Category: Critical Play

Most of the challenges this week were related to the hack. I decided to redesign a childhood board game, Ludo. Finalizing the idea for the hack took a long time, and I started several different ones before landing on this. One challenge designing the hack was to figure out the amount of changes I could make to the game without losing all identity of the original game. I did not want to redesign every aspect of it and create a new board game entirely, but rather to reuse existing gameplay mechanics to support my critique. Research about the history of the game showed that most versions of the game have been surprisingly consistent across countless adaptations and variations, so i decided to keep the original format of the game, the cross design (an unfortunate resemblance with a swastika, as one student pointed out). I also decided to retain the original color scheme, as it offers a good contrast to the seriousness of the theme. 

Another challenge while designing was to balance the gameplay such that the majority demographics (neurotypical, american) did not become the target of the critique. My goal was not to pit students against each other, or call out certain groups for having more privileges, but rather to highlight the challenges faced by minority groups in order to challenge authorities, like college administrations, faculty, etc., who often overlook such challenges and assume that the majority demographics represent the standard college pathway, and any students with extenuating circumstances need to prove they are not lazy (guilty until proven innocent), and show evidence of adversity through ridiculous procedures before being trusted and given access to whichever accommodations, medical support, and flexibility in academic pathways that they need to succeed. Of course, the design inevitably brings other students’ attention to the specific obstacles faced by minority groups, but I had to cautiously restructure the gameplay to direct the overall critique away from some toxic narrative, like  neurotypical vs neurodivergent. 

Creating the physical board for the game was actually much harder than the digital design, even though the former took much longer. Mainly because I did not have a large enough piece of cardboard to do the job, and kept missing the Maker Space hours due to scheduling conflicts. I decided to cut through a TV box i had, which ended up working well, but required some tedious craftwork to make it look presentation worthy. It was also a challenge to print the huge design onto multiple papers without damaging the symmetry of the design. Plus, I sadly misjudged the center of the board when gluing the first piece, and then again, and again, somehow, which is why the final board may have seemed annoyingly off-center. Although, I like how the design turned out on paper.

This week’s readings were challenging in various ways. I struggle to remember exact terms or rules from readings, and focus more on the overall concepts and themes, which wasn’t directly compatible with the quick quiz questions in class. The readings have a large range in terms of topic and focus, so it helps to connect the overarching concepts together. Each reading also introduces a large, often improvised or new vocabulary the author has used to make sense of the concepts they are explaining, which is useful for building an epistemological structure for digital studies but not as useful in a fast-paced class like this where quick integration and application of those concepts is more essential than memorization of specific terms those concepts were referred to by a particular author, which tends to happen gradually and with longer-term engagement with each term, at least for me, and its hard to maintain that memory with weekly introduction of large vocabulary sets. So that is still a challenge for me while reading.

Other than that, i had some confusions this week about the prompt for Hack#2 as I brainstormed and finalized my idea. Some students brought it up in class so its clearer now, but the confusion was mainly related to the extent of physical expected in the hack. The prompt allows for some significant critical interventions with very little manipulation of artifacts, but that seemed somehow undesirable in a Davidson courseload.

The readings this week gave me a lot of new perspectives on the structure of the games and play, and their epistemology within the human experience. They were challenging reads at times, and I ended up spending a lot more time on each than I anticipated. I also had to go back and reread several sections to connect them with our discussions in class on Tuesday more successfully. I think it requires some significant unlearning of social and cultural attitudes around games and play to adapt these new ways of looking at them, such as recognizing how lack of choice in play can lead to a particularly meaningful form of engagement if done right, and may even be necessary in a lot of the standardized game design approaches surrounding us.  

I think Tuesday’s werewolf activity was a brilliant exercise in analyzing play, and fun as a group activity. The hard part was not playing more rounds, and the occasional social anxiety, of course.

Also, I got sick this week and had to miss class on Thursday. Its a failure on my nervous system’s end but quite a successful hack by the virus.

Working with the Makey Makey was the main highlight of this week for me. I did not face any issues understanding or setting it up, but I did get stuck coming up with the idea for the project. The Hack#1 guidelines encouraged an out-of-the-box use of the device, something beyond just a controller function for a digital tool, as I understood it. However, most implementations of the Makey Makey seemed to end up using it as a controller-enabler for a digital app. Initially, I decided to turn a chair into a VR controller, using the feet and armrests as buttons for movement within the game, but again, I wasnt sure if that would qualify as a particularly new use since it fit the controller-for-app concept.

It took me most of the week just to get to the idea of using a conductive handheld board with a freely moving object inside it, instead of using a finger or limb movement to press buttons. Implementing it was not as difficult, just tedious. The surface of the board had to be carefully wrapped in aluminum foil without letting it wrinkle, which was a challenge. I did go down a rabbit hole of installing Arduino to somehow remap the Makey Makey keys, before realizing it was much simpler to just do it on scratch.

When writing the Artist’s Statement, I followed my own approach, using concepts from the readings as I understood them, but not directly referencing any author, and I’m not sure now if that was the expected writing style.

I think the demoing process in class can be improved. The Hack uses a lot of tiny, sensitive parts that can easily become misaligned, and transporting them to the screen and setting them up right before presenting can add a lot of uncertainty and anxiety. My project didnt require going up to the screen, but it was still difficult to demo it while everyone was physically oriented towards the screen. One possible redo could be to have each student set up their project on a separate table/space in the classroom, and demo it one by one, and then have students walk around and use each others’ projects. Plugging into a big screen is not necessary in this case, as each student can get up close to the laptops, which is also a more realistic use of the product in most cases. It’s still possible to connect each computer to the tv screen from a distance (T&I could set it up), if more desirable. Then, students can take turns talking about each project.

Apart from the Hack, there wasn’t much else to face a challenge with so far. The readings this week were quite insightful.

This class is a new concept for me in many ways, including this flog. The particular assignments and class structure and approach are very unique, especially compared to Computer science and Math courses I’ve taken as a CS major. Of course, the unfamiliarity requires an initial adjustment which was the main task for me this week. I definitely enjoy and appreciate this class structure for it’s creative prompting.

I like the classroom choice, although it is inconvenient to reach a charging station the way the tables are set up at the start of class usually, which is a significant hindrance. There are movable charging stands in the room though, so I will try to reposition one somewhere more accessible and hope the library staff don’t mind it too much.

I also had some challenges setting up this flog through Davidson domains. It seems you cannot change the domain name you initially created your Domains account with, which in my case was for a coding project called StudBud. It’s not a name I want to stick with for this class, so I’ll see if T&I can help me fix that. Navigating wordpress took a while to readjust to, and feels more complicated than necessary in some areas, but it’s a smoother experience now that I understand the basic structure.

The readings have been interesting so far. I have disagreements with the authors, in both perspectives, on the overall duality of the ways they define play. There are various ways to reconcile their differences by visualizing play in context of its emotional significance and psychological effects for conscious beings as part of the same chain that leads to material outcomes both ways. Material interests end up being influenced and directed by the involved persons’ emotional health and experiences, and emotional health is strongly grounded in play, therefore I am reluctant to follow both authors’ assumptions around material productivity as a largely separate reality from the emotional productivity of play. Further elaboration seems outside the scope of this flog so I’ll leave it there.

That’s all for the first week of flogging.