Author: Grace

In my opinion, one of the most devastating impacts of the current Trump Administration is the cut to funding for international aid and development. The reality of these cuts is that it puts people’s lives at risk and ignores how U.S. economic interests have directly harmed the lives of people in other countries. A big advocate for this mass defunding is Elon Musk, the richest person in the world and  figurehead of the Trump Administration. It is important to note his wealth because a lot of it has come from taking advantage of the exploitation of resources, which can particularly be recognized in the continent of Africa. Specifically, his dad profited from questionable Emerald mining and Elon relies on the problematic mining of cobalt to power his rockets and electric cars. Therefore, it becomes ironic that Musk advocates for cuts to international development because the same communities he exploited to gain his unimaginable wealth he is now leaving behind. This inspired the question that drove the development of David and I’s critical game: how do some of the world’s richest people become wealthy and how does it come at the expense of others?

In order to explore this question, David and I decided to work with the classic childhood game ‘Operation.’ We wanted to reskin the traditional play of the game like Flanagan describes in Critical Play: Radical Game Design where we disguised the game board, so it is no longer a human body, but instead a map of Africa (33). Additionally, we disguised the objects meant to be taken out of the body, so they were instead natural resources. We also engaged in rewriting aspects of the games by “revising the narrative” when a player touches the metal edges with the tweezers, so instead of losing their turn it counts as a human rights violation (Flannagan, 33). Then, if a player gets three violations we decided that they would get sanctioned by the UN and therefore no longer able to extract any resources. This works to point out the ways in which there are some sort of regulations attempting to hold businesses in-line, but ultimately they are not super effective as shown by each player having three chances. Additionally we revised the role of the player, so they are no longer acting as a surgeon, but instead a business tycoon trying to make money. In this way, the goal of the game is to be the business tycoon who makes the most profits off of Africa. 

The player has the opportunity to choose between being one of four individuals that are directly based off of real life businessmen who actively profit off of exploiting African resources: Errol Musk, Elon Musk, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and Dan Gertler. For each of these businessmen we designed a player card that briefly describes their motivations and how they make their money off of natural resources. We chose to keep a child-like whimsy in the characterization of these people because we didn’t want the dark realities of what the players are doing to be inherently apparent to the players at first. However, the jovial tone of the character descriptions is contrasted with the dark underbelly to the true processes in which resources are extracted from African countries. 

In addition to basing the characters off of real life, David and I identified 10 lucrative resources that are prevalent in Africa to serve as the resources that the players are ‘extracting’: wood, coal, ivory, copper, emeralds, cobalt, gold, diamonds, petroleum, and gypsum. For each of these materials we mimicked the original operation game by designing a little card that describes the reason why these materials would be considered valuable to a businessperson and we assigned each of them a value loosely based on these materials real world values. Part of the motivation for describing the use of each material was to demonstrate how many of these resources are parts of our everyday lives emphasizing our reliance on Africa for its resources. We also were thoughtful to locate all of the resources on the African continent in a location relative to where these resources are most heavily extracted. The physical board shows the location of these resources exist all over the continent of Africa speaking to the vastness of this problem.

After playing the games with some friends, I was better able to understand the reality of the game is that players aren’t really thinking about the consequences of what they are doing because their ultimate goal is to win. This speaks to the motivations of the businessmen our game is criticizing because their motivations for profits outweigh their thought for the environment and communities they are harming with their actions. It is only after the game finishes that I think the reality sets in on what the players were actively doing speaking to influences of the capitalist mindset. 

While I do think this game is a successful commentary on billionaires profiting off of the  exploitation of African resources, I think there is more that could be done to contribute to this ‘critical play’ experience. For one, I feel like more could be done to emphasize the actual impacts that come from taking resources. I think this could maybe be done through a penalty card system, where players draw a card if they touch the metal edges and it describes a direct impact on the environment or community that their actions had. I also think it would be interesting to more involve companies as a part of the criticism because the game emphasizes that individuals are responsible for the resource draining and fails to account that it is many businesses as well. I also think in general it was challenging deciding how much context to provide, for example we wondered if we should mention specific countries and their relationship to resource extraction or just keep the game more broad. These are all questions to consider, if we choose to develop this project in the future. 

*We would like to note that we used Chat GPT for rewriting the instructions of ‘Extraction.’ We did this because the original instructions were quite long, so we thought it would be a better use of our time to have an artificial intelligence write out the entirety of the  instructions instead. We then went back and made edits to make sure that the instructions were still conveying the original message we intended with our game. We acknowledge the inherent problems with AI and that it is not necessarily accurate information, but we believed for writing the instructions it would not be directly presenting direct facts to our audience, instead the rules for play based on our shorter instructions for game play.

Works Cited

Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (2009)

“Rewrite the instructions of Operation based on this attached document where we have reskinned the game to be a commentary on resource extraction in Africa” prompt. ChatGPT, 18 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2025, chat.openai.com/chat.

I love poetry, but this has not always been the case. For a long time, I found it hard to relate to and felt like I was unequipped to actually understand the deep complexities of it. This served as the inspiration for my first hack, where I wanted to think about how the makey-makey could poke fun at the usual seriousness and pretentiousness  associated with poetry and make it more attainable to a wider audience.

I created a poetry generation game where the player uses a console to build a poem composed of randomly generated poetry lines coming from Shel Silverstein and Edgar Allen Poe. Poe because he is a critically acclaimed poet for his genius and artistry, yet darker themes. This contrasts  Silverstein, who is taken less seriously and known for his childlike uses of language and themes. I wanted to understand if these two poets’ words, put together, could still generate poetry that appears to have meaning or fits into the category of poetry.

From my many experiments generating poems, I find that generally the Silverstein and Poe work somewhat well together to create a sort of sensical and interesting poem. A serious student of poetry would probably be somewhat appalled by these poems, but that is part of the way in which the game pokes fun at the eliteness associated with poetry, where a poet so different from Edgar Allen Poe can still have their verse fit together with his somewhat well. 

I was thinking about Caillois’ ideas on chance games or Alea, where the player lacks control of the outcome. I thought this was interesting to incorporate into my game because the player can’t really choose what they are actually writing; they just get to choose who wrote the next line and when the poem is complete. In this way the player has some level of authorship to their poem, but the exact result is completely up to fate. In this way the game is an equalizer in creating poetry because it doesn’t matter who is the best with their words or most thoughtful, in the end the actual writing is up to chance. 

I would hope with this game that it allows the player to feel like the world of poetry is not that far out of reach. I tried to continue this message through the craft-like enclosure I made that is meant to evoke childhood and fun. In this way, I wanted to create less seriousness centered around the poems and try to make them come across as a fun output, hence making poetry generation into a game itself.

 Yet at the same time, while my game may show anything can be poetry it doesn’t necessarily mean everything should be. Even so, I think the opportunity to experiment with poetry through this game allows a user to learn it doesn’t have to be taken so seriously, which I hope would inspire future appreciation of the art form.