SPECIAL ISSUE 14 MARTIN BOARD

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CHALLENGES AND TASKS

  • Imagine one game idea per week
  • Prepare one question (at least) for next week lecturer

USEFUL

  • My Wiki Guide for TIC80 prototyping

GROUP WORK/ANNOTATING LINKS JACOPO & MARTIN

  • FIGMA MAP W.I.P Unitary Urbanism: Three Psychogeographic Imaginaries + Salvaging Situationism: Race and Space
  • PAD

ALL PADS

REFERENCES


Web

containing:

Readings

READINGS for next time:

NOTES & IDEAS


RESPONSIVE AS A GAME MECHANIC

On the Web, to use responsive feature of the screen display as the main mechanic of the game play, could provide a quiet unusual user experience with its interface. However, the Web window scaling is not very fluid. PINBALL POSTER

As Pinball machines format is usualy rectangular and contains a rich combination of colors, typefaces, shapes and illustrations, we could see each pinball machine as a canvas, or a thematic graphic poster. It could be compared to the print format of a poster such as ISO format sA2, A1, A0 or 40 x 60.

The two links bellow contains posters made by the french studio 'Formes Vives' for the 2019 28th International posters competition of Chaumont festival.

http://www.centrenationaldugraphisme.fr/en/le-signe/collection/extra-ball
http://www.centrenationaldugraphisme.fr/en/le-signe/collection/golden-ball

see project description bellow (source):

Prix Espoir, 28th International posters competition, 2019.
These two works arose from an invitation by Ultra publishing house. The carte blanche was for the design of two posters to be displayed temporarily in backlit posterboards in the little town of Le Relecq-Kerhuon. The designers of Formes Vives plunged into a personal creation inspired by pop culture and the colourful exuberance of pinball flippers. All living in different cities, the three designers took pleasure in composing the images like a collage. This series was awarded the Prix Espoir of the International Poster Competition of the 2019 Biennale du design graphique in Chaumont.

PLAYER VS GRAVITY = FATALITY

Playing pinball seems to relate to an indivudual sport performance. The result of this performance is a score that can be compared to other players scores through a scoreboard visible on the alphanumeric display of the pinball machine . Even if it is possible for several people to be specators, there is usualy only one player. The inclinaison of the machine combined to the physical world gravity allow the player to play by himslef and try to push up the ball up again and again for the longest time as possible.
There is however something invetiable, or fatalistic about pinball, because as long as gravity exists, the ball will always go down. Then human failure or a lack of luck with unevitably cause the ball to go down and finally game over.

Note: read essay on the pinball machine (not found yet/ask Lidia)

VISUALLY OVERWELMED / EATER EGGS

Pinball Interface usualy is visually overwelmed by many colors text, illustrations, shapes, circuits and textures that can seem very complex to our eyes. This visual complexiy also allows its creator to hide many secret features and eastereggs that only an accident or many hours of game would allow us to discover.

PINBALL APPARITION IN VIDEO GAMES

Pinball game appearing in Sims1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0XrtcAjatQ

RANDOMLY GENERATED PINBALL GAME

From the glossary of pinball terms, if start considering each element of a pinball machine as a variant, it could be interesting to randomize pinball interfaces.

READING NOTES


"You play not only against fellow players, but also against the mechanism."


"(…) the idea came to me that the game of pinball is about the systematic return of the balls. This games borrows its power from the longing to recover the discharged seed, from the fantasy of a double ejaculation: the spunk is hurled awat joyfully, achievs on player-ejaculator, ultimately returns to its point of departure. The pinball player bounces to expect the ball and to welcome it as a fullfilment of his sexual boomerang-illustion"


"The superficial pinball player lets out a shout of disappoitment, when his ball = spunk ultimately disappears again through the effect of gravity into its deeply hidden armoury. The complexity of this seeming disappointment is clear from the explanation given by a keen pinball player: “the ball cannot go into the hole”, whereby he forget that the whole game of pinball rests precisely on the fact that this disaster must happen sooner or later."

  • Report on the construction of situations / Toward a Situationist International - Guy Debord PDF

"(...) the material environment of life and the behaviors which that environment gives rise to and which radically transform it." (p.12)

Unitary urbanism is defined first of all as the use of all arts and techniques as means contributing to the composition of a unified milieu.

"The most elementary unit of unitary urbanism is not the house, but the architectural complex, which combines all the factors conditioning an ambience, or a series of clashing ambiences, on the scale of the constructed situation. Spatial"

"The situationist game is distinguished from the classic notion of games by its radical negation of the element of competition and of separation from everyday life."

"A rough experimentation toward a new mode of behavior has already been made with what we have termed the dérive: the practice of a passional journey out of the ordinary through a rapid changing of ambiences, as well as a means of psychogeographical study and of situationist psychology."

"Everything leads us to believe that the essential elements of our research lie in our hypothesis of the construction of situations."

"We must try to construct situations, that is to say, collective ambiences, ensembles of impressions determining the quality of a moment. If we take the simple example of a gathering of a group of individuals for a given time, it would be desirable, while taking into account the knowledge and material means we have at our disposal, to study what organization of the place, what selection of participants and what provocation of events are suitable for producing the desired ambience."

"Situationist theory resolutely supports a noncontinuous conception of life. The notion of unity must cease to be seen as applying to the whole of one’s life (where it serves as a reactionary mystification based on the belief in an immortal soul and, in the final analysis, on the division of labor); instead, it should apply to the construction of each particular moment of life through the unitary use of situationist methods. In a classless society there will no longer be “painters,” but only situationists who, among other things, sometimes paint."

"(...)the situationist attitude consists in going with the flow of time."

"Your role is not to imitate the bourgeois aesthetes who try to restrict people to what has already been done because what has already been done doesn’t bother them. You know that creation is never pure. Your role is to find out what the international avant-garde is doing, to take part in the critical development of its program, and to call for its support."

  • 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International - Wark_McKenzie PDF


Wark McKenzie 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International




Wark McKenzie 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International





















"Situationists believe themselves capable, due to their current methods and to the foreseeable development of these methods, not only of rearranging the urban environment, but of changing it almost at will."
THE WORLD WE LIVE IN, and beginning with its material décor, is discovered to be narrower by the day. It stifles us. We yield profoundly to its influence; we react to it according to our instincts instead of according to our aspirations. In a word, this world governs our way of being, and it grinds us down. It is only from its rearrangement, or more precisely its sundering, that any possibility of organising a superior way of life will emerge.

"Psychogeography could offer the potential to broaden our theory and practice and collective reimagining, to see the city through other(s’) eyes, in an empathy that leads to action;to see collectively, past individual blindnesses, to name in full our oppressions, and overcome them. To overthrow capitalism. To create a new world. Because that’s the point, after all.
Let this practice be a real and effective tool of theory and revolution, not a glib way of imposing a narrow set of arcane interests and obsessions upon our cities that shuts out other voices, voices which speak and write words that cost them dear."


"The new phase of affirmation of play seems to be characterized by the disappearance of any element of competition. The question of winning or losing, previously almost inseparable from ludic activity, appears linked to all other manifestations of the tension between individuals for the appropriation of goods."
"The element of competition must disappear in favor of a more authentically collective concept of play: the common creation of selected ludic ambiances."
"Due to its marginal existence in relation to the oppressive reality of work, play is often regarded as fictitious. But the work of the situationists is precisely the preparation of ludic possibilities to come."



Foreword

"We believe it is time for those of us in the humanities to seriously consider the lowest level of computing systems and to understand how these systems relate to culture and creativity"

1. Stella

"What does a creator, historian, researcher, student, or other user do when experiencing a creative computer artifact? An encounter with such a work could involve trying to understand the social and cultural contexts in which it came to exist. It might also involve interpreting its representational qualities—what it means and how it produces that meaning. Alternatively, a study might involve looking at the methods of this work’s construction, or the code itself, or even the hardware and physical form of the machines on which it is used."
"Digital media researchers are starting to see that code is a way to learn more about how computers are used in culture, but there have been few attempts to go even deeper, to investigate the basic hardware and software systems upon which programming takes place, the ones that are the foundation for computational expression. This book begins to do this—to develop a critical approach to computational platforms. We hope this will be one of several considerations of this low level of digital media, part of a family of approaches called “platform studies.” Studies in this fi eld will, we hope, investigate the relationships between platforms—the hardware and software design of standardized computing systems—and infl uential creative works that have been produced on those platforms."

Types of Platforms

When digital media creators choose a platform, they simplify devel-opment and delivery in many ways. "

To be used by people and to take part in our culture directly, a platform must take material form, as the Atari VCS certainly did. This can be done by means of the chips, boards, peripherals, controllers, and other components that make up the hardware of a physical computer system. The platforms that are most clearly encapsulated are those that are sold as a complete hardware system in a packaged form, ready to accept media such as cartridges

In drawing raster graphics, there is a considerable difference between setting up one television scan line at a time as the Atari VCS demands, having a buffered display with support for tiles and sprites, or having some more elaborate system that includes a native 3D renderer. Such a difference can end up being much more important than simple statistics of screen resolution or color depth that are used as shorthand by fans and marketers.

Cartridge Games for the Home

Pong’s start in a Silicon Valley tavern rather than a corner convenience store or shopping mall is an important detail of the medium’s evolution.


So what really is the situation? It's the realisation of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence. The revolutionary gamesters of all countries can be united in the S.I. to commence the emergence from the prehistory of daily life."

Against the spectacle, the realised situationist culture introduces total participation.
Against preserved art, it is the organisation of the directly lived moment.
Against particularised art, it will be a global practice with a bearing, each moment, on all the usable elements. Naturally this would tend to collective production which would be without doubt anonymous (at least to the extent where the works are no longer stocked as commodities, this culture will not be dominated by the need to leave traces.) The minimum proposals of these experiences will be a revolution in behaviour and a dynamic unitary urbanism capable of extension to the entire planet, and of being further extensible to all habitable planets.

Against unilateral art, situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of interaction. Today artists - with all culture visible - have become entirely separated from society, just as they are separated from each other by competition. But faced with this impasse of capitalism, art has remained essentially unilateral in response. This enclosed era of primitivism must be superseded by complete communication.



Written in the context of occidental revolutionary movment. Situationist promote the creation of situations providing a way out of capitalist, materialistic, consumerist way of life. Sitationists were popular among parisian students.
The book is only one of many examples but appears as a manifesto.
"In the society dominated by modern conditions of prodcutionm life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles" (Debord, 1967)
Debord however recognize some benefits of capitalism in the fact that it almost aborted the survival behaviour.
It aslo redefined what survival means at a higher level. Capitalism encourage us not to want but to need things that would have seen unecessary some times ago or in another context.
It could appear as a critic of consumerism.
Late capitalism would have made us obssesed with our own image. This also influenced by massive modern advertising in our physical and virtual environments.
Also tells about how a products reflects on what we appear to others.
All this is not only aiming at selling us products. (stopped at 11:30)

  • Unitary Urbanism: Three Psychogeographic Imaginaries



Notes to be found on the left side of the figma map made with Jacopro
Figma notes

  • Game Boys - The “gamer” identity undermines the radical potential of play



"Video games first emerged as bar amusements and then high-tech home gadgets for adults, but Nintendo treated game systems more as toys — and then succeeded to sell those toys to boys. Ever since then, the industry’s defensive crouch — rooted in its historical frailty and its self-preserving pivot to boyish juvenilia — has melded seamlessly with a defensive white-nerd masculinity that is all too familiar in 2019.

(...)players’ ability to use these systems for their own pleasures, desires, and identities — along with the fan-fiction, modding, and original full-motion-video content that proliferate around games — opens up spaces of creativity, encounter, and expression that challenge or attempt to overturn these stereotypes.

As Ruberg argues, there is often an implicit denial of sexual energies in the way we think about and play video games. When reactionary gamers reject queer, politicized, or minoritarian readings of games, they “are seeking to defend the sanctity of the ‘magic circle’ in which games are safe from cultural and political meanings.”
game industry accused of promotiing tennage sexist white supremacist heretosexual culture in video games and avoiding any political subject.

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