hotelbones @hotelbones - Tumblr Blog

Postcard Workers

Hi, my name is Condy Martin and this is my ongoing research on the 1960 Chicago Postal Workers protest game.

During the prime of its activity, the Chicago post office made the city a National postal hub as it was connected to various different transportation forms, organized for efficient movement of mail, and of course it was just really big.

In 1966 the Chicago Post-Office shut down due to a mail pile up of five million parcels.

It still stands today as one of Chicago’s large architectural structures.

After World War II Post Offices became less of a community meeting place and focused on the functionality of moving mail. Mail was increasing each year since the war with an estimate of 2.5 billion pieces of mail sent in 1945. It was for this reason that post offices like Chicago’s famous landmark were built.

Many believe that this shut down was the result of mechanical failure. The machinery was built without systems put into place to maintain them. Therefore, the assumption could easily be made that it was due to neglect that the shutdown of 1966 occurred. However, as my research goes deeper I am finding that was only the message that the government wanted to remain in the history books.

Neglect was the reason for the 1966 shut down. But it wasn’t just neglect of machinery, but neglect of the humans working the machinery.

I started doing research on this story as I recently made friends with a woman who worked in the post office during the days of its production. Her name was Addison McKay and we met at a bookstore while I was looking into President Lyndon Johnson’s Government Employment Policies.

Ms. Mckay happened to be there looking for a store that archived old catalogue scans. I overheard her search while I waited in line and told her to check out the public library downtown. I had used a lot of their archives in the past for my job. She thanked me and told me that she used to work for the post-office and couldn’t get a certain image of a catalogue out of her head.

We chatted for a bit and I asked her if she was aroudn during the shut down in ‘66. She told me she had been, even saying that she was a part of the reason it shut down.

“What do you mean you were part of the reason?”, I asked, “They claimed it shut down due to mechanical failure.”

“That’s what they want everyone in the education system to believe.” She chuckled, “But would a government facility really shut down over a production malfunction?”

She explained to me that the story of mechanical failure was a coverup to hide what really happened. The postal workers had brought production to a halt, but the mayor governor and post master lieutenant didn’t want other post offices to feel empowered by the act of protest.

At the time, postal workers were severely mistreated and underpaid. Many postal workers started at a salary of around $6,000 and even decades later may had only received a raise reaching $8,000. The conditions of working were abusive, overbearing, and unhealthy.

The management of their jobs had been given to an underdeveloped computer system that wasn’t prepared for the sheer amount of commodities coming through the facility. The newly implemented conveyor belts would break from their inability to handle the loads being put onto them. Mail piled over the workers, drowning them in piles of paper. The workers were only told to continue working in the conditions instead of fixing the system. “They tried to hide the problems of management with circus tickets and health care. But you can’t make the exhaustion of thousands of workers just vanish with benefits.”

When I thought it couldn’t get more interesting she told me that the way the workers protested was through a card game.

Interview w/ Ross Wents - 3/18/1996

How long did you work for the post office?

- Used to work in Baltimore at a cigar rolling company. Moved to Chicago in ‘64 and started at the new post Office.

- At the time the post office was giving jobs to everyone and anyone. The new building was 10 stories and the length of 10 super markets. (That’s what he says at least). They were desperate for any hands.

What was it like working at the post office?

- Now we think about the post office as this little place where people take your mail and give it to a smiling mail man. But the post office was hell. While the government compared us to soldiers to rally respect around the service of mail. We only received increasing mistreatment during our work hours.

- 12 Hour work days, interrogation for missing mail, verbal abuse from management, constant racism and sexism.

Did you play the card game?

- He did, he came in when there was already 30 people playing. But he ended up being a larger part of the game as he added the tally markings to the cards which really became the first step towards the final shutdown game.

I ask about what tallies mean but also if he remembers how the game works

- He would be surprised if someone could ever create a comprehensive ruleset on how the game functioned. Players never fully learned the game, the whole point was to make sure they never got caught. For example, if a worker on the sixth floor, package handling, was playing the game, their rules would work differently than someone working on the 8th floor, cancellation and first-class distribution.

- A few organizing workers understood the whole game. Those people were the ones who made sure new players understood what to do and how the symbols all worked.

How did the cards work for you?

- He worked on the fifth floor where mail with incorrect addresses or faulty formatting was handled.

- One of the important understandings each player had was they couldn’t interfere with the main responsibilities they had with their job. This was to ensure that people wouldn’t be caught by their managers for being inefficient employees, but the same mishandling of mail could happen somewhere else in the facility anyways.

- He remembered the following codes:

- A pair meant the letter was sent for cancellation

- Two pair meant the mail went to international in order for it to be returned and stay within the mail system perpetually.

- Red diamonds signified folding every five letters to come through.

Conclusion on Thesis 1

Here it is, the end of the first thesis semester. What’s funny about finishing this class is that it doesn’t indicate a sort of stop on thinking about the project. Despite most of the work for the semester done, my presentation and final papers finished formalizing the concept, it doesn’t stay that way. The project is just a thought constantly in flux, and the forms are all just artifacts of that process.

For my final presentation I decided to take the approach of pitching a manifesto I plan on writing over the break. Instead of detailing the design process over the course of the semester that touched on the magic circle and intimacy, this narrative covered how I had been thinking about relationships in games for most of my life.

For me, games have always been about the relationships surrounding them. As I created these slides to create a narrative around my work I finally realized this.

For the rest of the majority of the slides I had to provide a TON of context about the thinking that helped my work reach where it is at right now. It covered some of the oldest games, the influence of the military-industrial complex, how digital games became characterized, and how game studies has constricted the current forms of games.

THEN I finished off by showing some of the work I did this semester and how it applied to these concepts I introduced in order to lead up to the idea for the manifesto I had.

I had Katherine Moriwaki and John Roach as crits and both of them said that my deconstruction of the medium was good. They gave both thought that I gave a really compelling story to figure out what the intimacy of games really is. John suggested I look at Fluxus event scores and relational art aesthetics, both of which were big inspirations of thinking for the direction of my project. However, I had not considered the comment John said that “relational aesthetics in art is a critique stating that the whole system of art making is relational”.

Both of them felt like the scope of this project was so large, which is great, but that I need to really focus on a good endpoint for next semester. I wrote down in my notes, “how can I meaningfully engage with this project next semester?”. I have been considering this a bit, but I will save to answer this question for the end of this post.

They also noted that there were a couple points that need to reconnect, which makes sense because there is just so much history to put into 10 minutes, some connections may be a bit shaky on the first run.

The last, most helpful comment about this project was Katherine noting about my problem trying to find a way out of capitalism that, “It’s not about getting away from capitalism, but the awareness that we must participate in it and hate ourselves”.

Now all of this feedback was nice, but most of it felt like confirmation of my project in a short period of time given to discuss. It was nice but it didn’t feel like I received much new criticism that opened my mind to what was possible and what was going on. Then everything changed when I made a zine.

For the End of Semester Show ‘n’ Tell I decided the best way to present my work would be in the form of the zine. Most of my work was conceptual or language based, so I really wanted to put it all into a form that respected that instead of just throwing it all on a table. So I threw it all into a pdf instead! The funny thing is that last semester I did the same exact thing with A Taxonomy on Interweaving Games and Post-Play. If this continued to be a trend I think it would lead to participating in communities I want to be a part of (artist/DIY/zine).

What I didn’t expect most from Skein was how much overwhelming positive reactions I received from it. Prior to cutting everything out I thought I would just be showing some things I made to catch up with friends in the rest of MFADT. I especially thought this as most people at Major Major didn’t engage with the Interweaving Games zine. However, over 75% of people that read spent at least 15 minutes sitting, turning the pages and thinking. What was the most surpising is that they said they felt an emotional reaction to it, there were even a couple people that.....cried???? What???

There is a clear difference between Interweaving and Skein in the use of language. At the time of Taxonomy I was trying to make something for game academics as my audience. So the language was super dense and obtuse for anyone that wasn’t involved in that field. Skein was deeply emotional, it was produced from games that were about the personal emotions I went through this semester related to bodies, objects, and spaces. Plus, I made most of the work so even though it was emotional, it was typically removed from my perspective so it didn’t feel like I was telling a person how to feel.

Jess Irish was the first professor to stop by my table. She told me that so much of this work was in her field because of its use of text. What was great about getting her feedback is she gave me feedback on the use of specific words and how changing up parts of my work would have changed the expressions drastically.

She also gave me this idea that I should separate my work into two forms: a really radical, experimental printed form that replaces the thesis studio paper, and a form that is in place of the project. I don’t think I necessarily understood what she meant by this at this point, but others came and helped me think more about this idea.

Anna Harsanyi and Mattie Brice sat at my table at the exact same time shortly after and it was a major blessing. Holy cow. When Anna sat down she immediately was like, “please tell me you know about scores”. Then we just talked about how my work related to scores and what the current state of scores was. During the presentation and even bringing this zine to the show I thought of this work still much like a form that would exist in game communities, but this was the turning point of thought.

Both of them mentioned that my practice was a very well made intervention to make create new meaningful interventions for my community. But I guess I don’t really know what this means looking back because I don’t know what community is being referred to....

Anna said that I could probably pitch something to an art space like Recess. I have never been to Recess or heard of it prior to this point but I think I am going to look into a lot more... Mattie commented that this work makes sense for this point in time for games as the field has been trying to break into the art field for a while now and many of the forms are starting to become so similar in ways. She gave me a lot of books to read over winter break, but specifically told me I should look into methods of experimental ethnography because it would really open up a new side to my work.

Heres a couple questions I wrote down from this feedback:

- How do we transform the lived experience of a space?

- What does it mean to draw from life as material?

- How do you translate these observations into something else?

- How does one honor context? How do you honor other people’s experiences through your own?

I also asked about the issue I had this semester where a lot of this work was very personal and draining. Both of them responded that there isn’t a form of work that isn’t personal because it comes from ourselves. It’s just learning to create boundaries and structure for ourselves.

Mattie suggested last, that my thesis should be composed of two different parts. A personal, private, community performance that addresses my community’s needs through the forms I have used this semester. And second that a written, capitally receptive and communally respectful experimental document could take the form of the paper.

These three professors totally reframed how I looked at this project. I am so glad about the path I took to thinking about this thesis this semester. I wouldn’t have gotten to think through all of these things if I had done anything differently. But I think over winter break and next semester, I want to start thinking about how to move this project into a “game score” performance combined with a framework that pitches how to think about games relative to relationships.

Some final notes on what I would do if I went back in time and gave myself advice on the semester. And maybe these will be helpful for next semester. - You aren’t making any one thing for thesis. I know you think you know this going into thesis. But you are going to probably forget at some point. Everything you produce becomes an artifact immediately upon becoming formalized and it will be more valuable than any one thesis project could be. - Don’t feel like you have to follow any process people suggest. You do a fine job of thinking and making when you need to, even if you do get a little lost in the head cave sometimes. Just make sure to keep tabs with your advisors and friends to see if they can advise you when you need to take a break from thinking to make something. - If you have time, just make structures for yourself emotionally, reasonably, and socially. You are so bad at straining yourself and its gonna bleed into your work a lot

Demystifying. Remystifying.

For this past week I made some prototypes! Woah! But I don’t feel good about them yet. Oh. No big deal, failure is normal in the process, but maybe I am just getting a little fatigued of not finding something that feels good for a while.

With both of these prototypes I think I am just struggling with how to move forward with them. I have user tested some but the feedback hasn’t returned any feedback that has provided light on potential. I also am concerned about the thesis of this work.

Makey Things

Video Art

I decided to mess with video art after I met with Liza. I had some anxieties related to the thesis show and how I wish I just had something that conveyed my idea with 30 seconds to 1 minute. That’s pretty much the average time people stayed at my table last semester. So it feels like that’s a good estimate for this coming sharing show as well. Maybe the thesis show shouldn’t influence the direction of my project, but it’s hard for it not to when its one of the few times during the thesis process that a large group has the potential to validate your work.

The video is footage from the football game I wrote about in last week’s post which has been masked in a circle, with background footage of a walk through Cleveland city being obscured and distorted by noise.

I know there could be more here but I just don’t know the direction it is. I thought about adding in some parallels to non-game violence but it felt too intense. I’m not sure what to do here. I will maybe ask people what they think.

Metagame Essay

Another idea I had during this week was creating a “metagame essay”. This idea came to me after being recommended to watch “Fighting in the Age of Loneliness” by Felix Biederman and Jon Bois. At the 8:54 mark, Biederman has us zoom out to look at the larger picture of UFC’s history, revealing a large historical anthology graphic. However, it also kind of looks like a game board to me. And as I thought about this video art idea (above) I started to wonder what ways there could be to experiment with video art. I stared at some twitch streams for a while just to consider formats. Then I had the idea of creating video art that was simultaneously a metagame.

If you don’t want to read that academic book I linked, a metagame is just a game made ontop of something playful, maybe that is even on top of another game. So the idea was to create a video that would stream through a game streaming service like mixer or twitch.

The whatsapp messages above is the 5ish hours-in playtest I am currently holding just to see how people react to questions and how I can make adjustments to an image based on their answers. However, similar to the video art I am just not too sure where this is going. I don’t want to make a project that is just me being like, “who knows the right answer?”. But maybe it feels like that because I am doing it through whatsapp. I think there is another insecurity here as well.

Thinky Things

Design Misfits

In my Design Misfits class I have also been thinking through the magic circle. However, in thesis I have been working through modern effects of the magic circle aesthetics/ideologies while in that class I am tracing the word back to its original root and then looking at the effects of its appropriation. We are getting close to our final project in the class and as I have been doing research I have realized.....a loooot of people have written on this stuff. And after dropping the argument that intimacy is the answer to the magic circle I kind of lost any concise argument. So what am I even trying to say with my work about the magic circle? I’m not really sure right now. I will maybe go through some of my old posts and rethink some things.

Metagames

When I think about metagames I can’t stop thinking of Memento Mortem Mortis that LeMieux and Boluk made for their book. As the player you have to navigate through a 3D maze that must be navigated through the anamorphic distortion of the skull. Instead of looking around to move through the next turn of the maze, you have to look at a new side of the skull. It’s meant to create a critical connection between anamorphic games like Portal, echoCHROME, and levelhead to Robert Lazzarinni’s anamorphic sculptures.

I like this project because it is so densely expressing ideas within the game. The expression coming through the game is not one representing a system, but it is an artful critique, a densely packed image.

Timeline:

(12/2) Find what feels good about this project and argument & continue prototypes

(12/7) Make proof of concept of whatever that good feeling thing is.

(12/9) Presentations??

(12/14) Thesis show

Ponder Digest

Alright so this week I didn’t make anything. I was still figuring out where I am going after the 7 in 7. I will just cover a little bit of the things I did to digest and think.

Kateřina Šedá’s work and process

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEvn_HmGdnA

After last week I really wanted to look into Šedá’s process to determine what I felt connected to. I found it interesting that despite Šedá not considering herself in a games field or in games art, she calls all of her work game. I spoke to a couple people about this and it always seemed up for contest. That’s pretty interesting to me. Šedá’s work always studies areas and relationships for periods of time to determine a problem she observes. As she says, “I am most interested in connecting people based on their challenges.” This results in art like Everything is Perfect and It’s Too Late in the Day (I chose these two because they were the most interesting to me)

Patrick Lemieux’s “Everything but the Clouds”

Everything but the Clouds from Patrick LeMieux on Vimeo.

https://vimeo.com/241966869 As I am determining a path forward I am increasingly remembering how I got to this point in thesis, pushing back against the magic circle but more broadly pushing back against what is considered “fixed” and “unassailable” in games. If I take a step away from intimacy entirely and focus on tracing the magic circle I start to wonder what forms that can take. Originally my idea was to create a game design framework that rejects the concept of the magic circle entirely. But now I am more interested in displaying the effects of the concept’s acceptance from colonial origins and its contradictions in the capital system. These still connect with what I have been doing, but I may just take a new approach. In my Design Misfits class the professor Emmanuel Guy suggested that sometimes we need to think about what needs to be undesigned rather than designed. This is what made me think of Patrick Lemieux’s “Everything but the Clouds”. The linked video video documents his exhibition project to deconstruct Cory Arcangel’s “Super Mario Clouds” through analysis and recreation. I really like the idea of deconstruction as a project that becomes a form of academic analysis, art exhibition and historical trace. This may be the direction I take with this.

Mia Consalvo & Chrisopher A. Paul “Real Games”

I saw some people on Twitter talking about Mia Consalvo’s new book that asks the question “What is a real game?” and my MS2 brain jumped into action. Consalvo already has a lot of work on the magic circle, so for her to also be asking what is a game just felt like a really weird parallel. I haven’t finished the book yet, but as I go deeper it seems to be less about the broader concept of a game as much as what game-y games are considered a game or not a game.

What I found to be valuable book is the criticality towards game studies construction, something I am thinking about more and more as my work progresses. Specifically they write:

“…as a field, games studies hasn’t deeply grappled with its exclusions and omissions in its quest to have games research taken seriously. That idea keeps unreflective and dominant ideas about what a real game should be…”

This is super true, but in the book what a real game should be falls short as it only focuses on the language around Facebook games.

Browns player Myles Garett assaults Mason Rudolph with Helmet

Yeah I know, sports, it seems a little weird for the work I have done so far. But increasingly within the last month cases of the magic circle have appeared in front of me that I just can’t ignore. I spent the weekend in Las Vegas for my sister’s birthday and if you don’t know Las Vegas has massive screens airing sports everywhere. So I spent all the time walking around cigarette smoke filled areas, playing cards, and watching sports thinking about how they connect to my own work.

What’s interesting about this Myles Garett assault is that the attack on Mason Rudolph breaks the magic circle barrier of what we deem to be acceptable violence in sports. It’s possible it could have suffered permanent damage based on the attack. However, the victim didn’t pursue any action outside of the game against Garett. Instead the only discussions happening are whether or not Garett should face consequences within the league. Quote from people “What I did was foolish and I shouldn’t have allowed myself to slip like that,” he added. “That’s out of character, but a situation like that where it’s an emotional game … I allowed myself to fall into those emotions with that last play and what happened.” I think this is an interesting case of violence in games because it shows how much we attribute to games without really considering why. I don’t have much more nuanced thoughts to it right now, but its seriously interesting and it allowed me to have conversations about my work with a couple of people this weekend that have no involvement in my work.

Timeline Update

It’s hard to know what this work is going to result in form-wise at the moment. Hopefully I will make some things over the course of the next week so I will make another vague timeline.

11/28 - 12/05 : Create some artifacts/forms that represent what I want to emphasize, and my research to this point. 12/07-09 : Pop Up Show thing???

Thesis thoughts

I ended the last blog post on a note feeling like the questions I was getting from my lecture were highlighting a problem in my project. Something that was calling for me to assess my current direction instead of continuing to narrow what I was thinking about. I didn’t make anything this past week, I have mostly just been trying to figure out what this project is going to be. I have primarily thought about this through conversations with others. Specifically John Sharp, Kalyani Tupkari, and some of my coteachers in Colleen Macklin’s “Gaming the System” class. When I spoke to Kalyani on Monday earlier this week for our roleplaying assignment one of the most helpful things that came from me spontaneously generating what the directions I am thinking this project could go. This resulted in: - A study on the current state of intimacy

- A critical design history of magic circle aesthetics

- A continuation of the work between intimacy and the magic circle

The next day I spoke with John about my project for a little bit and it really highlighted part of the struggle I was having with my project. I had gone back to the anxieties I was having in MS2. What is a game? What is valuable expression as a game?

John reminded me of a great project called, There is Nothing There by Katrina Šedá. The project was a game that asked everyone in the Moravian town of Ponětovice to follow a designed routine for an entire day. The value of the creation of this game was bringing the citizens of the town together to think about their community through the creation of participatory social practice art. On top of that the project was also valuable through its documentation which highlighted questions about social practice art and games. (Something that I think other art pieces are not addressing as thoughtfully).

Thinking about games as art brought me back to my Game about Destressing for Two Players. The game was originally designed to co-create an artifact with me creating themed rules that focus on certain themes of emotions playesr are feeling. Originally this project was to think about how games can be rendered unplayable past their first time played unlike the replayability of most games. IT was also to think about creation from play. However, it’s interesting thing about thinking about this project in the context of “There is Nothing There” and intimacy games makes me rethink a lot of this project.

John also reminded me that I am not going to solve anything by the time thesis is over. And he is right. That is the mindset I had going into thesis. I just wanted to think about things and have some artifacts by the end. I am going to try and work back into that mindset. But there’s probably a valuable blog post to be written about why that changed over the course of this semester.

Lastly, before teaching class this past week I got a chance to ask my co-teachers what they thought about my lecture? All of them thought it was so invaluable but what I liked the most was what James Trybendis said to me; “I think you should definitely keep making these games. Not because they are being made to be put into place where the world’s social systems fail, but to highlight how those social system’s rules are failing through game rules.” Oh hell yeah James. So now I am just thinking about what the next step of this project will be. As Thesis Pop-up pressure builds, so does a social pressure to have made something physical to show. New Timeline

I honestly am not sure what a timeline looks right now because I don’t know what I need to have by the end of the semester. I was using trello before but since I haven’t updated it in a bit I am a little scared to start updating it. Like if I pull one toothpick from the sculpture it will all fall apart so lets just....take baby steps here on this blog post...I am gonna try and look at my cohort’s timelines to get an idea of what I need.

11/17 - Determine direction (For the next couple of days I am going to re-assess more of the old work I did in MS2 and consider how it may relate to my work. - I want to do some research into games as art and art in the public sphere. I may look at more of Šedá’s work and look for similar work then see what ideas I have to produce.) 11/28 - 12/05 : Pretty up the artifacts and documentation of this semester for final presentations and pop up 12/07-09 : Pop Up Show

7 in 7: The road swirls forward, Jouissance hangs in the air

This blog post is coming later than the assigned date because the past week (and a half) has been difficult. I have blogged on here in the past about struggles with feeling a belonging, and panic over what I am studying. However, the past week has just been rough because I used my own emotions for the material of my work.

Progress Report

It’s the week of the midterms so I have been focusing on my powerpoint and paper mostly. That means I haven’t gotten to work on forms, but instead I have just been refining my thoughts and feelings about my work.

Intimacy and Refractions

This post is part 2 of 2 for the weekly MFADT Thesis 1 blog posts. You can find the first part here.

I was going to try and push myself to make some forms today and then post late. However, as I have done a couple hours of thinking and working, it seems that I would be trying to pack too much work into a small period of time I have left myself. So, I will just be posting the materials I have so far and posting the artifacts that come as a result next week.

Come Out and Play, Keep The Real Astray

This post is part 1 of 2 for the weekly MFADT Thesis 1 blog posts. I am writing this part after going to Come Out and Play so I can document my thoughts and then write in a different state of mind once I produce some forms. Part two can be found here.

Reframing the Magic Circle

I was a little stubborn getting to actually writing this weekly post. The past week has been the most subtle and insecure week I have had for this project. I spent every day playing catch up with everything going on that thesis wasn’t the primary focus in my mind, so it felt like I didn’t get anything done. However, in retrospect I may find this week to be one of the most fruitful of this year long journey.

Two Deconstructions and a Process

It’s been about a year and some time since I was introduced to the design process and started making work under its name. However, as time goes on I am beginning to understand that I have my own process. While words like “domain”, “prototype”, “user testing” could all be somehow applied to my process, it wouldn’t necessarily fit.

Deconstructing Scores

Flux Scores

Deconstructing New Games

There are a lot of misconceptions about The New Games Movement it seems. Everyone that talks or writes about the time knows that there is a history of the games being somehow formed to protest the Vietnam war and its military technologies, but really the specifics of the movement always seem to be changing with a new person’s story.

A question in form

A Designer’s Sum

The DT Mythos

“What does it mean to design?”

Chocolate-Dipped Brain Bites

This post was written as an assignment for Parsons Design & Technology Thesis 1 taught by Liza Stark and Ethan Silverman. It contains a self-bio, questions I generated over the summer, and prototypes I made before the beginning of the semester.

#thesis #parsons #mfadt

A reflection and deliberation

in iI took a lot of time to think about what direction I would be taking my Major Studio 1 final this past weekend. At the midterm presentation I stated I was interested in intimate games and my idea of “Queer Play” from my manifesto. However, I have realized through this brainstorming process that my manifesto was not a fully developed idea. I like the idea of a metamodernist queer design philosophy. However, as I received feedback from the manifesto I felt that it really didn’t fully connect with who I am and how I design. It is very close but maybe not spot on. So I decided to continue designing and learn through my designs what my philosophy is along the way.

I wanted to continue designing around queerness and something I have been thinking about a lot this semester was queerness in games. I already developed a queer game this semester about my experience being non-binary. However, it was moreso about my emotional experience being non-binary and used as a communication tool for my peers. It isn’t something I really want to release as a public work, and I don’t want it to make an impact on anyone outside of my social circle.

But queering games was still a concept interesting to me. I just couldn’t figure out what exactly about it was interesting.

On Friday I went to the Whitney Museum of American Art and checked out their exhibition “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographs in Art”. It really brought me back to my undergraduate studies on computational effects on capital structures and society. However, what specifically has stuck with me was Sol LeWitt’s Instruction For Wondrous Walls. It was amazing because LeWitt had created a game that was also generative art. It was not generative art by the normal standard. However, if we see Sol LeWitt’s “Instructions” physical laborers as a metaphor for computers giving directions to each other in order to complete a task it becomes more clear to me as such.

This fascinated me, the idea of a game as a cultural artifact. It wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine games as pieces of human-made, cultural history and it wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine games being archived in a museum. Both of these things I had seen before. But what interested me was the idea of something so far off from the game commodity, but still being a game, saved as a historical artifact.

So I had two ideas that I wanted to utilize for my project, but I couldn’t figure out how to go about combining them. I also had a really hard time considering what I considered to be queer. So I decided that was my next step to take.

I started by reading Schrank and Bolter’s book “Avant-Garde Video Games”. While I do not at all agree with their ideas of video games and the binaries of “art games” and “non-aesthetic games” I did find some information that was helpful. Schrank states that video games are a site which culture normalizes ways which we think and play with technology. As he says, “...each game becomes a microcosm of technoculture”. This brought me to start thinking of Mattie Bryce’s talk from Design for the Century about using play for people to think of their futures.

If video games are what normalizes the ways that we play and think with technology, what if we changed the futures’ histories of important video game artifacts of our time? I liked the idea of replacing the multi-million video games being replaced by something that was much queerer or subversive. However, I still didn’t know what that would be so I kept researching into what queerness was.

Then I found Bonnie Ruberg’s work on queerness and video games. Really she didn’t say much that I had not already studied before. But she finally was the person that worded in a way that clicked with me. “Queerness is desiring, being, or playing differently.” Ruberg brings up representative queer games but also games that metaphorically are queer such as Realistic Kissing Simulator, Octodad, and Burnout Revenge.

This was helpful to me because many times when I talk to people trying to understand what queerness is all I got was that it was what I thought it was, or that it was against heteronormative values. But both of these answers were too broad for what I was looking for. Instead, Ruberg’s specific ideas of queerness and games have helped me really get back to understanding what my idea of queerness and games is.

So at this moment, I want my project to be a collection of installed, modern video games which have been modded to be displayed simultaneously with written works. These written works will be variations of poems, rulesets, and short stories about queerness that will be paired with the queer metaphors of modern, popular games. My hope is with these, I will be able to create a collection of play that rethinks the past, present, and future of identity, play, and queerness.

Class and Readings Update

Last week in Fei’s class we took part in two activities over the course of the week. On the first day we had to bring precedents to class for what inspired our ideas. For each one of the inspirations we had to write the medium that the precedent was made in. Then, we all crumpled up the post its we wrote the mediums on and threw them at each other.

This resulted in people having a total of 2-4 different mediums that could help them think of a new perspective for their ideas. For me I ended up with three different mediums. “Woven Textile”, “Motion Graphic”, “Academic Article”.

None of these mediums were what I was interested but I was open to figuring out if I could come up with an idea that sounded interesting from these three. I gathered into a group with Akshansh, Yuqi, and Adam. We each went around talking about ideas and for me they ended up coming up with an idea of shredding academic articles and weaving them into a wearable. While it was an interesting idea, it didn’t consider anything that I had theorized with my idea and it didn’t engage with queerness and games. It felt like the group was focusing more on the mediums rather than the concept in tandem with the mediums.

I talked with Fei after class that evening and told her about my idea. We talked for a little while and she helped give some ideas to me. However, the most helpful thing that she told me was that I need a more accessible way of describing what queerness is when presenting my projects. I think the way she said it to me was, “define your queerness”. I found that very helpful as many times when I present I always receive feedback that finds queerness to be mysterious.

I think my definition of queerness for this project (because its an ever changing, fluid concept) is inspired by the assigned pieces by Robert Yang and Guy Debord. Possibly even Barthes.

For me, queerness aims to analyze, create, and find work against the spectacle which has maintained an economy that has oppressed queer lives for such a long period of time. To define spectacle I think of I think of one of the many descriptions of spectacle that Debord has in his book:

“...the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle's essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life - a negation that has taken on a visible form.”

This part of Debord’s writing states that the spectacle from an brief, initial, outside view can be seen as an affirmation of all lives. However, with a deeper view it is actually negating other lives. I believe that Debord is writing about the separation of the laborers and those that manage the laborers. However, for my context I specifically want to refer to the negation of queer actions, history, and lives.

Funnily enough, Yang states that many times video games are one of those spectacles when trying to interpret Frank Lantz definition of video games.

“...video games often try to present a sort of audio / visual "total work of art" spectacle that demands your complete attention and immersion, but to achieve that bombastic effect we also have to engineer physics simulations and future-proof code bases to work for many years.”

So if video games are a form of spectacle that has been reinforcing the economy which erases and harms queer lives what if one was to in turn create a new identity for them in history? This is where my idea comes in (go back above to read about it.)

I think that Barthes’ “death of an author” is relevant to this but perhaps not to the extreme which he writes. Barthes advocates that the reader is the one which the writing is inscribed to and that, “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but its destination.” He believes that for so long the author was an arrogant figure but now the truth in writing can only really come out if the roles of control between the author and reader switch.

I do think that part of the spectacle that is a part of games culture needs a “death of the author” moment. However, I question whether my project is really aiming to kill the original creator. While I will be taking games out of their original context and repurposing them. I do believe that it is different than the audience finding their own meaning in a work. Instead what I am doing almost feels like “Faking the Author”. A hope to create an alternate future, and an alternate history.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

hotelbones