[-empyre-] Fwd: (no subject)

[Derek Curry]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello all,

These are all good points!

For me, it also raises the question of who the audience needs to be for
tabletop games.  Now that it is possible to publish games with limited runs
and to be both funded and advertised through crowdsourcing platforms before
the game is physically produced, I imagine there are possibilities to
create games for very small and specific audiences.  I’ve thought about
this before with some of the tabletop games I’ve made using GameCrafter.
Some of these games were used for psychology experiments (creating a game
to teach children delay of gratification), or to explain complex financial
instruments—both of which necessitated limited printings.  It occurred to
me that it would be possible to create one-of-a-kind tabletop games—perhaps
using images that have a personal meaning to the intended players.  This
example does not conform well to a traditional tabletop publishing model,
but could fit a fine art paradigm where galleries sell unique objects to
collectors who are willing to pay higher prices specifically *because* the
objects are unique.  Which may not be that much of a stretch—as Brent
pointed out, collecting is as much of a goal as playing games now for some
people.  Or, just as artists are often commissioned to create a portrait of
an individual or artwork for a specific context, game designers could
create tabletop games commissioned by a specific individuals or group.
Some tabletop indie games are already produced in more limited runs than
prints or photographs sold on the art market.  I am by no means suggesting
that this model should replace the current market for tabletop games, but
rather that it could exist alongside it and allow for new types of
experimentation in tabletop games.  Many of the most experimental
avant-garde artists were funded primarily by one or a few patrons, and I am
wondering if this is a possibility for tabletop game designers.

On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 7:14 PM Aaron Trammell 
wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Yes to this!
>
> I want to link your points here on sustainability to the conversations on
> the list last week. You're right! Modern board games are only being built
> for a crowdfunded splash and 1-2 actual plays at the moment. But the
> marketing is driven by a consumer lust for virtual or potential plays. What
> this means, though is more plastics, more trash, and more waste.
>
> The crowdfunding revolution is big news, but it's full of upsides and
> downsides. I do think that the present moment of modern board games is
> perhaps more exciting for collectors than it is for players. But at the
> same time, space is being made for new and (sometimes) diverse voices in
> the space of design. I dunno. Should we be concerned about the waste modern
> board games are producing now while the industry is still relatively small?
>
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 1:15 PM Brent Povis 
> wrote:
>
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Thanks Alenda and fine folks of Empyre! It was fun following last week’s
>> lines, which ran somewhat adjacent but were certainly relevant to board
>> gaming as well. As a tabletop designer/publisher, hopefully I can dip into
>> some industry perspective for this week’s Entmoot.
>>
>>
>>
>> The first title from our publishing house, a tactical 2-player game
>> called Morels  (2012), hit
>> kitchen tables 17 years after Settlers of Catan
>>  (1995) made the leap from
>> Germany to revolutionize American board gaming. We entered the market when
>> the creeping exponential upsweep of game releases over time
>>  was just beginning
>> to reach skyward. That acceleration has continued in earnest, such that
>> more tabletop games have been released in the 21st century than in all
>> of preceding human history.
>>
>>
>> Reasons for this are many and varied, from a crowdfunding-enabled
>> publishing coup and corresponding entry of new and dedicated talent to the
>> designer pool on the production side, to a growing interest in augmenting
>> face-to-face time among family and friends on the consumer side. An
>> additional catalyst, born at the intersection of these factors and the one
>> I’d like to examine in this post in hopes of making the analog jump on the
>> “Green Gaming” discussions of last week, is the “cult of the new” that has
>> increasingly defined the board game hobby over the last 5-10 years.
>>
>>
>>
>> When I was a child in the mid 80’s, the shelves in a sunlit corner of my
>> bedroom glittered with about 60 board games, a trove that bred awe among
>> schoolmates and that ever-elusive “quality time” for our family, which I’m
>> thankful to say happened on a near-nightly basis. I’d say 40 of those
>> titles were seldom played, primarily due to 

Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Derek Curry]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello all,

These are all good points!

For me, it also raises the question of who the audience needs to be for
tabletop games.  Now that it is possible to publish games with limited runs
and to be both funded and advertised through crowdsourcing platforms before
the game is physically produced, I imagine there are possibilities to
create games for very small and specific audiences.  I’ve thought about
this before with some of the tabletop games I’ve made using GameCrafter.
Some of these games were used for psychology experiments (creating a game
to teach children delay of gratification), or to explain complex financial
instruments—both of which necessitated limited printings.  It occurred to
me that it would be possible to create one-of-a-kind tabletop games—perhaps
using images that have a personal meaning to the intended players.  This
example does not conform well to a traditional tabletop publishing model,
but could fit a fine art paradigm where galleries sell unique objects to
collectors who are willing to pay higher prices specifically *because* the
objects are unique.  Which may not be that much of a stretch—as Brent
pointed out, collecting is as much of a goal as playing games now for some
people.  Or, just as artists are often commissioned to create a portrait of
an individual or artwork for a specific context, game designers could
create tabletop games commissioned by a specific individuals or group.
Some tabletop indie games are already produced in more limited runs than
prints or photographs sold on the art market.  I am by no means suggesting
that this model should replace the current market for tabletop games, but
rather that it could exist alongside it and allow for new types of
experimentation in tabletop games.  Many of the most experimental
avant-garde artists were funded primarily by one or a few patrons, and I am
wondering if this is a possibility for tabletop game designers.

On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 7:14 PM Aaron Trammell 
wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Yes to this!
>
> I want to link your points here on sustainability to the conversations on
> the list last week. You're right! Modern board games are only being built
> for a crowdfunded splash and 1-2 actual plays at the moment. But the
> marketing is driven by a consumer lust for virtual or potential plays. What
> this means, though is more plastics, more trash, and more waste.
>
> The crowdfunding revolution is big news, but it's full of upsides and
> downsides. I do think that the present moment of modern board games is
> perhaps more exciting for collectors than it is for players. But at the
> same time, space is being made for new and (sometimes) diverse voices in
> the space of design. I dunno. Should we be concerned about the waste modern
> board games are producing now while the industry is still relatively small?
>
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 1:15 PM Brent Povis 
> wrote:
>
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Thanks Alenda and fine folks of Empyre! It was fun following last week’s
>> lines, which ran somewhat adjacent but were certainly relevant to board
>> gaming as well. As a tabletop designer/publisher, hopefully I can dip into
>> some industry perspective for this week’s Entmoot.
>>
>>
>>
>> The first title from our publishing house, a tactical 2-player game
>> called Morels  (2012), hit
>> kitchen tables 17 years after Settlers of Catan
>>  (1995) made the leap from
>> Germany to revolutionize American board gaming. We entered the market when
>> the creeping exponential upsweep of game releases over time
>>  was just beginning
>> to reach skyward. That acceleration has continued in earnest, such that
>> more tabletop games have been released in the 21st century than in all
>> of preceding human history.
>>
>>
>> Reasons for this are many and varied, from a crowdfunding-enabled
>> publishing coup and corresponding entry of new and dedicated talent to the
>> designer pool on the production side, to a growing interest in augmenting
>> face-to-face time among family and friends on the consumer side. An
>> additional catalyst, born at the intersection of these factors and the one
>> I’d like to examine in this post in hopes of making the analog jump on the
>> “Green Gaming” discussions of last week, is the “cult of the new” that has
>> increasingly defined the board game hobby over the last 5-10 years.
>>
>>
>>
>> When I was a child in the mid 80’s, the shelves in a sunlit corner of my
>> bedroom glittered with about 60 board games, a trove that bred awe among
>> schoolmates and that ever-elusive “quality time” for our family, which I’m
>> thankful to say happened on a near-nightly basis. I’d say 40 of those
>> titles were seldom played, primarily due to 

Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2: Analog by design

[Derek Curry]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello Empyre community, and thank you Alenda for the introduction!

This is an exciting topic for me, as I am very interested in the area where
games cross into the real and the real becomes mixed up in a game. For this
post, I will focus on the former, or as Alenda put it, “digital games that
deliberately cross thresholds into the "real" world”

Alenda mentioned my game WarTweets that was made with Jennifer Gradecki. It
is a pervasive game that is played through a game interface and on Twitter
(to play the game, players login using their Twitter account).  The
gameplay is a simplified version of the game Global Thermonuclear War from
the 1984 film WarGames.  But, in WatTweets, orange rockets are launched
every time President Trump tweets. Players intercept the rockets by
tweeting back to the President. Elements of the game are intended to be
silly and biting, like the political cartoons of George Grosz or Honoré
Daumier. For example, the game map is a fictional world with landmarks
labeled as things Trump has said or tweeted, like “Covfefe Island” or “Grab
‘em by the Peninsula.” But the real intent of the game is to promote
political discourse on a public forum that will become part of the national
archive. US Courts have ruled that the Presidential Records Act of 1978
applies to Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account, which means that tweets
made by @realDonaldTrump are official presidential records. Federal judge
Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled that President Trump cannot block any Twitter
users from reading or posting to this account because it is a “designated
public forum.” This means that tweeting to @realDonaldTrump is a conduit
for political speech that cannot legally be censored by President Trump,
and a way for citizens to make their opinions of the Trump administration
part of the official public record. So, tweets made in the game become part
of the official public record.

We are well aware that inciting a meaningful or productive debate over
Twitter (or with President Trump for that matter), is a lofty goal that we
don’t expect to achieve. But, we do believe that games can create spaces
for possibilities—and the responses and exchanges we have had with players
have been thought-provoking. For example, some people become genuinely
angry, either because they disagree with the politics of the game, which is
understandable. Or because they have an ideological conviction that games
should not be overtly political, which to me is reminiscent of arguments
over the political autonomy of art—though no one has specifically evoked
Adorno or Kantian aesthetics. While Jennifer and I don’t enjoy making
people angry, these conversations have been very interesting as we end up
learning a great deal about what is important to people who are invested in
the “purity” of games. We were also surprised at how much some people
enjoyed railing against the president. I had assumed that anyone who really
wanted to vent at the president and had a Twitter account would already be
doing this. But, what we learned was the context of the game created a
space where players had a community of like-minded people. Some of these
players took the game very seriously and tried to intercept every rocket in
the game, while other players were more selective about what they responded
to, and used the game as an opportunity to fact-check the tweets and
retweets of the president.

The game also has its own Twitter account connected to a bot that is
counting how many times Trump has tweeted certain words since he has been
president. As of this writing, the latest one says “This is the 198th tweet
by @realDonaldTrump that contains the word RUSSIA since he has been
president.”  I don’t check this account regularly, but every couple of
weeks I will login and find people trying to start an argument with the
bot. The bot is not artificial intelligence, it is just a word counter.  I
don’t know if these people are imagining someone monitoring Trump’s twitter
account around the clock with a ledger in hand to log every instance of
certain words to tweet the word count back at the President within 5
minutes, or if is more like people who scream at the television when they
see something they don’t like.  But it has prompted me to think about the
role of NPCs in the real world such as automated customer support or
self-checkout machines at the grocery store. My dissertation research
focused on how algorithmic trading bots interacted with human traders and
monitored market information from the news and social media. But I think
that should be a subject for another post, and I am curious to hear the
thoughts of others.

-Derek

On Sun, Mar 8, 2020 at 1:15 PM Alenda Chang 
wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Greetings, empyre! This week, we're lucky to be joined by discussants
> Derek Curry, Brent Povis, Aaron Trammell, and Timothy Welsh. Tim

Re: [-empyre-] FW: Welcome Byron Rich to the September discussion

[Derek Curry]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello everyone, this has been an interesting discussion.  Thanks for
inviting me, Byron!



Many good points have been made here.  I like Paula’s examples of Christian
Phillip Müller’s work (unintentionally) revealing how a physical body in
space can be rendered invisible, it contrasts nicely with Jennifer's
example of border agents using data to track individuals in space.  It
reminds me of Deleuze's statement that "Individuals have become '*dividuals*,'
and masses, samples, data, markets, or '*banks*.'" Paul’s point that the
geopolitical demarcation between the US and Canada is not something that
can be seen physically, but can be rendered by a GPS, or possibly surmised
from a map is also apt.  Geopolitical borders are theoretical and
technological constructs, the result of measuring devices and political
decisions, which often have no physical analogue, such as a coastline or
river.  They exist only on, and perhaps because of, maps.


Though, even maps can be ambiguous at times as Francis Alÿs demonstrates in
his *The Greenline* (2004).  In the video, Alÿs is seen walking along the
armistice border that separates Israel from its neighboring states. The
armistice line was drawn by Moshe Dayan, the commander of the Jerusalem
front in the Arab-Israeli War, with a somewhat think green marker.  The
width of the marker on the map left some ambiguity as to where specifically
the armistice border is, and the Six Day War in 1967 resulted in a question
of whether or not the border is still recognized.  In my opinion, this is
one of the heaviest topics related to a border a contemporary artists can
deal with.  The video is historically informative, text explaining the
history of the line and an image of the map are shown, but no political
position is taken. The video begins with the statement:



SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC

CAN BECOME POLITICAL

and

SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL

CAN BECOME POETIC



This raises the question of not only what constitutes a border or a nation
state, but what the role of an artist or theorist should be in dealing with
a subject like this.  Given that borders are not just geopolitical
constructs, but contain national identities, laws, economic opportunities,
etc., it is difficult to imagine a single artwork that could deal with all
of these aspects.  Displaced bodies—migrants, refugees, or blue collar
workers who have lost their jobs as a result of globalization—are much
easier to depict in a viscerally compelling way than the techno-political
causes of their displacement.  New media works on this topic are usually
very compelling; John Craig Freeman’s *Border Memorial*, which Byron has
already mentioned, is one of my favorite works on this subject, and the
Electronic Disturbance Theater’s *Transborder Immigrant Tool* is in my list
of favorite hacktivist works.  And I can think of works that address the
technological or political nature of borders.  Julian Oliver’s project *Border
Bumping* (2012-2014) demonstrates this by showing how your cell phone may
enter a country long before you do.  But I struggle to think of artworks
that embody the complex dynamics that are (at least part of) the root cause
of displacement, such as automation or outsourcing of a job or free trade
agreements.  For example, the effects of NAFTA on the agricultural industry
in Mexico, which is one of the main causes for migration to the US is
rarely addressed directly in the visual arts even though there is a
plethora of academic literature on the subject.  The simultaneous inability
of Mexico to impose tariffs on imported agricultural goods imported from
the US, particularly corn, a traditional staple of a Mexican diet, combined
with the heavy subsidization of these crops by the US government resulted
in a large percentage of rural Mexican farmworkers unable to find
employment.  As viscerally compelling as images of migrant workers from
Mexico are, why someone would leave their family and community and risk
their life crossing a desert to work under the threat of arrest and
deportation for less than minimum wage is seldom addressed in artworks.
This techno-political situation is often the subtext for many artworks—the
explicit connection of EDT’s *Floodnet* to the Zapatistia uprising on the
day NAFTA took effect (Jan. 1, 1994) is one example.  But a clear
understanding of cause-and-effect requires specialized, if not esoteric,
knowledge that is not easily represented.  If an understanding of (and
control over) the complex interrelations between politics and technology is
relegated to politicians and technocrats, what agency do artists have in
these situations?  Are they to be relegated to the role of documenting the
effects of a complex problem, or can they participate in creating solutions?



The struggle between technocrats and the power elite is elucidated quite
well in Habermas’s “Technology and Science as Ideology”.  This is an