Games, Play, and Joy: Part 3
Playing with systems of power.
courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM).
This is Part 3 of my series Games, Play, and Joy, which is based on a class I taught in 2019 at NYU’s ITP (as part of my residency there), aimed at games-curious artists. Hope you enjoy.
Before the NYU course even existed, I originally developed a bunch of this material for a two-week SFPC x YCAM joint program in Yamaguchi, Japan. Huge thanks to the wonderful people at both organizations — Taeyoon Choi, Keina Konno, Chiho Yamada, and everyone else — for making it happen, giving me an excuse to go down these rabbit holes, and, in a way, kickstarting this whole effort.
As ever, this essay series doesn’t represent the opinions of my employers or whatever — just me.
Theory
- Part 1: Creating joyful possibilities with games.
- Part 2: Using rules as excuses and catalysts.
- Part 3: Playing with systems of power. (you are here)
Tactics
- Part 4: The art of finding the fun.
- Part 5: Adding gamefeel and juice.
- Part 6: The promises and perils of simulations.
- Part 7: The joy of feeling seen.
Your Turn
- Part 8: Epilogue.
In Part 2, we explored how good rulesets allow us to unlock new parts of ourselves. They function on multiple levels: as excuses; as temporary relations; as set-aside spaces to play with our own creativity (whether logical, physical, artistic, emotional, or otherwise) and spur the creativity of others; and as places to take on new roles and shake up the way that we view and interact with the world. This shaking up is important on personal and political levels: it can disrupt the hold that the everyday has on us, creating cracks through which we can see new possibilities and grow into something new.
Game designers, however, are not the only artists to work in the medium of rules — not by a long shot. In Part 2, we touched on the intersection of conceptual art and game design. Let’s explore two more art movements that used rules and games in an attempt to shake off the forces of the everyday, and create space for new ways of being.
We talked about the Surrealists in Part 2, and not too long after them came the Situationists. Influenced by Surrealism and Dadaism, the Situationist International (also called the Internationale Situationist, or SI) was a movement in the 1950s comprised of avant garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. They were committed to, as Art Story summarizes:
the disruption and reimagining of the systems which govern everyday life[. I]t was anti-capitalist, and left-leaning, but was also committed to the disruption of the hegemonic politics of Europe in the late 20th century through artistic praxis as well as political agitation.
The enemy of the Situationists was the “spectacle,” a term outlined by Guy Debord to refer to the tactics of distraction and pacification used by capitalism to obscure its own oppressive nature. In more concrete terms, Tiernan Morgan and Lauren Purje of art magazine Hyperallergic describes the spectacle as “the everyday manifestation of capitalist-driven phenomena; advertising, television, film, and celebrity.”
Morgan and Purje explain it as follows:
It can be found on every screen that you look at. It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser. It is the listicle telling you “10 things you need to know about ‘x.’” The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments, while encouraging us to focus on appearances. For Debord, this constituted an unacceptable “degradation” of our lives.
All of this gets into a lot of Marxist theories of commodity fetishism, which are way too deep to get into in this class, and which you can read about/debate elsewhere.
The key takeaway is that the spectacle alienates us from our own lives, our own desires, and our own authentic experiences. We no longer directly live our lives: we deal only in representations. We decline, as Debord says in his book The Society of the Spectacle, from “being into having, and having into merely appearing.”
Importantly, one of the skills of the spectacle is to snatch up anything meant to challenge it, chew it up, digest it, and barf out its own toothless version to make a profit — a process called “recuperation.” Jan D. Matthews describes this (more elegantly) as the “channeling of social revolt in a way that perpetuates capitalism.” If something bubbles up that might challenge the spectacle, the system swiftly attempts to gain control over it and sell us a defanged version, marketed to us by those that oppress us.
What is the effect, according to Debord, of our entire lives — both outer and inner — being shunted solely towards benefitting capitalism? A few things:
- Our desires are reshaped, interpreted, and simplified to fit into what capitalism can offer us. If the spectacle can’t channel it into profit it — or recuperate it for profit — then it is is worthless.
- We are distracted and pacified from revolution thanks to a continual flood of images that “manufacture[] new desires and aspirations.” Plus, “[s]ince the pleasure of acquiring a new commodity is fleeting, it is only a matter of time before we pursue a new desire — a new “fragment” of happiness” — fed to us by the spectacle. The consumer is thus mentally enslaved by the spectacle’s inexorable logic: work harder, buy more.” (Both quotes from Morgan and Purje.)
- Our authentic social lives get replaced with representations. (Consider the way that social media flattens and commodifies our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world (e.g. the concept of “doing it for the ‘gram’”))
- And perhaps, most simply but most importantly: we are isolated and lonely! The more a person accepts the spectacle, Debord says in The Society of the Spectacle, “the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. [H]is own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.”
That is, the economic system of the society of the spectacle is one of isolation, constantly producing isolation: we are alienated from our labor, from each other, from our own authentic desires, and an authentic human experience.
So how to escape it? “The way out” for the Situationists, says Peter Marshall, “was not to wait for a distant revolution but to reinvent everyday life here and now.” He continues:
To transform the perception of the world and to change the structure of society is the same thing. By liberating oneself, one changed power relations and therefore transformed society. They therefore tried to construct situations which disrupt the ordinary and normal in order to jolt people out of their customary ways of thinking and acting.
This was done through the construction of Situationist games. Play was seen as the opposite of the alienating work demanded by modern society — the essence of human freedom itself. Says Debord (translated by Ken Knabb):
Our action on behavior […] can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an essentially new type. The most general goal must be to extend the nonmediocre part of life, to reduce the empty moments of life as much as possible. […]
The situationist game is distinguished from the classic conception of the game by its radical negation of the element of competition and of separation from everyday life. On the other hand, it is not distinct from a moral choice, since it implies taking a stand in favor of what will bring about the future reign of freedom and play. […]
So what really is the situation? It’s the realization 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.
Basically, they believed that we could liberate ourselves from the oppression of daily systems and daily life — and thereby more fully inhabit ourselves — by interrupting daily life with various forms of play.
For example, the dérive: essentially, an unplanned journey through some landscape (often urban) in which people rid themselves of their everyday relations (errands, typical paths, etc.) and let themselves be drawn by various attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find.
This was seen as a way to lead to new encounters and snap out of the daze of everyday life. It was also seen as a way to frustrate tendencies from above to use various technologies (whether digital or otherwise) to optimize and direct the use of public space in ‘rational’ and productive ways, instead reappropriating it for ludic purposes. For example, consider what happens when you get lost in a foreign city. “Do you ask a passer-by for directions, or consult Google Maps on your smartphone?” Morgan and Purje ask. If the latter, are you aware of what algorithmic values (whether ‘shortest distance’ or ‘ad dollars’) shape the routes provided to you through technology? How does that in turn shape your direct experience of the world?
Another form of play was the détournement: the appropriation and recontexualization of symbols — especially of capitalism — to interrupt the smooth flow of the society of the spectacle (e.g. vandalized ads in public places, using the aesthetic of advertising to communicate subversive messages).
Through the use of détournement, situationists sought to show that the powers that be can never fully recuperate created meanings as well as expose and draw attention to the spectacle that pervades our lives. By doing this they hoped they could bring about a proletarian revolution that would result in people doing activities for the sheer joy it brings them, rather than capitalist interests. (source)
Film was a commonly used medium for détournement. For example, René Viénet’s La Dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?:
Viénet took an already existing Hong Kong martial arts film and replaced its dialogue, changing the meaning of the original story into a newly “detourned” film about the politicized proletariat training to liberate themselves and society from the strict organization of life by capitalists and bureaucrats. (source)
This is not to say that the Situationists solved the problem of the spectacle. Indeed, as Morgan and Purje note, The most significant criticism that can be leveled at The Society of the Spectacle is Debord’s failure to proffer any convincing solutions for countering the spectacle, other than describing an abstract need to put ‘practical force into action.’” The aesthetic of détournement, for example, has certainly been reabsorbed into advertising — consider Demi Adejuyigbe’s brilliant My Roommate Banksy series, which skewers a common kind of toothless ‘anti-establishment’ art.
But ultimately, the goal of all of this play was to facilitate a new culture that, as the Situationist Manifesto said, introduced total participation, organized directly lived moments, increases dialogue and interaction, and, ultimately, lead to everyone becoming an artist/situationist.
This desire to implode alienating structures can also seen in relational aesthetics, which Doug Wilson notes in his PhD thesis as being particularly relevant to thinking about “these issues of togetherness, aesthetics, and social interaction.”
In his book, Nicolas Bourriaud defines relational aesthetics as follows:
A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.
Let’s make this more concrete. Think of a typical painting in a museum. You walk up to it, take it in, and have some emotional/aesthetic/intellectual experience with it, pretty much individually from anyone else who might be around you. Regardless of how many people might be standing next to you (assuming you can still see it), your experience of that painting is basically the same.
Relational art goes in the opposite direction. It doesn’t seek to make a mimetic representation of something, experienced individually. Rather, the form is meant to catalyze a social interaction between people — and that social circumstance is the art.
Further, it is an embodied experience, not an intellectual one — meant to actually crack open reality to explore new forms of relation. As Bourriaud says, it is meant to “actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist.” The task of the artist is to create a conduit for creating this social experience.
Wilson notes the “iconic example” of the work of Rikrit Tiravanija in this arena. One example is “Untitled (Free),” which MoMA describes as a “landmark piece, in which the artist converted a gallery into a kitchen where he served rice and Thai curry for free[.]” They call it a “deceptively simple conceptual piece,” in which “the artist invites the visitor to interact with contemporary art in a more sociable way, and blurs the distance between artist and viewer. You aren’t looking at the art, but are part of it — and are, in fact, making the art as you eat curry and talk with friends or new acquaintances.”
Wilson also describes Tiravanija’s “Untitled (Tomorrow is Another Day),” as a piece in which the artist:
[…] reconstructed his New York apartment in the Kolnischer Kunstverein gallery. The installation, including a kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and living room, was made open to the public twenty-four hours a day, as a space of “intercultural exchange” (as quoted in Kester, 2004, p.105).
Why are these works important? Aren’t they basically the same as any other public space? Wilson describes their importance as follows:
According to Bourriaud, relational artworks like Tiravanija’s installations nurture an important type of conviviality¹ in a world where social relationships have become too predictable, too constrained by new “truncated channels of communication” (p.26). Relational art doesn’t just “address” its viewers; it also hopes to give them, as Bishop summarizes, “the wherewithal to create a community, however temporary or utopian this may be” (p.54). Rejecting ambitious revolutionary or utopian projects, Bourriaud argues that we might still be able to achieve more modest micro-utopias — “interstices opened up in the social corpus” (p.70).
We are not just creating a form: rather, Bourriaud says in his book, we are “invent[ing] possible encounters.” These works allow us to “point to a desired world, which the beholder thus becomes capable of discussing, and based on which his own desire can rebound.”²
Let’s tie it all together. Consider how the spectacle proscribes and flattens the desires, relationships, and experiences we are allowed to have. But we can disrupt the spectacle: whether through situationist games, relational art, social intervention, or a variety of other tactics. That disruption, in turn, allows us to experiment with new desires, new ways of relating, and new ways of being. It makes cracks in the forces of Empire, which we discussed in Part 1. It also gives us the the ability to conceptualize, discuss, and expand on these desires with others. When we have those things to point to, we can start building off them, connecting with others who relate to them, and taking steps to live them — or break them.
As we discussed in Part 2, one of the things that we can do with games is use rules and mechanics to encourage certain activities; to excuse certain behaviors; to create new moments of connection; and to prompt new forms of exchange. A game is a form like any other — and we can use it for those destabilizing and joyfully dizzying ends, too.
Let’s look at some practical examples of how game designers are using games as a way to subvert the everyday (whether you think of that as Empire, the spectacle , or something else)— from shaking up common social norms and sense of ‘proprietary’ in silly and embarrassing ways, to taking on oppressive power structures and providing catharsis.
Doug Wilson, cited earlier, creates games that are meant to foster togetherness through, as he says, “confrontational, broken, or otherwise ‘incomplete’” systems.” His games often have extremely binary win conditions, with almost no rules (or technological supervision) on what is actually allowed to reach those goals. B.U.T.T.O.N., for example, provides a clear win condition for each round (“first player whose button is held for 7 seconds wins”), but does not explicitly disallow any tactic to achieve this goal, nor does it try to monitor any of the players’ actions as they try to win. This is offloaded onto the players, who do the social work of deciding and experimenting with what is and isn’t ‘fair.’
Likewise, JS Joust is a physical dueling game with ‘last person standing’ rules. Each player holds a PS Move controller. If the controller is disturbed (shaken, moved too quickly, etc.), they are out. The goal is to knock other peoples’ controllers while protecting your own. There are, effectively, no other explicit rules: again, what is allowed or disallowed for any game is decided in context.
Why play a messy, broken, outwardly-antagonistic game? Aren’t broken games bad games?
Not necessarily. As we discussed in Part 2, ambiguities in rules — even if they make for what appear to be ‘bad games’ — can lead to evocative, exciting, and creative results. In Designing for the Pleasures of Disputation, Wilson encourages us to look at these sorts of ‘broken’ games “not as “systems,” but rather as festive contexts — as excuses to laugh and horse around with friends.” They encourage us to be performative, thereby tapping into our creativity. Further, silly games can act “as [an] alibi — as a culturally-recognized excuse to ‘act out’ and play the fool.” This can, in turn, “heighten, through festivity and laughter, a sense of togetherness.”
In this vein, consider games that give us excuses to do things that are socially frowned upon. Above is Fingle, “a game about the thrills of touching each other’s hands.” It’s a bit like Twister for your fingers: two players must draw buttons of certain colors onto matching targets, but the levels are designed such that they will inevitably end up touching hands, creating surprisingly intimate moments with other players that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Bot Party, by Phoenix Perry, is another game about excuses. The game mechanic is basically about completing circuits by touching other people. There are no rules about how you must touch, where you can touch, etc.: depending on people’s familiarity and intimacy, they can do anything from touching fingertips to kissing. But since it is a multiplayer game played in public spaces, it inevitably involves people who don’t know each other touching each other in a way they don’t typically.
“Having made bot party,” Perry said on Twitter, “I *immediately* get why this is a thing. You’d be surprised how lonely people are and how just 3.5 minutes of prosocial gameplay changes them. […] [P]eople really need more positive experiences with their bodies right now.”
Game mechanics can also provide safe spaces to subvert oppressive power structures, and provide moments of joy and catharsis for their target audience.³
Hair Nah, says Momo Pixel, “originated as the answer to a brief: What are the stresses that Black women face and how can we address them?” In Hair Nah, you play as a Black woman who is trying to live her life while constantly having to swat away a flood of hands attempting to touch her hair.
Unwanted hair-touching is a common experience for Black women: “[i]f we had a dollar for every time we had to duck, dodge, or physically stop someone’s hand from touching our hair,” says Siraad Dirshe in an article about the game, “we would be extremely rich right now.” But, as Pixel says in an interview with Dazed, “as a whole you don’t hear of black women being like, ‘What the fuck! Why you in my hair?’ You want to, but you don’t do that.” Instead, she notes, “we’ve been taught that we have to be quiet and respect white people’s feelings and don’t really say what we want to say.”
Pixel’s game thus acts, in part, as a way to subvert this real-life invasion and racist power dynamic in a safe space — a cathartic moment for folks who’ve also been there. In an interview with Fader, Pixel describes the motivation behind making the game:
I wanted to make a fun-ass game that would give black women something to laugh about. I think that it is an uncomfortable topic and often times we don’t get a chance to stop people from touching our hair. So I was trying to give them a game to finally be able to fight back.
She continues this thread in an interview with Vice’s i-D:
I want players who have never had their hair touched — or who touch others’ hair — to understand how much it’s an invasion of personal space. How disrespectful, entitled, rude, and selfish of an act reaching into a stranger’s head of hair is. I really wanted that to come across and for people to see how this can cause anxiety. […]
But for players who have had their hair touched, and for black women in particular, I wanted them to play this game and get their life! I wanted them to finally have a way to tell white women: “No. My Space. My Body. My Hair. Respect me.” Because when this happens in real life, it’s not funny. So I wanted to give them some joy and let them know, “Hey, I got you.”
Robert Yang’s Dream Hard is a subversion of the typical brawler game, meant, as he says, to “appropriate a game genre with queer intent[.]” The game was originally made to live in a custom arcade cabinet at Dreamhouse, a venue described by Gothamist as “a DIY queer sanctuary.” The Dreamhouse was actually a successor to Spectrum, a venue “at the intersection of Brooklyn’s thriving queer and DIY scenes, says Paper, “revered for its consistently wild parties that would only be attended by the most fabulous, messy queers this side of the East River had to offer.” But, as so often happens to any DIY efforts in NYC, Spectrum got evicted. Not long after the creation of the arcade cabinet, Dreamhouse got evicted too.⁴
Dream Hard puts brawler mechanics in this context of gentrification, the pushing out of queer artists, and the general rise of fascism in the USA. In Dream Hard, you are not fighting to escape: you’re fighting to get to stay, against waves of fascists and corporate bigwigs. As Yang says:
[…] Streets of Rage, The Warriors, or Escape From New York’s miraculous dream of journey and escape from the crime-ridden city isn’t completely relevant to the gentrifying reality of Bushwick / Ridgewood today. This is the neighborhood where The Dreamhouse lives, and hopes to remain. […]
Most brawlers cast you as a trespasser forced to move through enemy territory, but here I invert that relationship to emphasize how your enemies are the invaders. This place is your place, you belong here.
When the game ends, the characters on screen break into a big dance party. Yang describes the importance of the ending sequence:
I wanted to invoke themes of survival, fatigue, dreams, and celebration with a short epilogue sequence at the end of the game. Unlike most action games, in Dream Hard every defeated enemy’s body remains on the floor and does not disappear. By the end of the game, there are 50+ crumbled bodies everywhere, obscuring most of the dance floor, rendering it damaged and unrecognizable. Defending a space, even when necessary, does inflict a cost on a space.
But as the floor gradually fills with dancers, you clean-up the floor and celebrate who was displaced. It’s a bit of a cheesy feel-good pep talk, but that kind of radical upfront communal hope feels necessary and queer to me in 2018. This tone is the also the crux of the DIY punk aesthetics like The Dreamhouse, necessary to cope with limited resources and spaces by showing up for each other. If society thinks queer people are trash, then we’ll work together to make trash fashionable and exciting.
Treachery in Beatdown City is another subversion of the brawler genre, touching on/satirizing everything from racism, sexism, microaggressions, “the gig economy, apps and how they impact everything from gentrification to dating, the ongoing privatization of public services, corporate participation in the surveillance state, and more,” says Brendan Sinclair. He describes the first fight in the game, which is:
set in a gym, where a white patron assumes the Puerto Rican boxer Lisa — one of the game’s three protagonists — is a cleaning lady. She is joined by the undocumented immigrant pro wrestler Brad and rags-to-riches Jeet Kune Do/capoeira practitioner Bruce and from there, the trio pummel their way through trust fund punks, racist preppies, trendy gentrifiers, abusive cops, and other sources of anger.
This is a far cry from who usually get the spotlight (and who usually receives the violence) in videogames. Dia Lacina notes the game’s uniqueness in both who it centers and whose violence is justified:
Most games give you a stock white guy (the “progressive” ones give you a white woman, redheaded, sometimes with white girl dreadlocks). And it’s always in service to some form of cultural hegemony or a version of “Western” imperialism. Violence in games is great, when you are a member of the status quo going ripshit on anything that threatens the status quo. […]
Todd Howard won’t even let you really kill Ulfric Stormcloak, who is notably racist, until the very end of a tedious questline. And Skyrim is a game with a literal Murder Faction.
But Beatdown City says “You see that racist? You can wreck his shit.” […]
It’s a catharsis for everyone who has to deal with this shit daily. A place to unapologetically throw hands at all the people who need to catch them. It’s a power fantasy for everyone left out of the normal videogame power fantasy.
Kimari Rennis describes similar moments of catharsis and hope while playing:
[P]olice brutality is a real thing that has taken the lives of many people of color, people my age, people like George Floyd. You see it happening Right Now. But when I play Treachery in Beatdown City and I face a cop who proudly admits to getting famous on TV in a bad way for abusing innocent protestors, I don’t have to be afraid. At that moment in time, I and the character that I am playing are one. We are aligned to smirk with a witty line and proceed to knock the, dare I say, racism out of that cop with ease (but not in real life). Then, I move on in the quest to save my black president. It’s then that I am hopeful, even outside of the game.
These moments of togetherness, connection, catharsis, and hope are valuable for more than just their impacts on our personal lives. They are politically vital, too. It is fascinating is to see how many artists and activists — far from games — talk about how joy in these various forms is critical to their movements.
adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism is, in part, a survey of how pleasure and joy are used to activate people, across a wide variety of backgrounds and through a wide variety of tactics: from Black feminists to Indigenous activists to experimental burlesque dancers and beyond. Pleasure is not a distraction from movement work— quite the opposite. She posits that:
[t]rue pleasure — joy, happiness and satisfaction — has been the force that helps us move beyond the constant struggle, that helps us live and generate futures beyond this dystopic present, futures worthy of our miraculous lives.
She interviews two queer burlesque dancers of color — Una Aya Osato and Michi Ilona Osato — whose comments, although of course oriented around dance and performance, feel relevant to the kinds of set-aside experiences we can cultivate in the magic circle of play and games. Says Michi Ilona Osato:
[W]hat we are doing when we are creating is envisioning or practicing for the world we want. So to have those moments on stage where we and the audience are living in, inhabiting a different world, where that is our reality, gives us a physical memory of it to be able to have the strength to keep working [for] the world we want to live in. […]
Sometimes, even when we are performing sexy self-love liberation, we may not feel that way. But doing the performance will remind us that part of us does feel that way, and by performing it, practicing that love for ourselves and all people, I feel like it can strengthen our ability to get there. […]
Leaving the show, our bodies have the physical memory of existing in a world that holds all the contradictions with fierce love, reminding us of the world we work for.
So: what are the worlds we want to work for? What embodied experiences do we want to have? What alternatives do we want to try and crack out of our lives under Empire? Which people do we want to connect —or confront? Who needs joy, catharsis, or agency, and how can we provide spaces to practice it? What rules and contexts can we design (or purposefully not design) to provide room for this messy, emergent joy?
We’ll get into some specific design tactics in Part 4.
¹ Conviviality comes up as a key concept in Joyful Militancy as well: “To undo Empire’s radical monopolies entails participating in convivial forms of life: assemblages of tools, feelings, infrastructures, habits, skills, and relationships that enable and support the flourishing of creativity, autonomy, collective responsibility, and struggle.”
² Of course, relational aesthetics is not without critique. Wilson quotes Claire Bishop’s critique:
She asks: “If relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why?”
For example, ‘more conversation between people’ is a fine goal — but it’s somewhat worthless if said conversation is locked up in a self-selecting group, and doesn’t include people you should be listening to in the first place. She instead proposes the concept of relational antagonism: artworks which are meant to highlight feelings of difference, estrangement, unease, and discomfort between people, in order to more honestly reveal existing relationships and tensions.
³ I go into this in more depth in my 2018 Eyeo talk.
⁴ The arcade cabinet made for the Dreamhouse — called the DreamboxXx — lives on at the indie arcade bar and venue Wonderville, in Brooklyn. You can play it and a pile of other indie games (including mine!) for free.
Hope you enjoyed! If folks seem to like this series, I’ll keep going. If you want to buy me a socially-distanced coffee, you can do so here. If you want to donate somewhere, I think these folks are pretty cool.
Also, full disclosure, I’m friendly with a ton of the folks I cited here. But as a rule, I only cite folks whose work I think is legitimately important and great, regardless of whether we are friendly or somehow mortal enemies.
