Category: Flog

This week has not been met with too many big failures; however, it seems like I can’t do anything right when it comes to my Hack #2. I have the idea of what I’m gonna do: reskin the game of Life, exposing our misogynistic society. That seemed very easy in my head (like that’s any small task). It has been the little things that are taking me a while or stumping me. I am trying to send the right message and make it clear without going overboard. It seems to be a fine line. I do not want the game to be absurd because I want to depict real life but try to bring the male-centered tones to light.

I have really enjoyed the content and the material this week (even the first pop quiz that I did not do too hot on). My skim reading for Tuesday’s class was clearly a fail! However, it was a failure, and I am glad I had it because I realized how little I was actually retaining and how much I was missing. This is an overall struggle, but I am in four digital studies/data science classes this semester: E-lit, Critical AI, Surveillance Culture, and this course. I am having a really hard time remembering what I talked about in which class. For instance, in this class, we talked about surveillance/hacking originating at MIT today (Thursday), which I had just talked about in my other class. As I was reading and listening in class, I was confused about what I had already heard versus if I was making stuff up . . . idk It’s like when you can’t remember if you made up the crazy thing you were about to say or if you best friend told you.

I am super excited to see my game of Life come to life !!! Hopefully, I do not hit any more roadblocks as I finalize things this weekend.

This week I was working on my Hack #2: Critical Play. I initially had the idea to modify the American Girl Doll Fashion Show Game to make claims about ideal beauty standards that little girls are exposed to at such a young age. I was also thinking of making claims about the stereotype that only girls can play with dolls. I was inspired from class where we modified Passage and SG and I decided to make the characters into two women instead of one man and one woman. We also decided to modify the red heart into a rainbow heart instead. When attempting this, I had a difficult time finding modifiable games online.

I then decided for a more traditional game that would have lot of websites that provided codes to modify. I went with a Pac Man mod, where the more Pac Man eats, the bigger it gets until it explodes. I was thinking of touching on themes of capitalism and greed. I spent many hours on Google and looking at different codes on Github, which made me realize my coding days were long over (sophomore year). I thought this would be an interesting concept to pursue, but coding is very difficult especially for a more intricate game like Pac Man in comparison to Passage. I downloaded different codes online and modifying them in Python, but none of them seemed to create my desired effect.

Lastly, I decided to go for a more classic, physical game, Uno. This one I did not have much trouble with except for figuring out new rules in order for it to make a critical statement i wanted.

For the third week of class, there are not many updates for my FLOG as I have not had to submit anything this week. However, I can talk about my thought process for Hack #2 which is due next week. Since we are looking into critical play, I was thinking of creating a hacked version of Operation, the board game, and creating a statement about the organ trade. Seems like an interesting topic, kind of scary, but interesting to look into because when (at least for me) people think of trade with humans, it tends to be about the sex trafficking issue around the world, but organ trafficking is also an issue. I even looked into the World Health Organization’s page where they have plenty of information about the issue, further cementing my plan.

Unfortunately I am writing this Flog late. It is currently 12:27 AM on 2/8/25. My failure this week first consists of this Flog. I forgot to do it. I realized I had forgot to do it when my roommate walked in and I jokingly said: “I probably have some homework I forgot do.” Then I realized. The Flog!!!!

Regardless, this week, I set out to figure out what sort of Hack I wanted to do. My mind immediately set on a Minecraft texture pack, I could somehow come up with some textures that changed a vanilla Minecraft village to reflect some sort of social problem or something along those lines… But then I realized. I don’t have much artistic ability. The last time I created a Minecraft texture pack was in the 7th grade, and all I wanted to do was add another type of tree. I came to the conclusion that this task was not one achievable for me, so I sought other solutions.

In class, I heard Grace talk about a genius idea. A reskin of Operation to be Africa, and have the player take resource out of it (like what Elon Musk does). I thought this was a great idea, and wanted to help out.

And so it began… I thought we could make our own type of operation with a MakeyMakey, using Scratch or Python to make sound cues, but as I brought this idea to Grace, it turned out she already bought Operation off Amazon

I decided this was another failure of the week.

This week we talked about adversarial design and how we can think of reframing games to take a more critical stance on the world. Part of this involved playing a game of Werewolf as a class, where I somewhat failed at being the werewolf since I was eliminated in the very first round, but I also think this was a bit unlucky. And in the end the werewolves won, so not a complete fail!

For the second hack I started working on my idea, but I have noticed myself second guessing myself a bit on how to make the game effective and critical without going too far. I appreciated how we discussed in class the importance of punching up and not down. It reminded me of a quote I have thought about a lot since I heard it my freshman year. The founder of the Onion came to Davidson and said “humor should comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.” This is what I hope to achieve in my hack and is a principle I will keep looking back to in my adversarial designing.

On Thursday, we played the game passage and then tried ‘hacking’ into the game to make our own edits. I thought this was super cool because it is never something I thought I would be able to do. But my partner Jacob and I were ultimately not too technically skilled in getting into the game files on our computers, and maybe gave up a little too quickly.

What’s impressive about this week is we hacked Passage. When I started this game with my partner, the first thing came to my mind was “what’s the point of this game”? As we went further, I felt silly for that question because I should have wait longer before asking. The first round of playing is basically what the developer wants us to do: meet the lady, grow older together, lose her half way, and die alone. I was too curious to pay attention to the detail of the scene, or to find out if the gameplay has more possibilities. Those vivid background color really caught my eyes and I was wondering if those colors have different meaning. The second round I tried not to meet the girl and found it more flexible when you only control one character. I can pass more obstacles and explore the area I couldn’t go to when there’s two of us. Since the game is a metaphor of people’s life journey, the meaning behind this is really interesting. There’re several treasure cases(are they?) scattered around the map, I tried to find them in the second round but it didn’t seem I actually get anything or points after I collected them. I still don’t get it even now.

Then it came to the hacking, which is much more interesting than I expected. I took a game development class last semester, but that was Unity we’re using. The files appeared in the folder are something I’ve never seen before. I failed to download the game in the beginning, but I somehow got it. We tried to change the color of the girl’s hair, we did change it successfully in Gimp, but it seems like Gimp only exports the format that can’t be directly used in the game. I really like how we change the main character into the girl – that’s so cool and I felt more comfortable with it.

This week, we explored the online “Passage” game and, at first, I had no clue what was happening. The shapes on screen felt more like strange blobs than avatars, and the overall abstract, fleeting visuals were difficult to make out. Eventually, though, the image pieced together—once the symbols clicked and I realized these were supposed to be characters, I had room to think about the game’s deeper meanings and mechanisms.

I don’t feel like I “failed” at playing the game before, but it was eye-opening to see how a simple tweak, like switching the main avatar from male to female, could carry such weight. It felt like a metaphor for shifting power—a woman stepping forward in a traditionally male-coded role. This reminded me of the kind of metaphorical moments I want to create in my own hack. As I am exploring adversarial design, I aim to create a game that’s simple to play but addresses complex issues. I’ve brainstormed some initial concepts—like plastic surgery dolls and an immigration-themed Chutes & Ladders—but I’m still working through the execution details. Researching more examples of subversive games has helped point me in the right direction, and I expect to gain even more clarity as I dive deeper into the project.

LF

This week, our main focus was adversarial design, critical play, and reskinning games. I didn’t have a lot of trouble with the readings, but I did fail as the Werewolf moderator, which kept the game running a lot longer than it did. Turns out that the seer pointed at someone who was actually the werewolf, but I thought she was pointing at someone else, so the werewolf walked free. Oops! I felt embarrassed but it’s alright. The other thing I failed at majorly was reskinning Passage. First, I found out that my laptop can’t run Whiskey because Whiskey is only compatible with a certain kind of Apple computer chip that my Macbook does not have. I have an intel chip, which must be the peasant of computer chips, apparently. So instead of Whiskey I am beholden to using Apple’s own app for running Windows software. It was pre installed to my Mac but it is not intuitive at all, so I’d have to look up some tutorials on how to use it. Luckily, Jody let me look off her computer. We had trouble getting Passage to actually open. It kept downloading and adding itself to the file system but never actually opening. Eventually, it opened and then we took the files and opened them in Gimp. We tried to recolor the avatar’s hair pink but it never updated on the game. We made the game crash twice by accidentally deleting files we were duplicating. We never figured out why our changes didn’t show up in the game. I suspect we were editing the wrong file.

Another fail is I still haven’t thought of an idea for my second hack. I’m pretty sure I want to reskin a board game, but I need to figure out what I’m going to do. I’m thinking maybe the Game of Life as a commentary about immigration to the United States. However, I need to find a tasteful way to represent real people’s stories instead of tokenizing them in a board game. I’m thinking of referencing an ethnography I read for another class.

In class this week, we discussed critical play and how creating adversarial games helps engage with political issues and other topics of debate. Through adversarial design we can express agonism, and the examples (like the Feral Robotic Dogs and Agonistics: A Language Game) helped me understand what this looks like a little better. However, I am still having trouble thinking of an idea for hack #2. I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on what I’m trying to achieve, but actually picking a good base game to reskin has been difficult. I had the idea to reskin one of those children’s makeup games, but a lot of them are old flash games and I haven’t figured out how to modify them in the way I want to. I also haven’t figured out the correct way to download an HTML5 game, so I may have to find a different genre of video game, or switch to a board game.

I also struggled a lot with GIMP in class. I’ve used lots of digital art software so I thought it wouldn’t be that bad, but for some reason GIMP doesn’t have any of the same shortcuts or indicators that I’m used to. That made things very difficult when trying to modify the sprites in “Passage”. Unfortunately, a lot of other digital art software don’t have the option to save as a .tga, so if the game I pick for hack #2 needs those files I will have to use it. Hopefully I can find a suitable game for my project this weekend!

This week, we discussed a lot about critical play and “reskinning.” We thought a lot about how games and other forms of entertainment can be reimagined in ways that critique systems of oppression, injustice, and inequity. I really enjoyed this week because of the first hand examples that we participated in. Through playing Werewolf and Passage, we were able to interact as a class together to better understand how “simple” games can offer deeper meaning and depth. With that in mind, our next Hack has been assigned as a modification or “reskin” on an existing game to offer a critical stance on a social or systematic structure. I am really inclined to modify and hack a video game, as my brother and I used to hack and mod games all the time when we grew up, but my qualm is whether or not this would actually be feasible. As kids, we jailbroke a lot of our devices to access game files, but nowadays Apple has cracked down on their operating system to make it extremely difficult to jailbreak devices. Most likely, I won’t be able to hack any games like I have in the past, but I think I am going to attempt to create a ROM hack. I really want work with something in the digital field, but if I find that it becomes to difficult and inaccessible (especially in regards to my Mac machine), then I will probably find a way to work with a physical, analog game.

This week in class, our discussion was primarily focused on remixing/reskinning games and adversarial design. To look into how games get reskinned and redesigned, we looked how the card game “Mafia.” We talked about there are so many different variations of this game with different names and cards to changed up the scene and environment of the game. Games like “Werewolf” and even “Among Us” essentially share all of the same rules and concepts as “Mafia,” but they have been slightly redesigned for the players to get a bit of a different experience playing these different games. We played a round of “Werewolf” to get a sense of the game. At first, a lot of the class was confused about some of the rules, but as the game went on, they realized they had already known the rules from similar games that they had played in the past. We also looked at the game “Passage.” For this game, we downloaded the files of the game to be able to manipulate and redesign aspects of the game ourselves. What was cool about this is that we could take a more adversarial design approach while manipulating this game. What that means is that we could change the game in a way to challenge certain values or beliefs. For example, one of the changes we made was swapping the male and female characters’ places in the game. This made it to where the female was the lead character rather than the male. Females are often underrepresented in leading roles of games, movies, stories, etc. Later, we got the opportunity to use the software “Gimp” to be able to edit the characters’ appearance, but this was a difficult process. We initially wanted to make the characters a racial minority to continue to represent marginalized groups as lead roles in games, but we had some trouble uploading them into the game. We saved the changes that we made to our two lead characters, but then could not find the files after. We took the time to make these changes, just for us to lose the file. Since we lost the file, we obviously could not get them into the game, so our characters had to stay the same. Redesigning a game can definitely be hard. Obviously the physical component of making the game look different by coding it to be that way can be extremely frustrating, but it can also be just as frustrating trying to come up with the initial idea of what you want to do with the game. All-in-all, this process can be very challenging, but also be very rewarding at the same time if you accomplish what you set out to.

In class on Thursday we played the game Passage and then experimented with modifying it. It was interesting to see how such a simple interface and a simple game could hold so much more meaning about one’s life passage and experiences. It was cool to see the characters find, or not find love, pass through obstacles, and age as they continued down the path. When initially playing the game, SG and I realized how it was a male character that was taking initiative of the journey, and decides whether or not to find the female partner. This relates to the DiSalvo reading for class, where it talks about adversial design, which is designed for the purpose of critique, creating discussion, and contributing commentary. For our modification we decided to go off that idea of adversial design and change the characters of the game. Instead of the man finding the woman, we initially decided to make the woman find the man. We then took it a step further to change it to a woman finding a woman, to make a statement about LGBTQIA+ and the current political issues. This part was pretty straight forward as we only had to change the file names. We then decided to modify other parts of Passage such as the heart that appears when a relationship occurs. Instead of the traditional red heart that pops up, we modified it to a rainbow, to again, represent LGBTQIA+. This is where we ran into an issue, however, where we were not able to get the modification to transfer to the actual game. We used both Gimp and Photoshop to see which would work better, and then exported it as the correct file. Even after several attempts we still could not figure out how to get our modification to apply to the actual game.