User:Ada/SI20
✴ pad collecting
✴ week 1 | bare facts
special issuing
➵ ritual: sage tea and sharing game stories.
○ shared about my horse tunnel game where i would pretend to be a horse when driving trough tunnels, not sure why i picked that one.
○ read and annotated with boyana the bare facts of rituals (johnathan z. smith), talked about the interesting parts of the text.
○ rituals as exercises in the strategy of choice, grace and nature, divine and human
○ ancient men making rituals of bear hunts, creating false divine realities so far from the human truth. ritual as a perfect hunt where all variables are controlled. the hunter knows that this is not reality but performing the ritual makes the hunt's full significance to be perceived, a significance which the rules express but are powerless to effectuate.
✴ week 2 | ritual-games
special issuing
➵ ritual: aglaia's coffee reading ritual (happy drinking times ahead for me)
○ going over the text defining games (Salen & Zimmerman). did not like, patriarchal survival of the fittest mentality about games. defined them as systems in which players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules that result in quantifiable outcome. hard pass.
○ conflict identifiyed as non-essential in games, games and rituals as stories (journey, florence & abzu, beyong blue, gris)
○ real emotion in digital play, play as labour, games as rituals?
○ me, cara and stephen made a physical graph(on the right). x = gameness, y = ritualness. then we placed concepts in the graph. gun, unserious, cara, intoxication were more game-like. me, strong scents, belief and purification were more ritual-like. butter and courtship were outside the graph.
prototyping
○ LAN party (played adventure badly)
○ python basics revisited, text-adventure game python lessons.
methoding
○ read and annotated the ruling class and ruling ideas(marx&engels). it was very confusingly written. ritual as instrument of freedom is discussed.
○ annotated wedding rituals from the perspective of marx-engels. I annotated the ritual of a municipality wedding in Milan. religious authority was just replaced with urban one.
✴ week 3 | modding & culting
special issuing
➵ ritual: hard-drive purification from stephen. i was late, my hard-drive is still sinful.
○ talked about the base and superstructure model.
○ read and annotated game modding: cross-over mutation and unwelcome gifts (Schleiner) with aglaia. we discussed about wether modding is community building or exploiting labour, wether video game companies can ever be ethical or wish for anything but profit. i shared my love for the sims modding and how the player is the author in this context.
prototyping
○ text adventured some more. shared our assignments. i made a text-adventure python game about a cult member going trough the cult and eventually either escaping or staying. the game used all python elements i tried so far, was my first trial with if and elif statements. i struggled a bit with placement and indentation. seems like my coding mistakes are really silly.
○ made an undo function for my game with joseph
○ talked about putting data into .json files (spoiler: this will take me weeks to understand)
methoding
○ reading ideology in popular games, discusses the reworking of the base/superstructure model into the ideology/media/production/feedback model.
○ counter-media is introduced in the media, the space between media and production is collapsing as self-performance in (social and on-line) media means we are both the producer and consumer of media.
○ i annotated sims, what real values are reproduced in the game I am playing? community being so important in this game then means that the crux of the social reproduction is happening when the choices you have made in the game are broadcasted. counter culture in terms of mods is allowed, if not encouraged. cheating is also encouraging, but if the way to play is to not play like you are told, is that even counter-culture?
✴ week 4 | ideology fanfiction
special issuing
➵ ritual: aglaia's birthday ritual, cake and my coffee&pandan jellies.
○ dissected the ideology in papa louie with boyana (my favorite childhood browser game). found that the narrative of papa louie had some weird gaps. why is he papa if he has no children, is he papa of pizza? Is the delivery guy his child? (boyana's thought).
○ found that fighting and escaping were rewarded behaviours. we tried analysing different ways for papa to deal with loss. started building a wiki how page and then abandoned it.
prototyping
○ discussed text adventure games: made a taker function for my alien colonialism game, discussed making it less colonial.
" ".join( spliti[1:] )
things_i_need = spliti[1:]
things = " ".join(things_i_need)
○ talked about mud servers. i was still too lost with the previous script, agreed to keep working on that instead.
methoding
○ built on monday and tuesday's sessions by continuing on the pizza game (for me, bobi and suzan).
○ papa's ghosteria: made a mind map of rituals for dealing with loss. identified what papa lost by losing his pizzeria:
1.loss of safety (innocence, physical safety)
2.loss of community (clients, belonging)
3.loss of future (hope, dreams)
4.loss of identity (dignity, making things himself)
5.loss of labour (money, time, effort ,pizza)
✴ week 5 | crystallising thoughts
special issuing
➵ ritual: Special Issue Prediction Ritual (SIPR): The priestess Ada will start the ritual by playing the ceremonial music on the sacred Spotify. Candles shall be turned on. Then three human sacrifices will be selected amongst the group trough collective decision. The three sacrificial people will then select three cards from either of the two decks given by the priestess. While they do so, they must think of the special issue.The priestess will then interpret the cards and together we shall rejoice in having found out our special issue’s future. The result of the reading: creativity, loss of control, rituals.
○ individual tutorials to talk about how it's going so far, then collective mapping.
prototyping
○ worked on our assignments. mine was a python text-adventure version of last week's papa's ghosteria. mine did not work very well. here is the help message.
# an help message
if i in ["help","what","instructions", "advice"]:
printer(bcolors.GREEN +"""
you asked for help! great job in reaching out.
the aim of this game is to aid papa in recovering
from the trauma that was inflicted on him by losing
his pizzeria.
you play the game by typing one word answers.
words like here or see will show you the current room.
words like care or experiment will show you what is in the room
words like take or carry will make you collect objects.
the word inventory will show you what you have done so far."""
)
✴ week 6 | modding oracles
special issuing
➵ ritual: cara's 15 min guided meditation while listening to Rotterdam sounds.
○ exploring tarot and oracle decks from the ones we had.
○ history of witch-hunts. women who are poor and ask for help\marginalized women, depending on the country and time period. They weren't killed because they were few people. They were punished for practicing older religions. Interesting how we talk about this from the hunters perspective: This is the matter of how history is constructed, -most of the writing is done by men so what these witches did is a mystery also. There is one alchemy book written by women at these times but these spells are like how to make toothpaste or shampoo etc.
prototyping
○ JS basics. I couldn't make it to class, it was very sad as i really wanted to learn JavaScript and missing the class really affected this. I tried my best to do the assignment using the material made for class and online resources.
methoding
○ continued with modding oracle decks like we talked about on monday. me and suzan worked on tarot decks based on online Youtube tarot reading channels and the comments users leave. digital intimacy, hope for the future. Tarot reading services address specific needs= safe space, offers understanding, hope, community, structure, time frame (action plan).
✴ week 7 | wishes, ideas & LSD
special issuing
➵ ritual: for irmak's ritual we wrote worries on paper and shared them with a tiny hand-made worry-doll.
○ We then shared what we made when we modded oracle decks. Me and Irmak shared our algorithm-led tarot and its board. It was one board with love, luck and work. Then we had three decks, based on these themes, composed of three cards each. All the cards came from comments left on youtube videos of tarot readings.
prototyping
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methoding
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✴ week 8
special issuing
➵ ritual:
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prototyping
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methoding
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✴ week 9
special issuing
➵ ritual:
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prototyping
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methoding
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