AUTOETHNOGRAPHY: PERSONAL MEMORY DATA COLLECTION – EXERCISE 5.6 ARTEFACTS OF DESIGN

autoethnography, critical making, dissertation, game jams, Process Writing, research

Using Exercise 5.6 from Heewon Chang’s Autoethnography as Method (“List five artifacts, in order of importance, that represent your culture and briefly describe what each artifact represents. Select one and expound on the cultural meaning of this article in your life.”) as a prompt, I’m going to talk about my history with artefacts of design. I already wrote about my “artefacts of play” here [https://tag.hexagram.ca/jekagames/autoethnography-personal-memory-data-collection-exercise-5-6-artefacts-play/].

Of course, neither of these lists are exhaustive. In the artefacts of play list, for example, board games are notably absent, and I’ve spent many hours playing games like Battlestar Galactica or Betrayal at House on the Hill with friends. I may later try to do some kind of reconstructive timeline work to supplement them.

These lists are also deeply personal, despite the fact that I belong to a community at TAG and a broader “community.” It’s just overwhelming to try and pick out five canon artefacts. That’s because, let’s face it, everyone plays or has played in their life. It’s part of our development. And while maybe not everyone has “officially” designed a game, whatever that means, designing and adapting games and play is also a part of childhood play. So, with that said, here are my 5 Artefacts of Game Design, or, five important tools and influences on my game design process:

ARTEFACTS OF DESIGN

*Mindmaps
Especially when working from a pre-determined theme, mapping out my ideas and writing things down on paper in a spatially-organized way has always been an effective way of coming up with a game for me. It also makes it much easier to retrace my lines of thought later. This is a very important design tool for me.

*Game Jams/Rapid Prototyping
Looking at the roughly 30 games and game prototypes that I have made since January 2013, fully 21 originally started out as part of a rapid prototyping session (7 of them, with the first version made in less than a week) or as a game jam project (14 of them, with the first version usually made in 48 hours or less), whether later refined and reworked or otherwise. Having a playable version to refine and work with has been a key tool for me. It also helps me to discard what isn’t working before I have invested a lot of energy into it.

When I was studying creative writing, I was always more of a “short story” writer than a novelist or someone who wanted to sustain a long term project. I generally prefer to focus on one or two themes and ideas in a project, which I think is true of my game-making practice as well. I think that I can sustain longer term projects if I want — I have a current collaborative project that I have been working on for well over a year, and several other projects that took about six months of sustained work. But I haven’t yet found a project that I wanted to expand enough to make it into a single focus.

*Google Search Engine
The first game-making tool that I used (other than when someone else programmed my first video game ever during Global Game Jam 2013 in Unity) was Stencyl. From there, I moved on to Construct 2, then did a bit of Unity, and then learned Processing, then Phaser and some JavaScript, and now, I’m developping in JavaScript with whichever libraries are necessary to the project, and Unity once again for 3D projects (I’m not big on 3D for 3D’s sake at the moment — heck, I still need to learn how to make textures and align them). But, through it all, (and I normally use Duck Duck Go if I can help it), googling my problems has been a constant. I’d say that roughly half of my time spent programming is looking up code and figuring out how to make things work. Luckily, I’m very good at picking the right search engine terms. I would not have been able to develop games without a cracking good search engine as a resource.

*Duct Tape
Duct Tape is meant to represent two artistic practices for me — the first is “Making the most tin-foil, duct-tape version of a thing quickly” to test out concepts, and the other is how crafting and making physical objects is a core part of many of my games. I have always been a person who makes things. I enjoy prop-making, costume-making, sewing, sculpting, building structures, painting, drawing…

Luckily, I have been able to use these skills as part of my game-making practice with alternative controls. It’s been very useful to know about the materiality of things.

*The Desks of TAG Lab
I couldn’t think of an object that represented the role of collaborators in my process. Over the years, I’ve worked with many people in small teams (usually just 2-3 people) to make all sorts of projects. I’m very grateful to my collaborators — and each is listed on my games’ page next to the game(s) that we made together. I work best when I have other people to bounce ideas off of — and this is true even for my solo work. The reason I chose the Desks of TAG Lab as an artefact is because just sitting in the lab, amongst other people working, can lead to all sorts of conversations or collaborations, and the folk sitting there are usually willing to stop by for a quick chat, or, in the case of the talented programmers in the room, help me to answer particularly thorny coding questions. Even when working alone, talking about my work to others is very helpful. This is definitely a very important aspect of my process. Of my 30-ish projects, just 13 are solo endeavours.

—-

So, a fair few of these objects are abstracted, or are strategies rather than physical things. There are definitely other influences I could talk about.

Community is definitely one of those things, in the form of MRGS, Pixelles, and TAG. I could also talk about the specific designers who had an impact on the way that I make games, or who made me feel like I had permission to make “weird” games any which way I chose — like Pippin Barr, who taught the Curious Games Studio (my first “formal” game design class). I could also talk about specific tools, and their affordances, and what they encouraged me to make, and what I learned from them. I will eventually talk about the three years that I spent my summers doing Critical Hit, first as a participant, then as an assistant, then as a co-director. These were definitely very formative experiences.

More on this as my autoethnography continues!

Reflective Games: Sleepover Witching Hour

critical making, Process Writing, reflective games

Just a short entry to record for posterity an idea for a new nanolarp. This larp might be called “CAMP GENDERQUEER” or possibly “A SLEEPOVER PARTY FOR ADULTS” or…well, we’ll see.

Lately, I’ve been looking outside of nordic larp to other sources. This has led me to read a fair bit about “edularp”, which is to say larps and play-acting that takes place largely in primary school with young children. I guess this has contributed to my having childhood experiences on my mind.

Fellow Designer, friend and collaborator, Allison Cole made a series of nanolarps (well, shortish larps) for her MFA at the NYU Game Center where each game was designed with someone that she had not collaborated with before, but wanted to. One of the games that game out of this project, designed by Allison herself, Joachim Despland, and Carolyn Jong, is a game called “Remember That Time”, a game for three players and no facilitators which takes place at a high school reunion. Here’s the overview from Allison’s Anthology of Intimacy book (unpublished, artisanally handcrafted in a limited run):

“You are at a high school reunion. It has been 15 years since you graduated. When you were in high school you were in a triad and the three of you have found yourselves at a secluded table in the corner with a bottle of wine. The evening lies in front of you, with nothing to hold your attention but the exes from your fondly remembered youth and your memories.”

In this game, the players drink a bottle of wine together, reminiscing about their shared past and pouring toasts when they feel a scene is resolved, and playing until the bottle is finished. They then engage in a discussion about why the relationship ended and a number of other subjects. As the idea for this larp formulated in my mind, I was reminded of Allison, Joachim and Carolyn’s game (which I have not playtested because I do not drink). I’ve been considering what my next larp ought to be about, and I keep coming back to questions around my own gender and sexuality, and thinking about how to explore this very personal experience in a way that would be nice for other people.

As I flopped down onto my beanbag chairs in my office, in my permanent blanket fort (see picture below), I began to think about sleepovers and the intimacy of those strange, late-night conversations, which usually take place amongst people of shared assigned-at-birth gender of similar age. The conversations that I have had late at night during sleepovers, just as everyone is about to drift off to sleep, are some of the most intimate half-remembered conversations I ever had with friends in my youth.

The idea is only half-formulated for now, but I think that, in this larp, which would stretch the definition of nanolarp, I would like players to arrive in pajamas, watch a silly movie or play some silly board games, and then hang out on beanbag chairs and couches (both of which TAG has) in a room with the lights turned off, where nobody has to look anyone else in the face, and talk.

I think there would be rules to facilitate disclosure, and of course, some kind of fictional layer/persona, loosely defined, for each player. Maybe, if someone discloses something intimate, other players also have to bring up something about themselves. Maybe there are rules about what is said, and maybe there’s a cone of silence involved — what happens at Adult Sleepover stays at Adult Sleepover? It’s still forming in my mind. This may not be the case for everyone, but there’s a certain safety and intimacy involved in being bundled up cosily, chatting in the middle of the night, that’s difficult to otherwise replicate. The topics might be the usual ones — weird little stories that are too gross or embarrassing to tell in the light of day (if you see me in person, ask me about “Nickel”, a story that I still remember telling at Camp Tamaracouta as a Scout about a kid who picks his nose a lot), about crushes, opinions about anything from music to movies to how to solve all the world’s problems. I am sure this is partially my nostalgia talking, but I think this could be a warm, intimate and sincere experience, if I design it right and the players are feeling it.

Reflective Games: Genres of Thought Playtest

critical making, playtest, Process Writing, reflective games

Last week, I finished a playtestable version of a new nanolarp/improv game called “Genres of Thought” and had the chance to play one round with the folks from the Reflective Games project. We discussed it before playing, and Enric brought up the idea that technologically-assisted larps could be a different way of framing a larp and thinking about what “counts” as a larp and what could count, opening up the definition and hopefully making the form more accessible and less scary to new players.

During the game, I noticed a few elements that needed smoothing out, or that I had accidentally omitted from the rules — but, this wasn’t so much of an issue since I was the gamemaster and could make a decision on the fly about things like who should start the scene (it would have been utter confusion to have all the players at once), or who should be the “odd genre out” (I used a random number generator).

The Group Genre was “Fantasy” and the task was “to keep the surprise party a secret at all costs. The Odd Genre Out was mystery, and the Odd Genre goal was to describe your alibi for a crime, perhaps explaining the details of the crime. In the scene, players were preparing a surprise party for their 30-year-old Elder (people in Fantasy medieval age eras didn’t live so long, remember) and the Odd Genre Out was professing that they had not in fact told the Elder about the surprise party. There was also a bit with a giant magical frog, and a lot of laughter. With five players, it was a bit of a jumble, but the players seemed to have fun.

The genres were not as much a part of the focus as I would have liked — I think this also might have been because all the players were active at once, and both trying to pay attention to each other and be active in the game. More playtesting is needed to determine whether five players is too many, or whether players just needed to go “on” and “off-scene” more in the way that improvisers do. For now, I’ve not included that as a requirement, because I intend for this to be a nanolarp, and in larps, simultaneous scenes happen all the time.

The question that we discussed at the end of the round was, “What is something that you used to believe in that you don’t believe anymore, and why might that be the case?”

One of the players, noting that it’s the “big questions” that are likely to occur to people right away, noted that they no longer believe in God. The rest of our discussion focused on this topic, and people’s experiences with spirituality and the institutions that surround religion.

We also talked about the experience of playing afterwards — I think that many of the first round jitters would have been smoothed out with a few more scenes, and I admitted that while I eventually expected players to build up a rapport and a comfort/intimacy through play that would allow them to get to the “heavy” topics, I was surprised that it happened right away for our group. The Reflective games folk generally seemed to agree that playing together did make players feel open to discussing this vulnerable topic, but that also our pre-existing relationships as a research group (with the exception of a guest to the lab who was meeting us for the first time) likely also impacted what the players were willing to discuss.

I spent a bit of time reworking the rules to clarify some aspects of the game for both gamemaster and players based on this playthrough. Primarily, the rules I added have to do with how to choose the focus for the scene (basically, it’s okay to do it however you want and have multiple conversations going on at once, because it’s a larp, but if you want to play for an audience, use the Gamemaster as a “camera,” focusing attention on certain players in the scene). And with that, this prototype is ready to release out into the world. Here it is! Here’s the github repository.

When I brought up the fact that I knew some fairly experienced improvisers who might be willing to try out the game, the Reflective Games group expressed curiosity about what the gameplay would be like with these more experienced players. While I wasn’t able to arrange anything for my current visit in Montreal, my friend Jordan McRae has put together a group of people who are willing to playtest the game the next time that I am in town.

Reflective Games: Shared Knowledge & Horizons of Expectations

critical making, Process Writing, reflective games

For my Reflective Games work, I am currently still playing around with nanolarp design, which has been a productive but challenging constraint. As with “This Just In”, the problem with running a nanolarp that also aims to inspire critical reflection is that there is so little time to convey a nuanced, in-depth situation to the player. So, situations that players are likely to be familiar with lend themselves well to having a larp created around them.

I’ve spent the past month or so exploring this limitation through a variety of different research paths. I started out thinking about “stereotyping as shorthand” — the kinds of information that are compressed by stereotypes in order to communicate quickly (but without nuance, of course). When I took an introductory philosophy class, we spent a fair bit of time talking about the difference between “stereotyping” and “negative stereotyping”, and how humans have historically used stereotypes for survival. That fire is hot and that gravity will cause me to fall if I step out of a window are both stereotypes that I don’t have to test in order to believe that they are true.

But the connotation of the word has been pretty strongly cemented at this point, and it was difficult to find literature that explored this idea of “shorthanding” — I also tried looking into “data compression”, and of course that was largely about technical protocols and algorithms for encoding data. From there, I moved into more linguistic areas of thought, after detouring around fortune telling and how fortune telling props are used as prompts for fortune tellers to access information stored in their brains. I did gather some interesting reading materials, including a source all about cold reading — I think that I will almost definitely use this information in a future project given how we made use of objects as “tarot”-style cues in The Truly Terrific Traveling Troubleshooter.

Really, I thought to myself, all of language is about representing complex objects, ideas and wholes with just a few syllables. So, I decided to do some research into Semiotics and Linguistics (and just for fun also found some texts about Contextual Behavioural Science that I intend to read).

Last week, during our Reflective Games check-in meeting, Rilla and Enric brought up some interesting ideas about the moment that we are forced to rethink received knowledge and shorthand that we have taken for granted, and the moments that come afterwards, and how these moments might in fact be the most crucial to reflection. From there, I returned to thinking through what kinds of information people in a particular region or culture were likely to commonly know.

While “This Just In” had been about narrowing in on a common narrative by trying to please competing concerns, I want this next larp to be about widening out from a narrow idea of what the horizon of expectations might be. I have been thinking carefully about how to seed these moments.

Through some free association, I started to think about the essay/letter that the teenagers write at the end of The Breakfast Club, describing how they were so much more than the stereotypes that people might see when they looked at them. From there, of course I thought about the eighties more generally and John Hughes, and coming-of-age movies/texts (which are a not-so-guilty pleasure of mine).

This led me think about Fiasco and how it operates on movie genres. A genre sets a common horizon of expectations in a way that isn’t too proscriptive. But then, I wanted to be sure that things would go off-script, and that the players would definitely move beyond that horizon of expectations and those genre tropes.

In games like Spyfall and Fake Artist in New York, one player is missing information that all the other players have. I am still formulating what this larp might look like, but I think it might go something like this: all the players are given a movie genre, but one player’s genre is different from the others. I might tell them something like “be the genre-movie-version of yourself” and include a set of rules that mean that the other players have to also behave as if the odd-genred person is perfectly normal and integrate whatever they bring to the table into the play.

I’m not sure on the rules yet, or the set of objects, but I think that this could be tested pretty easily.

So, we’ll see how things develop. I’m excited to be making something again, alongside all of this reading and research.

Global Game Jam 2018: transgalactica

critical making, game jams, Process Writing

For Global Game Jam 2018, I took on a local organizational role to make sure that things could run smoothly when our creative director, Gina Hara, was having her film, Geek Girls, launch in theatres on the same day. Nevertheless, the jam was relatively hands-off except for keeping an eye on the space, once I had made announcements, played the keynote, and helped a few people form teams. That meant that I had a fair bit of time to work with Squinky (Dietrich Squinkifer) on a project. Jammers rarely take my advice, but I never work in teams largely than three for a jam project, if I can avoid it, and in fact, two has been an even more ideal number of late for me, when working with Squinky. This year, the theme of the jam was “transmission”, and since Squinky and I are both nonbinary trans people, we decided that we absolutely wanted to make a game with trans themes and content.

We scoped tightly but ambitiously, aiming to write, record and subtitle a number of original texts as well as finding and editing other audio to fill out our soundscape. It’s rare that I work with narrative or writing-heavy projects for a jam, so I was actually quite pleased that things worked out so well this time. I think that what was helpful was that I was able to write what was working in the moment, and discard the ideas that weren’t, and that I didn’t have to sustain any of the pieces for very long. Since the narrative for our game was that the player was meant to follow a trail of radio station-style broadcasts, each piece was distinct and self-contained, but also working with larger themes related to identity, acceptance, and frustration, with a healthy dose of humour thrown in. That was helpful in terms of the writing. There were a couple of more serious, more explicitly personal pieces that I might have liked to be able to write and include for the project, but I couldn’t get that kind of writing done in the jam context, so rather than getting stuck on that, I wrote several pieces simultaneously, moving around when I got stuck.

When jamming, one core challenge is to on-goingly check in and understand your teammates’ needs and negotiate each other’s expectations — in our case, our schedules didn’t necessarily match up, since Squinky is a bit of a night owl, and I had to be at the jam relatively early to watch the space as one of the organizers. I would have preferred that we could be at the jam space at the same time and spend as much time as we could on the project (although I always make sure to have 8 hours of sleep a night during jams, regardless of what’s happening) — but I understood Squinky’s needs. Similarly, Squinky was concerned about the scope of the writing and audio involved in the game, given the jam context, but once we had gotten started, I really wanted to foreground the writing and audio and work with a distinct gated narrative, so I pushed for it.

The jam went smoothly on the whole!

I used my Zoom H2n for the first time, and am super pleased with how easy it is to use and how good the sound quality it produces is. In the end, we got it all done, including writing and recording an original theme song. In the end, we got it all done, only to discover during the first few minutes of playtesting that some of the audio was accidentally skipped because it was triggered when people accidentally passed the right station very quickly. Since Squinky isn’t big on crowds and there was a lot of potential for sensory overload, they decided to go somewhere quiet and add a delay as to how much of the audio had to be played from a story-related clip before the player could move on to the next. That prevented any accidental speed-running of the game.

I am super glad with how the project turned out and I feel very good about the trans-positive content that I wrote. Squinky is a very resourceful programmer too, which really allowed us to push that extra little bit to make the game feel right.

The github repository for the project is here.

You can play the game here <3. If you do, please feel free to let us know what you think on twitter (our handles are in the credits at the end of the game).

Updates and Plans for January

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

First post of 2018! First, some updates, then, some research work.

Here’s what’s going on with me and my work currently:

— I have applied for a legal name change. Update your contact lists — you should now have me as Jess Rowan Marcotte!

— My partner and I are likely moving in the next few months.

— Got a number of papers and conference proposals in.

— I will continue to work as part of the Reflective Games research group this spring. So far, I’m continuing to focus on larps and theatre. Right now, I’m thinking through and researching the “language” and “mechanics” of short-handing information in nanolarps. More writing on this to come soon, I think!

— I’ve submitted my dissertation proposal along with a two and half year timeline for completing my thesis-related creative work, autoethnographic study, archival practices, and the dissertation detailing all of this. This work will begin in earnest on February 1st, pending my updated ethics certificate and hopefully receiving a passing grade for the proposal.

— I am spending January tying up a few loose ends, setting up a museum exhibit that I helped to curate at THEMUSEUM in Kitchener-Waterloo called INTERPLAY: Thinking Through Games (see the exhibit description here: https://themuseum.ca/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/digital-dynamics-2018/interplay/), and running and participating in Global Game Jam 2018 at the TAG location.

— I have been reading more on autoethnography, which continues to prove itself to be a method with deep ties to intersectionality and feminism. My latest readings (& re-readings) have been Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research by Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis (Oxford UP 2015), Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life edited by Robin M. Boylorn & Mark P. Orbe (Routledge 2016 — first published by Left Coast Press 2014), and Heewon Chang’s Autoethnography as Method (Routledge 2016 — first published by Left Coast Press 2008).

Heewon Chang’s work has been the most useful from a practical “how do I get started” standpoint, and, with that in mind, I’ve adapted some of the exercises from Autoethnography as Method as I begin collecting what Chang calls “personal memory data.” My goal for January is to try and get as much of the preliminary investigation into personal memory data as possible finished. So, this blog is going to be a mix of personal memory data posts and Reflective Games research for a while.

One of the differences between much of the autoethnographical work I have been reading and what I am undertaking in my dissertation is that my focus is primarily on my identity as a creator and game designer. What I mean to say is that the group that I am studying are game designers, not members of a marginalized group or who necessarily share a particular identity beyond the fact that they are designers and academics working in the field of games and game studies — and those identities are far from unified wholes. That’s not necessarily totally different from what other autoethnographers are doing, but there are some key differences in the kind of subject matter I’ll be addressing. I wasn’t “born” as a part of this group in the way that I was born into other identities. My own positionality and intersections (and those of others) will of course be a part of this research, but nevertheless, many of the exercises suggested have to be adapted.

The exercise that I’ve decided to start off my personal memory data collection process with is from Chapter 5 of Autoethnography as Method — it’s Exercise 5.6: “List five artifacts, in order of importance, that represent your culture and briefly describe what each artifact represents. Select one and expound on the cultural meaning of this article in your life.”

Using this exercise as a starting prompt, I’ve decided to do multiple lists of artefacts with a focus on my identities as a player and as a designer. I’m planning to write a little bit about each artefact, and I’ve decided that I’ll place them first in a chronological order, and then later try to rank them by order of importance. I’m also going to write as much as comes out, drawing connections and pointing out gaps for future exploration or thoughts that are in tension as I go. This part of the process will be of course be in danger of being in large part revisionist, but knowing what I think is important in this moment and having some thoughts about why I think that’s the case should still be helpful. So, look out for a series of artefact lists related to play, digital play, and game design coming your way in the next little while.

Thanks for reading! Here comes a lot of dissertation work!

Reflective Games: This Just In! playtest

critical making, playtest, Process Writing, reflective games

As you might have realized from my posts over these past few months, I’ve been working with and researching larps since October or so. Last week, I ran my first larp, a pre-made nanolarp called “Abattoir” — you can read my previous post about that here.

This Just In! mindmap from development

In the time since then, I set a deadline for myself to create my own nanolarp. From start to finish, including the discussion before the game and the debrief afterwars, this larp should take around forty-five minutes to play.

For a long while, while reading up on all these topics, I struggled to find a topic that I could explore in a short larp for the reflective games group to play. Last week, when I finally sat down to do some brainstorming and create a mindmap, the tumblers fell into place in the lock and in about an hour, I had the basics of the game decided and put into place. I just had to develop characters and a self-contained ruleset based on my research.

This morning, I playtested the larp with the Reflective Games group.

In a nutshell, this is a larp about subjectivity and how different networks “spin” the news – there are overarching, oversimplified narratives that show up time and time again in news stories.

You can read, or even play, the entire larp here on itch.io. Here’s a ringing endorsement from one of the players who playtested with me this morning:

“Thank God I didn’t go to journalism school.”

A little more on how the playtesting went:

The players appreciated the flow of information — it stimulated their conversation and added a good level of complication. Players were aware of the kinds of news narratives they were reproducing as they were producing them, which created a kind of unease. For some players, they avoided bringing up certain narratives deliberately (i.e. mental health), while other players said that they embraced their role and said whichever shitty thing came to mind.

When asked to tell me about something memorable that happened during play, players highlighted these occurrences:

* Trying to negotiate the meta and self-awareness around the topic of mainstream news outlets was satisfyingly awkward. One player said that this felt like it was probably pretty true to what happened in these kinds of spaces, with “edgy” content slowly grounded down until it had no edge.
* The news team agreed, at Station Management’s insistence, that they should not mention the “alt right” in the news cast, since it might alienate some of their viewers. During the news cast, “alt right” accidentally slipped out, and the reaction from Station Management (shock) and the Young Idealist (Pulitzer! Pulitzer!) was very satisfying.
* The alarm that signaled the end of the discussion was surprising and memorable when it came – one player felt that this was a nice moment.

Here’s some of the feedback that players provided to improve the game:
About the news cast at the end, players suggested that perhaps they might be able to work jointly on a kind of teleprompter script or to have players take notes. I’ve decided not to go that route, but have decided to encourage the newscaster (who needs to deliver the news report) to take notes. Additionally, the folk in the Reflective Game group suggested that I emphasize that they will indeed have to give a sixty second report at the end of the game.

There were some adjustments to be made in terms of the instructions for the players to let them know what they ought to be doing. From my own observations, I decided to make it explicit that players should introduce themselves, and have added in a warm-up exercise to get players into character and more comfortable with the play.

On the whole, I’m quite satisfied with how this larp played, although I’m aware that the people who played with me this time around were an ideal audience, and that the game might play differently with another group. That’s just how larps work, I guess.

For now, I’ve decided to release this as a prototype with the one “tragedy” that I ran today. In the future, I would like to develop other situations and create a deck that could be shuffled, or a table of results which could be chosen from with dice rolls.

Reflective Games: Coming Home to a New Form

critical making, Process Writing, reflective games, research

Learning about Nordic Larp and the culture around it is a little like coming home. The discourse often focuses on taking care of people, making sure that consent and boundaries are negotiated, and making sure that larp can be a space to explore difficult subjects as safely as possible. On the other hand, there are so many styles and schools within Nordic Larp, and learning about those is both thrilling and intimidating.

What’s amazing about larp is that there is a huge amount of content (especially proceedings-style papers from the Knutepunkt conference) published each year and available for free. There’s a lot to absorb, and a lot that makes me feel uncertain about the best way to proceed. At the same time, the sheer volume and variety of manifestos and articles available signal the lack of unified consensus about larp design. That means that maybe I can carve out a space that I am comfortable designing in. I’ll try to explain my discomfort and excitement a little bit.

So. As a game designer, the subjects and scenarios that I design around are often ones where there is the potential for discomfort and even outright (emotional) harm to the player. To name a few topics, I’ve worked with design questions related to consent and physical touch, sensual relationship with plants, inequality and harassment for women in the workplace, different intersections of oppression, and emotional labour and radical softness.

My games often invite players to be vulnerable. Although they may choose their own level of comfort, players frequently choose to be quite vulnerable, as it turns out, particularly when it comes to my game about consent (In Tune) and the one related to emotional labour (The Truly Terrific Travelling Troubleshooter). Negotiating consent and learning about one’s comfort levels frequently means a certain amount of disclosure to one’s partner, by way of explanation for why a boundary exists, or even by disclosing the existence of a boundary. Similarly, since The Truly Terrific Travelling Troubleshooter prompts players to draw on their own experiences to come up with a (fictional or non-fictional, player’s choice) trouble, players often wind up coming up with problems that are partially based on the ones that they are already facing.

These experiences are carefully crafted, and I have considered how to facilitate this sort of play through rules, framing, and control of the experience. That is what makes some forms of larp intimidating — there’s a loss of control that goes beyond anything that I am used to as a game designer or as a tabletop game master. There are many techniques to help restore some of that control, though, which makes this loss of control both intimidating and exciting. I am used to crafting moments both as a designer and as a game master, and responding on-the-fly to my players, but I am always there in order to provide additional information, to tell them what they see, to play non-player characters and shape the experience.

There are so many forms of larp to learn about, and relatively few chances to experience them all for someone living in Canada. That means that I will have to feel out what will work best for me as a designer by reading widely — on the other hand, there is so much to read that it has been difficult to absorb everything as well as I would like. I’m working on it, but there’s still plenty to read.

For my larp, I think that I would like to invite the Reflective Games group to play, along with some other folk at TAG and perhaps my usual Monday Night RPG gaming group. That would mean having roughly ten or so people, so perhaps I will create a smaller-scale prototype to experiment with an even smaller group.

When it comes to subject matter for the larp, gender has, as one might imagine, been on my mind lately, as I approach a legal name change and have been using they/them pronouns for roughly a year and a half with most people. I keep thinking about the discomfort of being misgendered, the compromises I choose to make, and the discomfort that some people seem to feel at even the idea of nonbinary identity. This isn’t a very settled subject — there’s a lot of (not necessarily in good faith) debate around this, especially lately with respect to the Jordan Petersen video incident at Laurier. Maybe this is a good thing because of the questions that it raises – questions that I have no answer to. I am also not altogether sure yet what the “thesis” of such a game would be. I’m working on it.

I will continue to read, but this week, I think I’ll also focus on trying to create something.

[PS: I also had the chance to showcase The Truly Terrific Traveling Troubleshooter at MEGA this weekend — I had some very interesting conversations around it, and on the whole the game was well-received. To children, I got to talk about making conductive buttons and makey-makeys. To parents, I got to talk about the value of emotional labour. To my academic peers and other designers, I got to talk about physical-digital hybrid games and the genesis of this game. On the whole, the feedback that I got was that generally people were surprised by how effective a tool this was. Oh, and of course, in case you missed it, the digital edition of The Truly Terrific Traveling Troubleshooter is available here!]

CGSA 2017: Queering Game Controls Slides and Talk

critical making, Process Writing, talks

[I’m pleased to share that an article based on the research originally presented at CGSA 2017 has been published in a special issue of Game Studies about queer game studies. You can find the special issue here. You can find my article, entitled “Queering Control(lers) Through Reflective Game Design Practices” here. The research has developed quite a lot since this initial talk on the subject, so I highly recommend the Game Studies article rather than this post.

Should you need access to the slides and talk as they appeared on this blog, please find the original post below:]

[This year, at CGSA 2017 in Toronto, I showcased The Truly Terrific Traveling Troubleshooter, gave a talk called “Queering Game Controls” and chaired a panel. I thought I’d share my slides along with the rough-not-quite-what-I-presented version of my talk, along with a few notes about the kind of discussion that took place afterwards. I’ve kept the slide-change cues in the talk in case anyone wants to follow along. My travel to CGSA this year was funded by the Concordia Faculty of Fine Arts.]

Slides on Google Docs: https://goo.gl/f1Ei7M]

QUEERING GAME CONTROLS
“It is not simply that queer has yet to solidify and take on a more consistent profile, but rather that its definitional indeterminacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent characteristics.” (Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction)

When I was conceptualizing this talk, I was thinking about the topic of queerness and game controls through the lens of visibility, through hypervisibility, through invisibility. I am a queer nonbinary person married to a cis man who came out in 2016, after first realizing that there was language that existed that described my experience, and then deciding that I wanted to use that language for myself. Being assigned female at birth, my marriage and relationship to a cis man has at times erased other aspects of my identity, since people make a lot of assumptions from that. So, all this to say that my experiences with queerness are reflected in my work as a designer, and the concept of visibility is something that I think a lot about. I come to this talk as a queer game designer and doctoral student. [slide]

Words like queer and genderqueer allow me to express my experience as part of a multidimensional spectrum rather than a binary, and the flexibility of their definitions is something that I value. That “definitional indeterminacy” extends to the concept of queering game controls (ibid.). For the purpose of this talk, game controls refers to both the physical and digital aspects of control that allow players to interact with a game. I’ll be talking about control literacy, game feel, flow, procedural rhetoric embedded into controls, player agency, materiality and embodiment, subsequently queering each concept using examples from my own work and the work of others. Afterwards, we’ll open up into a roundtable discussion. I’ll try to leave about half our time for discussion. [slide]

DESIGN EXERCISE
Actually, as part of our discussion, I’d like for you to do something as you listen to my talk. Don’t worry — hopefully it won’t be too distracting: I’d like for you to think of a game, a mechanic or a control that you think would benefit from queering, and think of some ways that it could be queered. At the end, I’ll ask for some folk to volunteer to talk about what they came up with. [slide]

CONTROL LITERACY
Control literacy refers to the ability to pick up and play with a given controller, whether it’s a mouse, a joystick, the standard gamepad, a touchscreen or a touchpad, the frequently standardized keyboard key-controls , or any other set of learned conventions that are often assumed when it comes to game controls. Many of you will, for example, know exactly what I mean if I say something like, “the controls are just WASD (‘WHAZ-DEE’)”. This literacy quickly becomes invisible for those who have it, and is a part of what we mean when we say that someone is “good” at games or technology. For a detailed analysis of some standard game inputs, see Chapter 6 of Steve Swink’s Game Feel.

Of course, literacy is a learned skill. Talking about the Xbox 360 controller, Anna Anthropy points out to us: “The amount of both manual dexterity and game-playing experience required […] makes play inaccessible to those who aren’t already grounded in the technique of playing games.” (Anna Anthropy 2012). Designers and those who are inculcated with this literacy make a lot of assumptions about these standard control schemes. When we think are dealing with the default, we forget to ask ourselves about it at all. As Shinkle points out: “Rather than reducing the need for skillful engagement and the potential for error, such control systems demand their own highly-specific skillset.” [slide]

GAME FEEL
This brings me to the next term that we might want to be familiar with to facilitate this discussion: Game Feel. Swink defines Game Feel thus:
“Game feel is the tactile, kinesthetic sense of manipulating a virtual object. It’s the sensation of control in a game.” Game feel is easy to bring to mind, but difficult to understand and define. Game feel is about “moment-to-moment interaction.” Swink takes the normative best-practice stance that game feel that feels “intuitive” and that encourages the “flow state” is to be sought after. [slide]

FLOW
Flow, a term popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s, refers to a mental state supposedly achieved when performing a task wherein the level of challenge is commensurate with the player’s skill. Gameplay must walk the line between boredom and frustration to fall within the flow channel. This is the Goldilocks approach to game design: not too hot, and not too cold. When players are in the flow state, we are told that they forget what’s around them and are totally involved, totally absorbed. Control literacy and “good” game feel, or at least, not distractingly bad, are prerequisites for reaching the flow state. [slide]

PROCEDURAL RHETORIC IN GAME CONTROLS
Next, I want to talk about what game controls tell us through their procedural rhetoric. At a very basic level, most games give their players a great deal of power through their controls. The average game tells us we can run without getting tired (unless we have a stamina bar), that we can leap high into the air, executing perfect, identical jumps each time, and that we’ll have no trouble activating complex machines at the push of a button or two. Finally, most games tell us, through the control that they give us that we will only get stronger over time. To quote Mattie Brice, “gamers are set up to be colonial forces. It’s about individuality, conquering, and solving. Feeling empowered and free at the expense of the world.” Players are used to having maximum agency and power within the rules of most games. [slide]

MATERIALITY AND EMBODIMENT
I want to introduce the concept of materiality as it relates to the status quo of games and game development. Standard, mass-produced game controls are objects of plastic, rubber and metal, with electronic guts inside. On rare occasions, the industry might produce something like this: [slide]

But that raises a whole other discussion about heteronormative design, and I don’t think that we can yet call this particularly subversive, unless, for example, we were to repurpose it to play a different game.

[slide]
The most common game controls have yet to move beyond plastic. That isn’t to say that there aren’t material differences among plastics. As Swink points out in Game Feel:

“The materials used to construct the device has an impact on the way the user feels about the controller, and therefore, the game. The white plastic that houses my Xbox 360 controller has a smooth, pleasingly porous feel. It’s almost like skin. My Wiimote and Playstation controllers feel like plastic. It’s a subtle difference and measuring its impact on game feel is extremely difficult.”

I’ve yet to see a commonly-accepted mass-produced game controller that isn’t largely plastic. It occurs to me that designers of another kind of toy have learned to make incredible things with silicone — maybe the game industry can follow suit. The controllers could even be waterproof. [slide]

QUEERING GAME CONTROLS
OK, so how are game creators, queer and otherwise, queering game controls? What are some examples of subversion related to these standards and best practices?

Amongst alternative game creators and artists, hacking or repurposing of industry-produced controllers is common, especially with the Kinect and PlayStation Moves. Other creators are changing the relationship of the player to the controller and controls, forcing a new paradigm. Yet other projects create custom controllers, tying the game mechanics and the game intimately to the means of controlling it. As Annamarie Jagose tells us, queer is definitionally flexible, and so is, I think, the act of queering. That’s why I think it’s most useful to point to specific examples at this point from my own practice and from some others, rather than trying to form a general theory of how to queer game controls. [slide]

Before proceeding, I want to take the time to problematize “flow” as a desired state. Brian Schrank points out in Avant-garde Videogames that “Games or cultures that foster flow allow people to be perfectly subjugated within their systems. When a system is designed with optimal flow, people forget that they are being subjugated: their doubts and distractions are kept to a minimum, and all human labor is positively absorbed into the system.”

In their 2016 GDC talk, Designing Discomfort, Dietrich Squinkifer suggests that there is “untapped potential in using gameplay itself to take the player out of flow and instead deliberately invoke uncomfortable emotions,” and that furthermore, this is necessary for the maturation of games. [slide]

Before it was even a conscious part of my game design practice, I have been making games that take what is invisible and make it visible again, often making the invisible hypervisible. Leveraging awkwardness, discomfort, imbalance and other queerable concepts is one of my core design approaches, creating indeterminacy and unsettledness. In my games, I create spaces for critical reflection and conversations, a practice perhaps best explained by Rilla Khaled in Reflective Game Design, which she outlines as privileging questions over answers, clarity over stealth, disruption over comfort, and reflection over immersion. [slide]

In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam suggests, “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” Queering design provides non-standard ways of creating as an alternative to the hegemonic best practices that govern the game industry. Queering can serve as both design philosophy and desired outcome for player experience.

With all of this in mind, I propose that we can and should create gameplay experiences by taking players out of the flow state: let the game be slow, let players be bored, or frustrated, or any number of the other emotions that are part of the spectrum of human experience beyond the limited set that flow and industry best practices encourage. Let them remember that they have bodies, and encourage them to think about that embodiment. Let them interact with
something other than plastic. [slide]

I’m going to talk about some games that I think demonstrate some strategies for queering games — not all the games are by queer designers, but they all subvert expectations around controls in ways that are useful touchstones for our discussion. Given time constraints, I’ve prioritized examples from my own practice and games by teams with queer creators.

The games that I propose fall under four “ways of queering” controls, although they may fit under multiple categories at once, which are:

Queering Common Control Schemes
(Un)common Technologies
Living Entities Touching Each Other
Controls as Theatre

As you might be able to tell, these categories are far from exhaustive — I have included them to suggest some of the ways that I think might be generative for pursuing future queering of game controls. [slide]

QUEERING COMMON CONTROL SCHEMES
A common problem that I encounter in my work is, oddly enough, for a queer games talk, reproduction. I often work with custom controllers — a category that we will talk about — but that means that it is difficult for me to digitally share my work. Games in this category subvert commonly-found game controls in satisfying ways. [slide]

A Series of Gunshots (2015)
by Pippin Barr and Rilla Khaled
A Series of Gunshots is a game by Pippin Barr in collaboration with Rilla Khaled that wrestles with player agency. In a blog post about the game, Barr had this to say about the controls:

Why just any key? And what about the mouse? I had a build that included a mouse click to trigger the shots as well, but it quickly became obvious that that has too much implied directed agency (you click somewhere specific) which messes with the ‘involved and not involved’ feeling I want the game to have. The fact it’s any keypress (again, not, like the spacebar only to avoid the sense of having a specific agency, a trigger) makes your involvement both critical (it’s the only thing that makes the gun go off) and abstracted/distant.

Why can’t you see the shooting? Well, you can – you see a flash in a window (or conceivably in an alley or a car, say), but you can’t see the people or the gun or ragdoll physics or any other details. That’s for two main reasons. The big one is I’m aiming for player interpretation and imagination within this highly constrained and minimalist interaction, so the less seen the better. The other one is that to the extent this game is ‘about’ shooting in games (and in life) I want to avoid any sense of ‘rewarding’ the action with visuals, physics, etc.

In Barr and Khaled’s game, you can chose to shoot or not shoot, but you don’t know who is shooting who, or why. Shooting is divorced from the usual narrative justifications for it, although of course the buildings and architecture do suggest a setting. [slide]

Seventy-Eight (2014)
by Allison Cole, Jess Marcotte and Myriam Obin
In 2014, I made a short platformer game called “Seventy-Eight” with Allison Cole and Myriam Obin. The title is a reference to the difference (at the time, and not accounting for intersectional identities) in pay between men and women — for every dollar a man made, a woman could expect to make seventy-eight cents. In this game, you play a woman who can’t seem to please the system. Made in a weekend at the GAMERella game jam, the game features audio recordings of gendered insults that we asked other jammers to record, based on what they might expect to hear aimed at a woman who was considered to be underperforming, a woman who was considered to be performing at a normal level, and a woman who was thought to be overperforming. The appropriate audio plays when the character is at the bottom of the screen (underperforming), the center (performing adequately), and at the top of the screen (overperforming). The character is damaged if they are either too much to the bottom of the screen or too high up.

In programming this game, I created phantom key presses and invisible changes to the platforms that would cause the avatar to jump or walk without player input, as well as making platforms lose their collision detection boxes at random, causing the avatar to fall through. These were deliberate choices that were meant to make the game feel systemically unfair, but they read so subtly that they felt like glitches or mistakes. These were meant to procedurally represent the invisible forces of systemic oppression that might trip people up in the workplace.

The intent was to create a feeling of paranoia in the players causing them to wonder whether or not the system was against them or if their own performance was inadequate. Such feelings of not knowing are common to the experience of marginalized people. But ultimately, despite the careful theming, there was no way for players to know about these programmatically enforced rules related to the controls without being told. The result was that players expressed frustration because they didn’t know that this was happening.

Ultimately, I don’t think this experiment was successful, but I still think it is instructive for thinking about how we might use the queering of game controls to develop games in the future. [slide]

(UN)COMMON TECHNOLOGIES
Now I’d like to talk about games that use (un)common technologies, by which I mean technologies that are mass-produced and readily available for purchase, as opposed to custom controllers, but that might not be in every home with a console or computer. [slide]

Hurt Me Plenty (2014)
by Robert Yang
In Robert Yang’s “Hurt Me Plenty,” the player takes on the role of a Dominant negotiating boundaries with a partner who they are about to spank. The player negotiates how hard they will spank their partner, what clothes the submissive will wear for the spanking, and a safeword. The game randomizes the title that the player’s partner uses for them.

If the player violates their partner’s boundaries in the game, the game can lock the player out for hours at a time, potentially days, depending how seriously boundaries have been violated. This means that if the game is being showcased at a festival, and one player violates these boundaries, all the festival-goers can be locked out for hours. As Yang notes “Your trust, safety and politics affects the entire community” (Indie Tech Talk #23 Cheeky Design, NYU Game Innovation Lab 2014). This denial is powerful because players are used to being catered to and to being in control.

Although players can buy the game to play at home, the festival version of “Hurt Me Plenty” makes use of the Leap Motion controller, a control that can register the speed and movement of a person’s hand in the air. The problem is that this controller doesn’t actually always work that well, and can be finicky, which means that potentially, players may not have quite the right technique with the leap motion, and might accidentally flick their wrists too hard, or become frustrated with the control and overdo their next motions. The possibility of mistakes in this scenario seems like it might be quite generative. [slide]

LIVING ENTITIES TOUCHING EACH OTHER
I want to recall Swink’s earlier words about the porous plastic material of his Xbox 360 Controller. He said, “It’s almost like skin.” Well, these games are about touching the skin of a living other, whether human or otherwise. [slide]

In Tune (2014)
by Allison Cole, Jess Marcotte and Zachary Miller
“In Tune is a game that deals with bodies, their interactions, and giving/withholding consent. Players are asked to negotiate and communicate their own physical boundaries with a partner using skin-to-skin contact as the main controller of the game.”
(Cole, Marcotte and Miller 2014)

The controllers for this game are comprised of PlayStation Move controllers, a Makey-Makey, and a pair of hand-sewn conductive sleeves.

In Tune uses consensual touch as one of the main mechanics of the game. With a partner, players are asked to examine a physical pose modeled on a screen by two artist’s mannequins. Players then discuss whether they wish to complete the pose, and if they do, how they will do so. The game is focused on negotiation of boundaries, and as such, it is possible to decide to modify a pose to make it more comfortable for those playing. This is one reason why during the development we thought about and discarded the idea of using something like the Kinect. The accuracy of the poses isn’t as important to us as the negotiation.

Should players decide not to complete a particular pose, they simply skip it, and are presented with a new one. If they decide to complete the pose, they hold it for 13.5 seconds, enabling them to consider the experience without turning the game into a problematic version of “chicken.” If players interact while one player is not consenting (a state that they signal through a button on the PlayStation Move), the game provides audio feedback in the form of radio static, vibrating controllers, and bright red lights at the tip of the Move. After a pose is completed, players are presented with a prompt that is intended to help them to reflect on the experience or deepen their relationship with their partner. Such a prompt might, for example, ask players to recommend media to one another, do their best chicken impersonation, or name something that the other player has done well during the last interaction. The poses are not ranked in any way, and the same pose can appear twice. This allows for people’s different personal histories with intimacy, and also allows for people to reconsider the same pose. They might have said yes to a pose, and decide the next time that this wasn’t a comfortable experience for them, and so say no this time. On the other hand, they may not have felt comfortable with a pose when it was first presented and skipped it, but after getting to know the game and their partner, they may wish to say yes the next time they see it. Some poses are also deliberately challenging for a number of logistical reasons, encouraging players to say no for reasons other than just the relative intimacy of the pose. Power dynamics are also included as a factor, with some poses mimicking power exchanges.

Returning to this idea of visibility, In Tune makes visible consenting bodies. In our day to day existence, or when we grow familiar with people, we may neglect to ask them whether it’s okay, to, say, give them a kiss or a hug. As one of the designers of the game, who has also played it a great deal, this game reminds me that there is pleasure in the asking. [slide]

We Are Fine, We’ll Be Fine (2015)
by Raoul Olou, Hope Erin Phillips and Nicole Pacampara
“We Are Fine, We’ll Be Fine” by Raoul Olou, Hope Erin Phillips, and Nicole Pacampara, was initially developed at Critical Hit 2015. This game, which features a beautiful wooden game board, is set up like a ritual or seance. It leverages social contract and social behavioural rules to be able to keep players playing once they’ve started, since the game requires three players. When players connect to each other in different configurations by touching each other’s hands while also touching designated spots on the game board, audio clips play. The audio is made up of interviews with marginalized people who tell stories about their experience with marginalization. The players only have the option to listen and to hold on to each other. The game resists the temptation of giving players more agency than activating the game board, holding each other’s hands, and listening. Players can’t try and fix the situations and they don’t add to the archive of sounds. [slide]

rustle your leaves to me softly (2017)
by Jess Marcotte and Dietrich Squinkifer
The full title of this game is “rustle your leaves to me softly: an ASMR plant dating simulator,” and in it, players form a relationship with one or more plants. This screenless game, made by myself and Dietrich Squinkifer, uses touch as the main interaction of the game, with sound as feedback. From my end, the game was inspired by discussions with Ida Toft around designing for an other that we can’t necessarily know the mind of. The controllers are made up of ceramic cups, copper tape, and wire, with one wire wrapped around a screw that is then stuck into the moist dirt that fills the cup. These are hooked up to an arduino board with a very powerful resistor. The entire setup is hooked up to a computer reading a web-based javascript program. This setup facilitates an interaction between a plant and a human. There are a number of factors in productive tension here.

As the human touches the cup and the plant’s surface, a soundscape begins to play, layering itself and fading in and out according to the conductance between the plant and the human. The relationship that is built by this experience is partially fictionalized: the instructions for the game have dating profiles for each plant, suggesting what kinds of touches and other interactions the plant partner might enjoy, and the instruction manual also contains a section explaining that the plant is playing an ASMR soundscape back to the human in the hopes that it is something that they will enjoy. The Plant ASMR that results was written and performed by Dietrich Squinkifer and myself, designers trying to think like plants trying to appeal to humans.

Fictionally, the plants also enjoy this relationship — we can’t access the consciousness of these plants to determine whether or not they enjoy being touched, although there are number of articles that have come out recently talking about plants and their sensory organs, such as a BBC Earth article that came out just before this game was made entitled, “Plants Can See, Hear, Smell and Respond.” Still other research by Dr. James Cahill (University of Alberta) talks about how some plants may benefit from or “enjoy” being touched, while others are harmed by it. So, we can’t know for sure about these particular plants. This is part of the fiction of the game.

On the other hand, the conductance, and therefore each plant’s personality, is based on the plant’s physical properties as well as the physical properties of the human player. Touching the plant in different places, with different degrees of pressure or different types of touches varies the soundscape, and humans themselves offer different skin conductance based on the dryness of their skin. These properties are not engineered, and the feeling of the human touching the plant’s skin is not made up. These physical properties form the unique character of the relationship between each plant and human, and I think the feeling of being connected to another living creature, even if it is mediated, is sincere.

The relationship formed, in the sense that is non-reproductive, is queer. There is also a sense of transgressive intimacy that comes from the fact that the game is generally played in front of a public audience, but that the plants come off as well…uh…quite thirsty. Plant metaphors – root, stem, bud, flower, etcetera are deeply embedded into romantic poetry traditions, meaning that words that are perhaps innocent when they refer to plants become sensual, even erotic, when contextualized in the game’s whispered ASMR soundscape. [slide]

CONTROLS AS THEATRE
It is possible to critique some custom controllers by saying that all that they do is reproduce extant control schemes without adding anything meaningful to the experience. Just because a button isn’t on a standard controller, that doesn’t mean it will create more meaningful interactions, or serve to make a better game. Under this category, I have included one of my latest collaborations with Dietrich Squinkifer, The Truly Terrific Traveling Troubleshooter, as an example of a physical-digital hybrid game that brings the fictional setting of its game world into the spaces that it visits. [slide]

The Truly Terrific Traveling Troubleshooter (2017)
by Jess Marcotte and Dietrich Squinkifer

You may have had the chance to play this game yesterday at lunch. The Truly Terrific Traveling Troubleshooter is a radically-soft game about emotional labour and otherness that fits entirely inside of a carry-on suitcase. One player takes on the role of the Troubleshooter and the other is a Customer with a trouble. Assisted by the Troubleshooter’s toolkit, the SUITCASE (Suitcase Unit Intended to Cure All Sorts of Emotions), the players work together to find a solution to this problem by following a series of steps. At the end of the encounter, the Customer decides whether or not the terms of their agreement with the Troubleshooter have been fulfilled, and whether the Troubleshooter has earned their payment — a coupon upon which a method of payment is represented.

There is a lot to say about emotional labour, radical softness and otherness, but I’ll focus on materiality and controls for the sake of this talk. First of all, all the “buttons” in this game are handcrafted objects which were crocheted or sewn by Dietrich Squinkifer and myself. I then embroidered the objects with conductive thread. There are nine objects: a fish, a beaker, a scroll, a lizard, an eyeball, an ear, a heart, teeth and a plant. When “consulted,” the objects play different statements which are then meant to be interpreted and serve as inspiration to working on a solution for the Customer’s trouble. The objects are meant to be interpreted in multiple ways by Troubleshooters and Customers alike, without a perfectly defined meaning. So, touching the teeth, for example, is as likely to yield “take a bite out of your enemies” as it is to say something like “talk it over.”

The soft, yielding tactility of the objects was similarly important to our design, suggesting a vulnerability and an openness that contrasts with the hard shell of the suitcase that houses them. Inasmuch as possible, everything that comes out of the suitcase (except for packaging materials that protect the objects inside) is diegetic to the universe of the game, including the Troubleshooter’s certificate from the Institute of Emotional Labour, which serves as a character sheet, the headphones, which are painted an antique gold, and the Troubleshooter’s manual, which is a hand-bound set of gameplay instructions. Embroidered upon the tablecloth are the game’s grounds, which are both functional and decorative.These are the ways in which the objects help to set a stage and assist players in getting into character. The physical objects in the game are also meant to serve as inspiration for improvisation, as well as to give the Troubleshooter something to fiddle with as they think. [slide]

A FEW CLOSING NOTES
*The status quo quickly becomes invisible or normalized.
*Game controls require a literacy that not everyone may have.
*We can create controls that destabilize standard control literacies.
*There are other interesting states and effects that game designers can aim for besides the flow state.
*Players are used to being powerful in mainstream games, but playing with that agency and that power can be generative.
*Making the invisible visible again, or even hypervisible, can be a generative design exercise.
*Alternative controllers can leverage materiality and embodiedness in ways that support queering, so long as they create interactions that are meaningful to the game. [slide]

[I’ve done my best to remember as many of the topics and themes of discussion that took place in the second half of the session, but wasn’t able to take notes. Apologies!]

DISCUSSION PERIOD

* One audience member talked about a friend who loved the idea of LARPing intimacy, but because of experiences in their background, was not down with the physicality involved. We briefly discussed ways of including intimate content/intimacy related content in LARPs without players having to act out these sequences, such as the fade-to-black technique, Ars Amandi, and countless others.
* One audience member brought up the innovative ways that Board Games are already leveraging controls and embodiment, such as by modifying the way that people make use of their bodies (specifically, the example of a game that uses a dental dam to alter the shape of a person’s mouth, distorting their speech). A fellow audience member noted that such uses of the body can be uncomfortable for some folks or even ableist, given that they often mimic disabilities (such as having a speech impediment), and we discussed how players, at the end of the day, can simply take off the controller or decide to stop playing when it ceased to be “fun.”
* This led to a discussion of some creators’ frustration with the notion of “empathy games,” which are sometimes assumed to be created for people who do not have that marginalization to “learn what it’s like” to be marginalized in that way, but a short experience like a game cannot stand in for years of life experience. And, furthermore, marginalized creators are unlikely to be creating their games for the sole sake of educating someone else.
* Another audience member brought up the importance of documentation for alternative game controllers such as video, since the controllers themselves are so often hard to access.
* In response to the design exercise I introduced at the beginning of the talk, an audience member brought up the idea of trying to make a game that, the better you did by standard metrics, the worse you would do in the game. This also brought the idea of doing well at doing objectionable things, like in Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please, or like in Brenda Romero’s Train.

WORKS CITED
Anthropy, A. (2012). Rise of the Video Game Zinesters. 1st ed. Seven Stories Press.
Barr, P. and Khaled, R. (2015a). A series of gunshots [game]., Pippin Barr, Montreal, Canada.
Barr, P. (2015). A series of shots in the dark. Pippin Barr, Available at http://www.pippinbarr.com/2015/10/26/a-
series-of- shots-in- the-dark/
Brice, M. (2016), Death of the Player. Mattie Brice, Available at http://www.mattiebrice.com/death-of-the-player/
Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. 1st ed. Durham: Duke University Press.
Jagose, A. (1996). Queer theory. 1st ed. New York: New York University Press.
Khaled, R. (forthcoming). ‘Questions over Answers: Reflective Game Design’, in D. Cermak-Sassenrath, C. Walker & T. T. Chek (eds) Playful Subversions of Technoculture: New Directions in Creative, Interactive and Entertainment Technologies, Springer, Berlin, Germany.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
Olou, R., Pacampara, N. & Phillips, H. (2015). We Are Fine, We’ll Be Fine. Critical Hit Montreal, Montreal, Canada.
Schrank, B. and Bolter, J. (2014). Avant-garde videogames. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Shinkle, E. (2008). Video games, emotion and the six senses. Media, Culture & Society, 30(6), pp.907-915.
Swink, S. (2009). Game feel. 1st ed. Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers/Elsevier.
Yang, R. (2014). Hurt Me Plenty [game]., Robert Yang, NYC, USA.

GGJ 2017: Some Thoughts on rustle your leaves to me softly

adventures in gaming, critical making, game jams, Process Writing, research

rustle your leaves to me softly

It seems wrong to call this a postmortem given that the project was just born on the weekend and involves living creatures, so instead I’ll call these “some thoughts.”

Plants, wow! Plants are amazing! I’ve been thinking of plants as an example of an “other” that could be helpful in conceptualizing designs’ for entities besides the standard human user ever since some conversations last year with Ida Toft. Donna Haraway’s writings are especially relevant here, but here’s an easy-to-digest BBC article about plants and their various sensory abilities and complexities that might serve as an introduction to the subject.

I’ve just recently started to split my time between here and Fort McMurray, Alberta. As a result, I had been talking with Squinky about making a plant that people in our lab could take care of that would signal their care to me far away through the internet. To that end, I had ordered things for a tweeting plant project , so I had a sparkfun redboard, some breadboards, some moisture sensors, and some other odds and ends for working with plants.

It was only after I had ordered these parts that TAG’s local diversifier for Global Game Jam 2017, Sustainability, was announced. As part of this diversifier, one of this year’s TAG Global Game Jam co-organizers, Liane, acquired a bunch of plants. Our brainstorm quickly turned to what we could make with these plants, and I don’t regret it.

Initially, we were supposed to have a third team member, Six, but unfortunately, after the initial brainstorm, they weren’t feeling up to jamming. I just wanted to make sure to highlight their contributions to our conversation, which sent us down some interesting rabbit holes that ultimately lead to us making what I think is a really cool experience. It’s called “rustle your leaves to me softly” and it is an ASMR Plant Dating Simulator. I’ll try to take you through some of our process in this post.

This year’s theme was “Waves.” We began to talk a lot about soundwaves and Squinky half-jokingly mentioned ASMR — I of course wrote this down on our brainstorm. We began to brainstorm around the idea of an “ASMRchestra” played by touching various plants. Six suggested a more intimate relationship with one plant, with more varieties of interaction, including flex sensors, touch, sound detection which would activate sound and LEDs on the plant, possibly in an intimate space like the tent.

After Six let us know that they wouldn’t be jamming with us, Squinky and I had to scope the design in a bit more tightly to accomplish our work with two people instead of three. As we experimented with the simplest version of what the game could be, we discovered that rather than just being a switch, the redboard could detect consistent/predictable ranges of resistance when hooked up as a button (with a ground, a resistor, and a plain wire). With a strong enough resistor, the ranges of numbers we were receiving varied consistently with softer and firmer touches, and a variety of touch locations (as well as on the person doing the touching – some people are more conductive than others, based on their skin moisture).

The ASMRchestra and the more focused single-plant experience were both still possible avenues of exploration, but we didn’t determine right away which we wanted to do. Instead, Squinky focused on the programming, both physical and digital, of the Arduino, determining how things should be connected up, and programming a system that would let us detect the variations in resistance, and play sounds accordingly. They massaged the feel of the interaction with different numbers and adjusted how sounds faded in and out based on those numbers. They found and implemented what we would need to achieve fine grain control over the sound.

Meanwhile, I began to research ASMR more closely, writing down common traits of the voices and sounds that I was hearing, including what kind of sound combinations were common. Here are some of my notes:

Overall, the ASMR community seems to think that everyone can experience ASMR and it’s just a matter of finding the right triggers. That means that there is a huge variety of possible triggers. What helped us focus in on the kind of ASMR we would be creating was the notion of a reciprocal relationship between human and plant. The human inputs caresses, touches, and other inputs (such as blowing wind across the plant’s surface, or speech) and the plant, in this narrative, responds to the touches that it appreciates by outputting an ASMR soundscape that it hopes will be pleasing to the human. Respect for the ASMR community was important for us, despite what might be considered the inherent absurdity of humans and plants in a sensual relationship like this one (I don’t think it’s all that ridiculous – we are intimately linked to our environment). We wanted our attempts at ASMR to be sincere, despite our limited time to work on it.

While Squinky worked on programming, I took up asset creation, including physical crafting. My first task was to select robust plant specimens that would be the least likely to be harmed by our touches as long as we were respectful (I chose one plant with waxy leaves and several succulents).

Next, I worked on building controllers/homes for our chosen plants using ceramic cups, river rocks, dirt, copper tape, wire, electrical tape, and screws. The copper tape on the outside of the cup was a convenient and aesthetically pleasing place to put the ground, as people could grasp the cup to steady the plant as they touched it. With Ida Toft’s advice, we used the fact that both the plants and the earth in their pots contained moisture and were conductive to avoid attaching anything to the plants themselves. The screw provided a large contact that I could simply plant in the earth.

As usual, a jam involving a good deal of crafting meant that I took several trips to the Dollarama to find and repurpose objects there for the project. We decided early on that we wanted to avoid using screens as much as possible if we could, so, with that in mind, I made sure that what there was to look at instead (the plants, the electronics, the instruction booklet, the housing for the electronics, the table where the game would be played at) would look as unified and as pleasing as possible. Aesthetics when people won’t be completely focused on a screen are important (and of course I’d argue that they’re important in general, with or without screens). Right before the playtest, I found a quiet spot and decorated it with a green tablecloth, setting up just what was needed to play our game on the table. It was a bit removed from the rest of the space since audio was important to the game. I made signs to lead players to the game that said things like “4 plants in your area looking to meet” and the name of our game and team (we were “TEAM TINY CACTUS,” by the way – everytime Squinky and I work on a new project together, we give ourselves a new team name).

By Saturday evening, we knew that our game was no longer ASMRchestra, despite that being an excellent pun name. I was concerned that hooking up all the plants up at once would discourage people from discovering their individuality, that it would instrumentalize them in more ways than one: that people would cease to see them as living creatures and see them just as controllers, and that they would just try to play them as instruments simply making sounds instead of responding to the feedback they were receiving. The relationship between each plant and human, with the human taking the time to discover their differences, became an important part of how I was thinking about the game. We retreated to the jam space’s campground (complete with tent) to figure out a new name for our game. Names are important, because they’re conceptual tools — they help me figure out how to think about a game. As we giggled to each other in the intimacy of the tent, we settled on “rustle your leaves to me softly” – it immediately suggested something that we hadn’t considered before: poetry.

For me, this was the missing piece of the ASMR script. I would write a poem that could be randomized, line by line, from the plant’s perspective. We recorded the poem and other sets of words that night. Here are the word sets and the lines of the poem.

Sunday morning, I worked on the instructions and on creating housing for our electronics. The instruction booklet is another example of functionality and aesthetics combined. Using a book from the Dollar store as a base, I had to remove the metal spiral because I’m left-handed and planned to handwrite the instructions inside. I replaced the spine with twine, and painted the name of the game on the cover. crafted the book itself and the instructions to go in it. With safety of plants in mind. Respect for plants and their safety became a key concern for us. As I wrote the instructions, I realized that the plants already had built-in personalities based on their physical properties and their needs in terms of physical safety. As I wrote the instructions, I had to translate their needs and suggest interactions into the language of dating profiles. Here are what the instructions looked like:

You can read the full instructions here, including more plant dating profiles.

The conceptual thought behind the game is rather twisty. As designers, we were trying to take on the perspective of plants, thinking in ways that we thought a plant might think, where the plant in question was trying to conceive what a human would appreciate most from them, without understanding just what a human was, and thus thinking of it in plant terms. Based on what we decided plants would like in ASMR, the plants are then trying to please human tastes.

Since the sounds could be dropped in afterwards, collecting them and putting them into the game was one of our last tasks. I collected Creative Commons 0 attribution license ambient music tracks, water droplets, rain, rustling leaves, and other sounds (sources can get a bit tricky in the heat of a jam, so I usually use CC0 resources). Based on my notes about ASMR, Squinky and I then recorded a series of plant-related words and the individual lines of the poem that I wrote to be randomized. Squinky then figured out how to layer them beautifully, figuring out volumes and when sounds should stop and start in order for the plant to feel most responsive without the sound design being too busy.

As we playtested the game, I was surprised at the intimacy created by the experience. I was also surprised that the context was so transposed, and that the sound was working so well together, that I didn’t even mind listening to the sound of my own voice coming from a plant. It was eery and touching all at once.

The official jam playtest went well, but there were way more people that wanted to play than could be accommodated over the course of the time that we had. This was a good sign, although it was also a shame. Those who did play seemed to enjoy the game. Their first reaction was frequently laughter – I think they laughed out of surprise. Afterwards, they often got quiet, contemplative. Some seemed reluctant to stop playing, but felt the pressure of others waiting behind them to play. Some players also experienced ASMR sensations for the first time. Many seemed to discover that touching the plant felt good – and felt intimate. The textures, combined with the responsive sound, made for a pleasing sensory experience.

Thanks to the very talented Matthias Graham (@coraxincarna), who took photos and filmed for us, and Squinky, who figured out a way to record the sounds as people were playing, we were able to cut together a rough version of a video of what the experience is like — unfortunately, without the tactility and without the pleasure of that immediate connection between touch and sound — for those who haven’t had a chance to play.

We hope to set up the game at TAG sometime soon so that more folk can play it! There’s more to say, I think, about this game, but I wanted to get out a few thoughts as soon as possible after the jam before they faded away.

JEKA GAMES

MAKING STUFF & WRITING ABOUT IT.

critical making