time reading (and now rewriting). Last week, I spent roughly 6 or 7 ten-hour days completely rewriting an article, basically from scratch, for publication to include the requested revisions (after all, I read 19+ sources to better inform myself on the field that I am making a foray into). The sources turned out to be very, very helpful and gave me a lot to think about. I think the resulting article is many orders of magnitude better than the original.

So, now, having finished a draft, a fair number of generous people have agreed to read the draft. Since the revisions to the article are due on the 25th, I’ve asked commenters to finish reading for the 21st.

When I finished a draft on Saturday night, I felt drained, and I promised myself that I would take the next day off. Of course, when Sunday came along, having slept, and having already received some feedback, I immediately felt guilty and unable to really relax and take a break. This is an issue with graduate studies, but it’s also an issue with modern work: many of us could literally always be working. It’s exhausting, it’s toxic, and I don’t know exactly how to teach myself not to feel that way. I reasoned to myself that it would make more sense to gather more feedback and address it all at once, rather than rewriting as people were reading and commenting.

At the same time, while waiting for the comments, I find myself with some free/liminal time. I feel the need to keep myself thinking about the article in progress, rather than moving onto the background (lit review) and the methodology chapters. I think it would be difficult to switch modes. That leaves, then, playtesting my game. Although I am only scheduled to playtest it in September, my September is functionally gone: I will be away in Europe attending Ars Electronica and doing a bit of traveling from September 4th-18th, I’ll be in Hamilton around the 20th, I’m giving a guest lecture on the 27th, and QGCon is happening on the 29th and 30th of September. That’s basically all of September, gone — or at least, trying to schedule a playtest at an appropriate time for my game seems ill-advised.

The third factor in all this is what I have to give of myself in exchange for running a playtest, especially one for which I’m collecting Very Important Data for my dissertation. My games often require me to facilitate them — my knowledge, my (eventually acquired) ease with the patter and “game mastering” of a particular game are necessary to the game, especially when it comes to these physical-digital hybrids addressing intersectional issues. When I am at my most resilient, this is not an issue. I’ve spent eight hours at a time getting people to play a game about consent (In Tune), or facilitating play about emotional labour (The Truly Terrific Traveling Troubleshooter).

Was I just younger then (a few months ago)? Or was I just less tired? I think the truth is that there are issues facing my partner (and therefore both of us) that are weighing me down, taking up energy that I would rather give to my art. This affirms my belief that the whole “suffering for art” thing is bullshit — while suffering might give you lived experiences, it’s a lot harder (at least for me) to make creative work when I am exhausted, or unhappy. I can’t really speak much publicly about what is going on, but I know that it is well and truly sapping me.

So, this week, feeling guilty about not working, feeling unable to move onto other writing until I have settled this article, and feeling too exhausted to do the labour of actually planning playtests in the short term, I find myself trying to find better ways of working. I find myself doing the small things that I have put off. I find myself trying to recover and recharge, reminding myself that breaks and relaxation are essential.

Yesterday, for example, I revamped this website, added sections, reworked the games section to be more usable (rather than just a chronological listing of my projects), added more of a history to where I’ve showcased games, what I’m up to, and where I’ll be in the future.

Yesterday, the thought also came to me, inspired by Pippin Barr, to use tinyletter to communicate with people who might want to play my games. The prospect of reaching out repeatedly to mailing lists full of people who may or may not want to hear from me felt exhausting, along with the work of trying to organize playtests, let alone running them when they require my continuous, present, attentive moderation. So, to gather potential playtesters, I made a tinyletter and shared it in my networks. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the numbers so far — people are being very generous with their time (or at least their willingness to be contacted) for playtesting. If you’re local to Montreal (and even if you’re not), you can sign up for it here.

I’m also trying to just listen to my body and let myself rest. So far, since Sunday, the guilt has subsided a fair bit. After all, it is the summer. Once this article is done, I can move onto other academic writing and scheduling playtesters with the people who have signed up for my mailing list.

On another note: I wrote last time about the need to streamline Flip the Script! down from two hours, but I think that I was maybe wrong in that assessment. I know that two hours limits the audience for the game, but since it is inspired by theatre, I think that, in fact, I just need to think of this like a performance that needs to be scheduled rather than something that I can have people play in loud expo halls and arcades. 90 minutes is pretty darn short (or at least, average) for something like, say, a tabletop RPG or board game, for example.

Dissertation: Flip the Script! first full playtest

adventures in gaming, critical making, dissertation, Process Writing, reflective games, research

Since my last post, I’ve been doing a lot of reading in order to revise an article for a journal. I also wrote a draft of the full rules for Flip the Script! The week before last, I got to talk about them with the Reflective Games Group, and run through some of the rules, which led me to rewrite my section on intersectionality. This week, we did a full playtest (which I recorded the audio for).

The playtest went well, on the whole, but I was astounded to find that the run time was two hours, and I will have to find a way to streamline that amount of time in the future. It’s just too long to reasonably expect most festival players to commit to.

The major revisions that I plan to make other than trying to streamline the introductory parts is to try to use the LED interfaces in a different way. Squinky and I had criticized another puppet interface for just being buttons on the puppets’ heads that did things in game, and it’s true that this interface isn’t as embedded into the puppets as I originally envisioned. The truth is that I didn’t want to embed the electronics in places where I couldn’t easily access them, in the end, and so we’ve got this current version where the electronics aren’t even really sewn onto the puppets. And I’ve made my peace with that — it’s a different game than what I thought it would be in terms of its use of technology.

But, at the moment, there was very little reason for players to use the technology, and players rightly suggested that maybe offloading more onto the tech and getting it more involved would do good things for the game. It was also suggested that maybe I could have my own microbit to send signals, especially if the meaning of those signals changed (like perhaps the players could switch roles, or a new character is introduced — maybe I could make each of these into a more formalized rule for each round, sort of like the way that the games change in “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” — I don’t know why that specific reference comes to mind except that it’s the same general concept each time, with specific rules for each individual game/scene. Another interesting idea that came up was what it would be like to play my other nanolarps using puppets instead of having the players play themselves.

It also occurs to me that I wound up using a blackboard to record notes from the session where all the players could see them this time, and that I will want to do that in the future. That means I’ll have to get a carry-on sized whiteboard (possibly at the dollar store, possibly a picture frame with plastic or glass in the frame?) to do so in the future.

The subject that we wound up discussing in this game was the concept of the “good” migrant, explicitly asking “what does it mean to be a ‘good’ migrant?” To contextualize this, we were problematizing the idea of a good migrant while also recognizing that many nationalists and other people have expectations of what good migrants are, even if those expectations might be subconscious. We unpacked those in the context of apartment hunting.

I feel good about the playtesting, though, again, astounded that it took so long.

This is the statement that the players and I jointly came up with for our playthrough to release out into the world:
“Use what privilege you have to act in concrete, actionable solidarity.”

DISSERTATION: Early June Update and Notes on Lying Fallow

adventures in gaming, autoethnography, critical making, Process Writing, reflective games

I figured it was time for a little update from my notes and documentation!

So, since my last update, the project has moved forward considerably!

I also presented my Reflective Games research on a panel which I chaired at CGSA (the Canadian Games Studies Association) and had some great questions about it from other scholars, and had the chance to chair a talk by Kara Stone about Reparative Game Design and Time (in many forms — queer time, crip time, deep time). We got a lot of good questions and feedback, and I felt quite recharged by the conference.

To simplify things a little, beyond preparing for and presenting at CGSA, here are the…

Egh. As I opened the link to github with the intent of sharing my code repository, I found out about the news that github is being acquired by Microsoft, and I’m not too sure how to feel about that.

Well, at any rate, the code lives there for now, so here’s a timeline of the progress since my last blog post, along with some short descriptions and pictures.

TIMELINE
May 20th-21st:

After finishing Harle, my first puppet, I got to work on a puppet that I came to call Avi. The names of the two colours of fleece that I bought from Fabricville were Guacamole and Chai Tea, and reminded me of the colours of the inside of an avocado. So, despite the fact that Avi looks a lot like a turtle, their look is actually avocado-inspired.

I was invited to an impromptu get-together at a friend’s house, and I knew that I would have a lot of hand-sewing to do, based on Harle. So, I machine-sewed everything possible ahead of time, and brought my pins, fabric, stuffing, needle and thread over to this friend’s house. I have found that I can watch, listen and speak while handsewing, and so while we conversed and others played board games, Avi’s body came together. The next day, I added features like Avi’s eyes and other details.

May 23rd-25th:

My friend Gina suggested that my third puppet should be a red dragon, complete with wings. I had been planning to use red fabric so that the puppets are each sort of in correspondence with CMY/RGB colour theory (Avi, while not Cyan, is both green and yellow). Since Drake was my third puppet, I felt confident enough to experiment with the design, particular when it came to character details. I had this vision of fringes and crests, and, measuring against the puppet’s face, I free-handed a pattern on a piece of cardstock, cut it out, and used the same technique that is used to machine-sew the hands of the puppets to sew my fringes.

Yes, Drake is an obvious name for a dragon-inspired puppet, but I was also thinking of my Toronto friends who are huge Drake fans (in particular, the writers, artists and game designers).

May 26th-28th:
I spent the next few days working on Microbits/Neopixel code, and created a Git repository for this (not very reader-friendly but very small in size) code here.

I used the Microbits coding environment and their drag-and-drop code along with the Adafruit Neopixels package/library for the environment. It was astoundingly easy to get things up and running. I ran into a persistent problem using repetitive loops (like the While loop and the loop that allows you to repeat code multiple times) — the code couldn’t be interrupted. That meant that I couldn’t turn the signal off when I wanted to. That felt clunky, so instead, the LEDs animate a few times, and then continue to be their rainbow selves until the other button is pressed and they are turned off (this is something that I just updated yesterday, but didn’t feel like I should separate from this section — it’ll still get its own timeline entry!).

One major change was deciding to use one neopixel instead of two — basically, I didn’t want to have wires hanging around everywhere and the one LED seemed sufficient for the signal.

May 28th:
Following that, I started to design vests to hold the electronics. While I could have embedded them directly onto the puppets, I felt that it would be better not to damage the puppets and also easy to develop an agile, changeable solution if the electronics were on something that the puppets wore instead. The vests are perhaps not the most aesthetic things in the world, but on the whole, I think that they look fine. I only had time to start the basics before having to pack and get ready for CGSA. At first, I thought of using my cat’s harness pattern, but that seemed to take up too much fabric, and anyway, wasn’t based on the same shape as the puppets. This gave me the idea of using the existing puppet pattern as a base. So, using the larger puppet back pattern, I slightly altered the shapes and left room for arm holes.

May 29th – June 2nd: I was at CGSA!

June 3rd-4th:

A whirlwind of staying up too late and sewing tiny vests for puppets! After designing the shape and ensuring that it worked, I had to design a pocket for the batteries (which I talked through with Tom), a way of making the Microbits buttons easier to use no matter a person’s handedness/what hand they chose to put the puppet on, and decide on LED positioning. Tom helped me talk through the pocket decision, which due to the flexible positioning of the microbits (which are attached by velcro and can be repositioned), had to be in a specific orientation. Last night, I finished all three vests and they’re all in working order.

June 4th: After finishing the vests, I tweaked the code, cleaning it up to reflect the single neopixel, turning down the brightness of the LEDs, and making it so that the second button turned the pixels to “black” or “off” instead of to the very-bright white setting.

And that brings us to now.

NOW!

I am ready to draft rules of play for the game, but I have started to do some reading to familiarize myself a little bit with the literature on psychodrama and on sociodrama (which may actually be more what I am aiming for — systems and the experiences of a group rather than necessarily individual experiences).

In terms of narrowing down the themes of the game, I have been thinking a lot about harassment, bullying, and microaggressions. This, I think, is the confluence of a few factors: some of my friends and colleagues have recently told me about harassment which they are experiencing, my own family is facing harassment and bullying, and I just watched Season 2 of Thirteen Reasons Why.

So, I’ll be doing some reading and thinking before I sit down and commit to the rules.

On the Autoethnography side of things, I wanted to note the difficulty of tracing the influences on my thought process. This thought is based partially on this quote from a recent blog post by Pippin Barr about Translation Studies:

“One of the most difficult things about trying to actually talk about design is that it’s so ephemeral much of the time. Even with the best will in the world and the determination to pause and reflect on your design work in the moment as you make decisions, it can be hard to think of how to even frame what you’re doing, and thus hard to get words out. The most important thing in that context is to actually know what you’re trying to make, for which you can refer to design documents, artist statements, or similar. But even then it can be tricky to make the connections between some specific design decision and the high level statement of purpose.”

To really note all the overheard bits of conversation, all of the media that I am consuming (willingly or not, whether it’s the music playing in the grocery store, or an accidental glance at someone else’s phone, or all the myriad things I might scroll past on social media) that might have an influence on my process, and still have this project be manageable in scope is…just not possible.

What I can do, and what I am doing is documenting, writing notes, and recording conversations when I can clearly say that yes, this is part of my design process. I am taking notes about the things that I am deliberately consuming and thinking about as part of this design process. But there is so much going on, and for both ethical and practical reasons, it can’t all go in. So, the data is necessarily incomplete. I guess I have to make peace with that. I already have hours of conversation recorded.

On another note about productivity and scheduling: I was having a conversation with a friend and fellow designer this morning, and we were talking about what I’ll summarize as the concept of “lying fallow” — I’m not sure if others have used this term before… I feel like the answer to that is yes. These thoughts are also definitely influenced by Kara Stone’s CGSA talk, which is forthcoming as a paper, about Reparative Design. Increasingly, I am coming to recognize the importance of the times where a project is active but I am not working on it. This is something I think that I discussed in my writing earlier this year, in January and February, when I was experiencing burnout symptoms.

Now that this idea has had the time to lie fallow, all of a sudden, things are just coming together. It’s a joy to work on it. It’s a joy to talk about it. But it needed that time. And so did I — I think that, like a field that has given all it has to grow the previous seasons’ crops, I needed to rest. I needed to be taking in information and thinking about the project without worrying too much about time. My past development cycles have definitely been about these bursts of activity, followed by refinement.

Having given six months to each game project (eight in the case of the first one, though I’m hoping to not need all of those extra months, in order to be able to build more of a buffer), and knowing that I also have to do things like writing and editing (for my dissertation, for publication) as well as teaching, and y’know, taking care of my physical and emotional needs, I know that my schedule is a lot. It can be difficult to feel okay about lying fallow, but ultimately, the past year has shown me that it is a necessity.

Your faithful autoethnographer,
Doing the best that they can,
Jess

Dissertation: Building Harle the Puppet

critical making, dissertation, Process Writing

Yesterday, after roughly two days’ work, I finished making the first puppet for “Flip the Script”, so I wanted to drop a few notes about what the process was like:

— I thought I would be able to sew everything by machine, but a few different parts required me to whipstitch some fairly intense parts of the fabric — sewing the round faceplate into the puppet’s face, sewing the neck to the body, and sewing the arms on. This made the process take so much longer than I expected, partially because I know how much wear and tear these puppets are going to face (so I may have been a bit overzealous with my reinforcing of the stitches).

— I couldn’t find affordable reticulated/polyurethane foam for the skull and mouthplate of the puppet at first, so I instead used 6mm EVA foam. The resulting skull was quite blocky and firm, and pretty uncomfortable to handle. The mouthplate is very robust, and Harle’s mouth hangs open unless it is being shut by a puppeteer. I eventually found thicker polyurethane foam at Wal-Mart (1″ instead of 1/2″) and I had to trim away at it with my scissors. For the next puppet, I am going to try and saw some polyurethane foam in half with an exacto, and see what comes of it. It will almost definitely be painstaking, but for what I need it for, it may do the trick.

— I bought ping-pong balls to use for eyes, and I compressed them inward in one spot to create an indented spot for the glue to hold and to make sure that the eyeballs would lay flat on the puppet’s head. Unthinking, I applied hot glue to this spot, and to my surprise, it began to expand outward, far beyond the original shape of the ping-pong ball. I could have anticipated this if I had thought about the trapped air inside the ping-pong ball heating up and expanding, but alas, I did not. It was a bit of a mess, but I managed to clean everything up all right.

Throughout this process, which turned out to be a bit slower than originally anticipated, I began to think with the materials — which is exactly what I had been hoping to do originally. It made me realize that I didn’t want to make generic puppets — I wanted to make characters that players could then choose as their assistants in the game. I like the idea of the puppets being actors or helpers to the players, rather than blank slates for them to project upon.

I have also been toying with the idea of having spots of velcro on the puppets where one can add accessories. I’m unsure about that for the moment. I am thinking that perhaps the electronics ought to be housed in vests/clothing on the puppets rather than sewn directly onto them.

Oh, I also found a number of tutorials doing exactly the sort of thing that I want to do with NeoPixels and the micro:bits (by which I mean, using NeoPixel rings with micro:bits).

On to the next puppet!

Your faithful autoethnographer
Jess

Dissertation: Planning my way forward

autoethnography, critical making, dissertation, Process Writing

Since my last update, I have spent a number of hours in design conversations with my spouse and my brother. These conversations helped me to greatly clarify what I should be doing to move forward with the design process for “Flip the Script.”

Talking to my brother in particular helped clarify what the design of the puppets ought to be like, regardless of whatever electronics wind up embedded in them. Basically, these puppets will all follow the “Project Puppet” pinhead pattern, and I will create accessories to make them customizable.

As we speak, I have a large plastic bag full of fleece, ready to be made into puppets, and I’ve got the pattern cut out and prepared. I hope to make the puppets in the next few weeks, before June 13th, when I will be leaving to come back to Montreal for three weeks with my spouse. During those three weeks, I plan to be working on a draft of my background chapter.

In these design conversations with my spouse and brother, I also talked about the rules. This clarified one of the problems I was having regarding interruption, and made me think that the game probably needs a few more steps of mediation to make it run smoothly — for example, letting the storyteller tell their story once all the way through, and then having the group decide on what the key moments that they would like to address in the retelling are.

So, here are my near-future goals for the game:
— Write out the Rules more formally.
— Make at least 3 puppets and some accessories for them
— Attach the NeoPixels to the Microbits and test (https://microbit-micropython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/neopixel.html — I have a different kind of
NeoPixel, but I see no reason why this shouldn’t work)
— Figure out just how much technology/computational assistance is needed for the game beyond this.
— Figure out how the group’s coda/lesson/thoughts will be recorded at the end. Will there be a website? Will there be a twitter account?

More as it happens!

Dissertation: Autoethnography and Anxiety

autoethnography, critical making, dissertation, Process Writing, reflective games, research

It’s been a little over three weeks since my last update, which is because I have been largely focused on reading and writing about larps and nanolarp design from a critical, reflective point of view. I finished a solid first draft of this paper last Thursday, and am letting it sit a bit before I write a talk and make slides based on it for this year’s CGSA conference in Regina. The paper is sitting at around 9500 words…which is a lot more than I intend to keep, so rewriting and editing is a future challenge on the docket.

I’ve been making some progress on my dissertation work since my last post. I have done some experimentation with the micro:bits that I ordered, and found that they do communicate in an easy, friendly way, as advertised.

I built code that displays a simple graphical pattern in LEDs when they receive a transmission from each other. This could be the signal for the “shoulda said” aspect of my first dissertation game. I also ordered a number of new electronic components: three Floras and a number of Neopixel rings that can easily be sewn onto textiles. I also made a sizable Fabricville order of different fleece materials for making puppets. This is reflected in the ads I am being shown on the internet, which have been asking me whether I would like to meet other single seniors in my area.

I have also bought a simple puppet pattern to give me an idea of what will be involved in making a traditional hand puppet. I feel confident in my ability to wing it, but that doesn’t mean that one of these patterns won’t turn out nicely, with a lot less effort on my part.

I’ve received updated ethics approval after submitting amendments regarding group playtesting!

I have also started to think about and draft the Background chapter of my dissertation. Though I’ll no doubt have to add to it before my final dissertation, having a version of the background chapter seems like a good goal, especially since the other activity that I have been engaged in is a great deal of reading. In the past few weeks, that has taken the form of the larp research that I have been doing, but I am now reading Adrienne Shaw’s Gaming at the Edge. A friend of mine has also recommended, based on a brief description of my planned dissertation game, that I read about Psychodrama, and loaned me a book with a chapter on it. Also, a project report about the followup to “Hybridex” has just been published about Hybrid games, and is just perfect for my background chapter.

The reason that one of the words in this blog title is “anxiety” is because I am feeling anxious about my dissertation. I understand that this is probably normal, but, I want to faithfully document these thoughts and feelings as well as I can for the autoethnographic process.

The first feeling, common to grad students and probably faculty members in academia everywhere, is that I am not getting enough done everyday. But, I know that I have been doing well, and doing a lot, on the whole, and making sure to take care of myself and others. I’ve done grocery shopping, gone to the gym, taken my cat for walks, cooked many sumptuous and delicious meals, and generally done a good job at those parts of being an adult human. I took care of my family and friends as well, being there for them emotionally, and finishing a first draft of two separate projects that I have been working on for about two years, with my father and my brother. I also wrote 9500 words in about two weeks. 9500 academic words! That’s a lot — so it shouldn’t surprise me that I’m feeling a bit tired, and haven’t done as much writing on the Background chapter. The reading is going well, and it takes time to read — I have to remind myself of that as well.

The next source of anxiety is related to Tom’s job, and unfortunately, there’s not much I can say about that, except to say that some of my days have been spent helping him, and I have no regrets there.

The next feeling is the feeling of time pressure: if you know me, you may know that I occasionally call myself a reverse procrastinator — that I like to get things done long before they are due so that I don’t have to worry about them. In planning my dissertation timeline, I wrote off January entirely and gave myself an additional two months for my first dissertation game project because I had a feeling that, with everything going on in my personal life, and with this being the first OFFICIAL PROJECT of my dissertation, that there might be some fumbling and stumbling blocks.

This brings us to what seems like a very important source of anxiety: designing the game itself. Generally speaking, when I make a project, I have the freedom to let the project be what it will be, take the time that it will take, and I don’t have to worry that much about making an “amazing” game. I am feeling a lot of pressure, somehow, to make this first dissertation project the best game ever, and feel like somehow the scope has to be bigger than my usual work. But that’s entirely not the point of these projects: I’m not studying whether the game that I make is any good, I am studying the process of making it and archiving it. I’m collecting data about the project and what people think about it. I’m studying my own game-making practice. I know that I will likely make better games, and I will likely make worse ones. I know that I also generally do my best work in small teams with other folks, and that for the most part, I intend these games to be solo. I know that I will be pushing against the limits of my skills, bettering myself, and learning entirely new skills.

Honestly, that’s a lot of pressure to put on six months of work that will include so much of the other necessary parts of grad school, even if they aren’t officially mandated: the reading, the writing, the preparing for conferences, the meetings, the interacting with the rest of my community. And yes, this all feeds into making this game, but at some point, I have to start making it.

Another problem with designing this game that I am having is that because I am putting heavy emphasis on the design of the physical objects involved, part of my brain is wary about working “for nothing”: I don’t want to start working on the physical crafting components, and have to scrap/restart them because the game has totally changed. Usually, that means I would just rapidly prototype with the cheapest available materials and be done with it. But that presents two problems at the moment:

— Fort McMurray is remote. I can’t just pop by the electronics store, the fabric store, or whatever other store to get more materials. There’s also no one or two-day shipping to Fort McMurray. If I need an object, I have to plan for it ahead of time.

— In this game, it feels like the interaction will only “feel” right and complete with the final objects because of their materiality. So, prototyping without a finished object is possible but presents some challenges for the imagination.

Another source of anxiety is working remotely in Fort McMurray: in addition to the difficulties sourcing materials, I am struggling with the fact that I am not in my usual creative environment. I have grown used to making things at the TAG lab, surrounded by other researchers, creators, and friends, and being able to casually discuss my project. I would much rather be working on these projects in Montreal.

…However, all of my crafting materials (and there is a lot of it) are up here in Fort McMurray, so popping back and forth to Montreal as I have been doing since the beginning of last year simply isn’t possible in this context. Or at least, it doesn’t feel very possible without a heck of a lot of money spent on checked baggage or shipping.

Thankfully, I should be moving back to Montreal soon. At the very latest, I am teaching a course in Winter 2019, and so I should be back in the city for my third dissertation project, at least.

This brings me to another very present source of anxiety or trepidation: Will this game be any good? Is “Flip the Script” a good idea? Won’t there be issues with constantly interrupting the play? How should I handle those issues? Should I make something a little less open with a little more story to it? Will this game be meaningful? Will it be reflective and critical? Am I taking advantage of the digital components enough? And, related to that: Am I running out of time?

Well…these are the things that are on my mind, and even just writing about them as been helpful. I hope this documentation will be helpful to future Jess as they write their dissertation. Certainly, the discussion about time limits, and the uncertainty about designing to spec and within certain limitations (that it has to be a game that explores physical-digital hybrid design, that it has to be made in roughly six months, that it should be about critical, reflective subjects) reminds me of my work with Rilla about critical game design, where a number of designers designed according to a prompt that we provided (you can read our chapter in Game Design Research)

Your faithful autoethnographer,
Jess

Dissertation: Game Idea – FLIP THE SCRIPT

critical making, dissertation, Process Writing

Coming up with 50 Puppet game ideas at the end of last month really did help unblock me creatively, and I think that I will be moving forward in making a game with puppets. I’m still refining the idea, but here are my rough notes about what the game might look like:

FLIP THE SCRIPT
“A game where a player narrates a negative interaction/experience that they had from start to finish. Then, the players act out this experience with puppets, deciding on roles among them. At any time, a player (any player) can “activate” a signal for “flipping the script” — this means that they want to interject with a redo of an action or statement with how they think it should have gone instead/how they wish it would have gone. The ‘flip the script’ button causes LEDs to light up (flashing rainbows, probably) on both the puppets and some kind of device that the narrator would hold. Together, action by action/sentence by sentence, the players improvise a “flipped script” version of the incident. At the end of the game, together, the players get to add to a Master document of ‘wishes”‘ for how other humans would treat them, deciding together on what their addition should be, or things they would like to see in the world. Inspired by Boal and Theatre of the Oppressed, improv inspirations from the “Shoulda said” game, and by Snafu Dance Theatre’s Snack Food Music show.

I’d use the micro:bits for the signal and for making the LEDs flash — maybe the signal for getting the leds to flash is covering them or something like that (since they can be used as light sensors), or maybe a puppet bringing its hands together for a certain amount of time (this could also be the case for the human narrator if the human wore gloves, but maybe they could just press a darn button). It probably has to be pretty instantaneous so that the scene can be interrupted quickly, but it should also be something that’s unlikely to happen accidentally. Maybe Arduino Gemma?

Because I want the game to be flexible in terms of content and length, and mostly improvised, I am finding less use for “puppets as controllers” than I thought I might. If the game were more “gamified”, then I could easily see ways of making use of the puppet’s mouth or hands or other aspects (like, for example, the ‘guitar hero’ puppets game idea from my list).”

More on this as it happens!

Dissertation: 50 Game Ideas with Puppets

critical making, dissertation, Process Writing

I am trying to decide whether or not to pursue this idea of a game with puppets, and so I have been doing my best to generate ideas. As I said to Rilla, my supervisor, the other day, it is hard to recapture what the idea generation process has been like on other occasions — whether ideas took time to form or whether they formed, whole-hog, when working on my own. Keeping in mind that I document fairly rigorously and do a lot of writing about my work, this already begins to show me the added value of the autoethnographic processes that I am employing for my dissertation. I can’t imagine what it would be like to try to retrace my creative process if I weren’t documenting so much.

I ambitiously started out this list with the notion that I would come up with 100 of these ideas, but I’ve been at this since Tuesday evening, and I honestly think that I have got what I needed from the exercise. So, instead, I shortened the number to 50. Even coming up with 50 ideas was very challenging. Sitting in front of the computer and trying to generate ideas without distractions was worse than useless. I had to have input coming into my brain from all sorts of different sources in order to come up with anything that I found interesting — but that also meant not coming up with ideas and playing/experiencing/doing other things.

And it is hard to keep a record of the hundreds of things that one might encounter in one’s day to day life. In this case, I’m making a concerted effort, so I can say that I’ve consumed Korean boyband videos (BTS, specifically), I finished co-playing Wild Arms with Tom and have started Final Fantasy VIII, I had my tarot read by a friend and fellow academic, I have read a fair number of sad news articles related to a missing boy in Montreal, and to police brutality and abuses of the Canadian Justice system, I’ve played with my cat, listened to Welcome To Night Vale, pulled out my own Tarot deck for inspiration, as well as Rilla Khaled and Christopher Moore’s Onkalo/deep time-related “We Should Just” card project, as well as Padgett Powell’s Interrogative Mood, and I’ve done a heck of a lot of sketching.

Nevertheless, there are loads of blank spots here, and tiny tasks here and there, like grocery shopping, or answering emails, that are no doubt influencing my thinking. I guess even if I can’t unearth the whole of this…I dunno, creative artefact… that I’m trying to preserve, I have to settle for doing my best, and not worry too much about the gaps. There will always be gaps, right? Like the gaps between unverbalized thoughts and impressions and language, for starters, or all the processes going on inside my head that are outside of the scope of even a dedicated autoethnographic dissertation, and what I might have dreamt and forgotten about during the night.

Well, without any further musing for the moment… Here are 50 puppet game ideas, with or without digital aspects, and without regard as to whether the ideas are any good, or whether they are “critical”:

1. a game where the embedded microbits on the puppet change colour and give simple (or not simple) behaviour cues for players to follow (possibly a mood change)

2. a game where players dress the characters up according to a specific set of rules that is reflected in play — possibly character roles, possibly something to do with gender roles

3. a game where you learn the basic rules and approaches to puppeteering

4. a game where you have to convince a small child that the puppet is a living and breathing entity

5. a puppeteering game where the first person to laugh loses a point

6. Coffee: A Misunderstanding, but with the puppets puppeteering puppets and trying to throw their voices

7. Rockband/Guitar Hero but with puppets and their actions and dialogue, or lip-synching songs

8. A Puppet Cooking Show where there are different connections and switches which are closed/open based on where you place the materials down.

9. A game about the uncanny valley but from the puppets’ point-of-view

10. A game where you reenact famous scenes from movies or moments in history, but with puppets.

11. A game with very flirty puppets who are trying to teach humans how to flirt

12. Puppets singing songs about gender from musicals (ie Mulan’s “I’ll Make a Man Out of You”)

14. A dress-up game where you have to dress the puppets according to a stereotype based on the available clothing

15. A game where you have to have awkward holiday dinner conversations and each player puts words in their puppet’s mouth that they might expect to hear from a particular diner (i.e. the racist uncle at Thanksgiving trope)

16. A game where puppets representing the able-bodied, ridiculously-athletic characters from video games talk about their invisible chronic pain and how they still can’t stop performing if the players won’t stop playing.

17. A game where puppets build a Utopia together & we get to see what players define their Puppet’s Utopia as.

18. A game where some puppets are ocean creatures and some puppets are plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the plastic has to kill off the ocean creatures by convincing them to eat them (i.e. a plastic bag pretending it is a jellyfish).

19. A game about climate change denial where a digital thermometer slowly heats up and the players simulate the effects on their world through the magic of theatre, while others play politicians and other humans trying to deny that it is happening or that it is our fault. At the end of the game, everyone loses. The lobbyists and politicians are entombed with their piles of money.

20. A game about the idea that “infinite growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”

21. A game where humanity is on trial and there’s no one left to defend it

22. The spiritual successor to Magical Girl Olympics, except it’s Eidolon, Aeon, Guardian, etc, transformation sequences.

23. To recreate famous paintings with puppets.

24. Friends use puppets to do impressions of each other, highlighting their best qualities.

25. A game where you make a very padded puppet, convince your cat it is alive, and wrestle your cat with the puppet

26. a game about the anatomy of puppets

27. Puppets deconstructing 50 Shades of Grey together & talking about consent, BDSM, and kink

28. A game where humans are practically extinct and puppets must build a new society together. What is a puppet idea of Utopia?

29. A game where puppets are jealous of human agency and want to puppeteer/take control of them! Jinkies!

30. A game about Kpop fan culture where all the puppets are secret boyfriends (fanservice and perceptions and queerbaiting).

31. A game about queerbaiting in the media where the puppets perform typical queerbaiting activities

32. A game where a player tells a story about a dream that they had recently, and puppets reenact the dream, even the parts that don’t make very much sense.

33. a game about negotiating consent between a puppeteer and the puppet– “you’re going to put your hand WHERE?”

34. A puppet seance where the humans are spirits who possess the attendees

35. A Sesame Street rip-off regarding gentrification and social justice (& Oscar the Grouch)

36. A game where you use puppets to tell stories from your ancestors/grandparents.

37. Wipeout, but you’re trying to contort puppets into the correct shapes.

38. A game where the Puppets can transform into other kinds of puppets to show their affective responses (like the double-headed doll I have from my aunt that has a happy side and a sad side).

39. Zombie Puppet Game: a game where the virulent PUPT Virus — an even more catching version of the IMPRV Virus, causes people to spontaneously become puppeteers. “Infected” players have to hide their status in creative ways to pretend they’re not infected and then suddenly reveal their puppets to non-infected players to turn them into puppeteers.

40. A game where three people control 1 puppet, representing various forces in the world acting upon us humans when we “try to do the right thing”

41. A game about the similarities and differences between puppets and avatars.

42. Debate club, but with puppets.

43. Human Dressage for the Distinguished Puppet — Players play puppets leading the human puppeteer through an obstacle course.

44. Puppets doing their own action-movie stunts.

45. Puppet Hair Salon where the puppets cut hair in the same way that Cookie Monster eats cookies. The hair in question is wigs, probably.

46. A Larp game where the puppets are the human players’ consciences and they always tell the truth about things the players might feel bad about, which everyone can hear, but must not acknowledge it directly in-game because it is meta-knowledge.

47. A game where everyone acts like the puppeteers don’t exist and the puppets are regular-butt humans, except for one person.

48. A puppeteer-off where the humans have to puppeteer increasingly abstracted puppets, until they are puppeteering things like sponges and spatulas. Three judges.

49. A Giant Game of Chess where each piece is a puppet and the teams engage in puppeteered combat each time a square is challenged.

50. A game where the puppets gesticulate and act things out, and two other players “subtitle”/”dub” the conversation according to what they think is going on.

Dissertation: First Game Update — Puppets, Cosplay, Masks

critical making, curious games, dissertation, Process Writing

Writing here as a record of what my process has been like of late in relation to this first dissertation game. The work is proving hard to get a handle on — for a number of reasons, I think.

So, lately, I’ve been reading about larps and I also just picked up and am about to read Queer Game Studies, edited by Bo Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw. Since what I have been absorbing reading-wise is larp related, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I have had no trouble writing my latest larp once I settled on the topic. I completed a draft in just seven hours, and you can read that draft here: https://jekagames.itch.io/queer-sleepover-witching-hour

I have the materials that I need in order to experiment with making some objects for my latest game, but I am having trouble figuring out what I would like to explore in the game. The truth is, with everything that is going on in my personal life with my spouse’s work, and my difficulties with living in Fort McMurray, not to mention that doctoral programs are not known to be stellar for one’s mental health, I have been having trouble working at the same pace that I am used to. In January, I had to take a break because I was exhibiting burnout symptoms. The break seemed to work well, but I still haven’t been able to return to my former pace of work, and although my symptoms are not nearly as bad as they were, I still am having much more trouble focusing than I am used to. My resilience is not what it used to be. I’m not who I used to be.

Maybe it will all get better if this situation ever resolves itself, but for now, I have to continuously remind myself to be kind to myself and not to rush the work. But I feel guilty not being productive and not making as much as I am used to (even though I’ve released like three games in the first three months of 2018 and have been doing plenty of reading, writing and other work – sheesh).

I’ve been having doubts about this game as a “puppet” game, and with the materials I’ve gathered, I find myself interested in maybe making a game with masks, or costumes. The problem with masks and costumes, I think, is that it is difficult to make something that will be “one size fits all” — because one size doesn’t fit all. Nevertheless, I am considering the affordances of these different possibilities. One theme that is very present for me at the moment is mental health. It’s a bit of a tired metaphor if I work it from the “masks” angle, so I would have to consider carefully what I want to say and how.

The puppets are causing me trouble possibly because of the relationship between puppet and audience, and the kinds of activities that puppets are used for. I want the interaction to be meaningful and supported by the digital components of the game. I find myself thinking of the Bird Game Collective’s “Lovebirds” and how they made use of masks.

Amongst the materials that I have gathered to play with are three micro:bits, twenty-dollar microcontrollers developed by the BBC and brought to my attention by my colleague, Enric Llagostera. They are Bluetooth and radio-communication enabled straight out of the box, which is making me rethink my initial thoughts. I initially thought that the puppets would be easier to make and less likely to break if I had them interact with an environment that was wired up and close circuits using conductive material rather than having them wired up, since I didn’t want to have to deal with strain on the wires and such. While that’s probably true, I think that having interactions embedded in the puppets themselves probably gives me more interesting design possibilities. Maybe I should use a combination of both. I can also certainly find ways to protect the wires and avoid stretching them too badly.

Well, I wish I had some solutions and could get right into the making. I hope that this long, contemplative process will be well-worth it! I won’t stop playing around with ideas, sketching, and trying to make stuff, though.