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The MA Interactive Media at Goldsmiths has a new page - http://www.imiant.org.uk

Or alternatively - http://www.disconnectandpunish.net

Hard at work at getting it presentable for the expo!

I presented my progress on the project at the end of March, but at the moment I’m left a little stuck on where to take things. So I’m going to try to think through what happened in my experiments a little more thoroughly, and see what I can do with things.

To start, here are some observation that bridge across my whole set of experiments:

• If the free decision is sufficiently rare and allows sufficient creativity, to some extent it takes over as the games purpose and becomes a form of performance or praxis, where one attempts to make the most elegant, interesting or amusing use of the freedom.
• However, exhaustion can be caused by constant decision making.  If having to make a reasonably free decision is a constant function of the game, it becomes pretty hellish having to create something out of nothing.  This is particularly the case if it has long term consequences.
• One way out of exhaustion is to resort to back-referencing to previous decisions; they act as shortcuts, a palette of previous actions.
• The collapse of discrete steps into continuous action collapses chess as a game - and one would expect it would do the same for many other turn based games. (Arguably, an analogy can be made to the collapse of juridical steps in the state of exception - ultimately expressed in arbitrary killings by police/security forces.)  This continuity made checking moves for legality extremely difficult
• In some cases there are attempts to maintain fairness even across obviously skewed structures.  These can be made by the players themselves or by people observing the game who intervene to help.  Much depends here on the social relations already established between players and non-players.  In pulse chess there was a tension between fairness and suffering - in that the more the game was made fair (in my opponents favour) the more I physically suffered.

Now, this project has been proceeding from the premise that one strategy when faced with indeterminacy is to employ a mode of errant reasoning, analogous to joking, which allows for arbitrary creation and connection.  But does this premise still feel right?

Automata Chess - errant reasoning as response to crisis?
A key crisis point was in automata chess, where we left in a point when it wasn’t clear whether under the rules I’d be in check or not.  And there was a form of arbitrary reasoning which actually failed to modify the situation - utilising an ambiguity in Chess as to why the King has to move out of check.  Is it because the King will be taken next turn, or is it the rule in and of itself without reference to any hypothetical game structure.  It failed to resolve the dilemma because it couldn’t reference anything outside of the game - such as an idea of fairness, a convention for resolving disputes, another similar game etc.  So we had to choose something which could resolve the dilemma.  In this case it was a random choice of two counters to determine the game rules, which of course did reference an idea of fairness but isn’t really a form of reasoning.

We can note here that a difference has emerged between justice and fairness, because the random choice is fair, but isn’t just.  Just because the counter went in my favour in the end, it doesn’t mean that I deserved it, that this was the right interpretation of the rules.  And also, we can consider how this might be different if a time limit was imposed, if the decision had to be made quickly?

Tense Temporality: Discreteness and Discretion
In the balloon mediated chess (where people had to pump up a balloon and let it deflate on a party-whistle - during which they could take a turn) Sian and Kirsty kept turns nominally discrete, even though they could have easily destroyed the game by making continuous moves with a

Phew, finally I’ve come up with something resembling a project.  Download below:

Project Proposal: Errant Gaming 01 - Joking the time

Bizarrely, the project seems roughly compatible with my self directed learning objectives.  Who’d have thought?

This is the product of tonight’s work.  It’s simple, but I think it’s helped.

What I’ve realised is that my interest is predominantly in the upper quadrant - the negotiation of anomie through errant reasoning.  I’ve already seen some of this in my trials of Anomie, and also the snap game I played with my housemate.  But I need to translate this into some more fully formed project that deals properly with the themes of this course.

The Turk was an automaton that toured Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, one famed for being an incredible chess player, able to best most opponents. But of course it was a trick - inside was a little chess master! For me, the Turk represents something of a departure.  I first encountered it reading Benjamin’s On the Concept of History in which he uses it as an analogy for historical materialism, with theology as the chess master.  For more - its appearance in the text marks a conceptual link with the state of exception, for inside the box where the machine could be might well be the political theology of Carl Schmitt.

This idea - the mysterious box, it works and then produces a reflexive outcome, seems very much connected to the functionalist philosophy of mind. Its products however make us think of that grand achievement of computation - of producing a computer program that could be a grand chess master.  Was this achievement was possible because of the rule governed structure of chess?  I think it is important to bear in mind the difference between clockwork and logic gates, that the machines in each instance are different in substantial ways.  Nonetheless, its worth thinking about whether are there games that a computer could not play, could never win out? How about scattegories, or pictionary?

One game I tried with my house - we’d lay two snap cards, and try to make a conceptual connection between them.  Each of us would write down the word, and the aim was to get the same word. It was a bloody nightmare, really painful.  But what was interesting were the moments when the connections we made took on the structures of the jokes - for instance, compacting two words drawn from the two cards into a substitute (boat and dog = bog).  Other conceptual connections gave the sense of drawing upon the same resources as jokes - I compacting a butterfly and a birthday cake with lit candles to ‘moth’ whereas my housemate went for ‘firefly’.  Could we imagine a computer program engaging in this kind of link-making, which actually seem to be found most often in party games?

This is something of a digression - what I actually wanted to post was a simple proposal for a game - automata chess!  Its inspired by the above, and also through encountering ‘Courier’ chess, which has an extended set of rules and pieces - apparently just seeing a chess variant loosened up the old brain cogs/fired in the noggin transistors.  Here, instead of taking a piece, you transform it into a whirling automata!  It requires some way of marking a piece (I’m not sure how yet) so each piece can be identified once taken.   When the player takes the piece, it comes under their command briefly - but only so they can set it a rule for movement.  From then on, this piece obeys the rule. Before a players turn, all the automata they have set take their movements, altering the possibilities for play.

Now, many things are undetermined.  Should the automata be able to take other pieces?  I think not, but it might be worth trying.  How complicated and responsive can you make the rules?  Should players be able to take the pieces again to change their rules (I reckon so!)  What happens when you take a piece - where does it go? I think it should take its first move immediately, or else be displaced one square when it is set.

This is all for testing!  But what does this prove?  One question - is this very different set of behaviours also computable? That is, can a computer conceive of every possible rule, no matter how complicated?  One important question in determining this - should you be able widen the responsiveness of the pieces to what’s outside the game board?

‘Anomie’ is an experimental card game which looks at what happens when you incorporate a zone outside of the rules of the game into the rules of the game itself.  You play it as follows:

At the beginning of the game, the two jokers are removed from the deck, and each player draws a card.  This card becomes their objective card.  The jokers are then added back in, and all players then draw a further 3 cards.  The game progresses by each player taking turns to lay cards face up into one of two piles - an IN pile and and OUT pile, and then taking another card from the main deck (which is face down).  The aim of the game is to get as many cards with the same suit and rank in the IN pile, and as many cards of the opposite colour in the OUT pile.

To make it a little easier, I’ve made a little game board which shows you where to place the cards.  Completely non-essential, but might prevent initial confusion.

If we left it at that, the game would proceed via mere luck.  But all the picture cards (Jack, Queen, King, Ace and Joker) all have special powers as described below:

Jack: Allows you to take the top two cards from the opposite pile to which you’ve played it. So if you play a Jack into the IN pile, you can take the top two cards from the OUT pile and place them in the IN pile as well.

Queen: Make another player pick up 3 cards from the opposite pile.  So if you play this in the OUT pile you can make another player pick up the top 3 cards from the IN pile.  The player who picks up the cards carries on as normal, but won’t pick up an additional card on their go until they are back to three cards.

King: Force any player to swap their objective card for another card. First they discard their objective card(s) into either the IN or OUT pile, face down. If there are cards left in the main deck (i.e. that haven’t come into play yet) then they have to take the first card from the main deck.  Otherwise, whoever played the King picks a card from their hand at random - this becomes their objective.  (Note that you cannot make a player with no cards change their objective)

Ace: Force another player to discard their entire hand, face down, into either the IN or OUT pile at your discretion.

Joker: This is the fun one.  This gives a complete free move.  What does ‘free’ mean?  Exactly what it says.  You can do anything.  You can seize another players hand, you can give yourself twenty objective cards, you can throw the IN pile out of the window.  There are two logical restrictions though: this is a free move, not a series of free moves.  Whatever you do has to be defendable as a ‘move’.  And it can’t result in the joker you’ve played ending back in your hand (the other joker is fine).  Apart from that, you can do whatever you like.

Once the game is over, everyone shows their objectives.  You then need to go through the IN and the OUT pile, and allocate points to player as follows:

In the IN pile:

- for each card of the same suit as the player’s objective: 1 point.

- for each card of the same rank as the player’s objective: 3 point.

In the OUT pile:

- for each card of the same colour as the player’s objective: -1 point.

- for each card of the same rank as the player’s objective: -3 points.

Anyone who allows himself to be dominated by the abstract picture of the relationship in which he finds himself with his opponent will never be able to make anything but violent attempts  to gain the upper hand in this conflict. [...]  Whereas an alert openness to the extreme, the comic, the private and the surprising aspects of a situation is the advanced school of politeness. Anyone who practices this will be able to seize the reins in a negotiation, and ultimately also gain control of the interests at stake. Finally, he will be able to astonish his opponent by manipulating the conflicting elements of the situation as if they were cards in game of patience. - Walter Benjamin, Ibizan Sequence

I am startled.  The leap I have made from a discussion of jokes, of unexpected connections disrupting forms of social relations, to games is actually entirely logical.  My enthusiasm has been great, but at the same time curiously detached.  And the move to games, as abstract schemas for social relations, is thus entirely explicable.

I’m wary of placing as much emphasis on ‘decision’ as I made in my previous post.  It’s not because I’ve suddenly realised that all games require decisions (though for some, this is just - to play); rather it’s because what interests me is the (un)co-ordination of collective decision making.

This evening, I had a go at playing through the ‘convincing’ game in Republic: The Revolution with a friend, with an ordinary desk of cards and no reference made to the idea of persuasion, deciisons or negotiation.  Republic is a computer game where your muster a political force in an authoritarian Eastern European state with the aim of overthrowing the government – Sim Insurrection, if you will. In it, you have the opportunity to attempt to persuade and intimidate key activists and community figures, often with the aim of having them join you (and possibly betray another faction).

The game of persuasion is presented as a game akin to top trumps. Each of you are assigned a number of points which you can use to buy four cards, each representing a conversational gambit. For the aggressor, the highest card is ‘Joke’; for the defender, the highest is ‘Ignore’. Others include ‘Press’, ‘Persuade’ (very low), ‘Dismiss’ and so on. You have four rounds in which you play your four cards – high card wins. Then you have a further four rounds, the difference being that you know now your opponent’s deck. If the aggressor wins enough rounds, the defender is persuaded and decides to join your faction.  This is a schematisation of an act of persuasion in order to render it meaningful in game terms. What alternative schematisations are available? Is there any connection between this top-trumps mechanism and social relations, or is it actually just a very a shallow representation?

It was interesting trying to predict what my opponent would do (the levels of inter-responsiveness are important - I think that she thinks that I won’t think that she’ll…) and especially interesting getting it right for the wrong reasons in one instance. Knowing your opponents cards might be said to represent the process by which you get a feel for a person, get a sense of what they might do and what might work. But as Sian pointed out, in life someone might always have another card to play, tucked up their sleeve, and the idea of knowing their cards is a fake.

What more’s to be said? I want to invent a game that acts like the negotiating room that Benjamin talks about in the Ibizan sequence, where it’s possible to try and persistently get the upper hand but at the same time allow for the bringing in of outside forces, of subverting every rule and turning the whole situation on its head.

This might also be the worst kind of cultural/software studies analogy, but I also want to find a way to consider ‘exception handling’ as programmatic process.

An idea for a little project has sprung up, informed by a combination of sources which I’ll go into a little later.

The basic idea is to try and create a game that in some way models the processes of a group coming to a decision.  The specific context I have in mind is a group of activists deciding on a political action - this was sparked by a complaint I read on a forum about how utterly tiresome these meetings are.  I think they have a number of interesting dynamics to model, not least the idea that not only do members have a whole host of competing agendas, but in fact many who come to such meetings go with no idea as to their objective.

Now, why would I want to do this?  Because what I’m specifically interested in is something like the remainder which can’t actually be contained in a rule governed system, the creative excess which gives the potential of exposing the arbitrary conditions of social engagement or producing whole other possibilties outside of a straight-forward either/or.  In theory, it should be actually impossible to model this in game form - and this is great, because it allows me to identify these areas of operation more clearly.  The game-making processes is primarily not an attempt to simulate social relations but a way to think them through. That said, it should also be possible to create a game which actually allows or even encourages such forces to come to bear - if this can be done, the game could be used as a way of testing out different strategies for generating decisions and understanding the effects of different contexts.

I’m pretty sure that this idea actually has a lot to do with a game I’ve been playing - technically called The Village but the people I play it with  call it Werewolves, probably to avoid being tainted by association with M. Night Shamalalyalalaanan or however you spell his name!  I’ll post my reflections on how that game works a little later.

Together with fellow students, activists and school children, last Wednesday I found myself caught in a small patch of street for six hours in the freezing cold with no food or toilet facilities, barricaded in each side by a row of riot police, delightfully impassive as always. That’s right, I had received my comeuppance for having come out to protest the proposed 80% cut in HE teaching, the tuition fee hikes and the abolition of the EMA (and I’d only meant to be out for a couple of hours as well before going home to a nice hot dinner.)

This scenario raises multiple questions on the legitimacy of violence by both the state and the individual, but I am going to ignore those and focus a little on the form of the ‘kettle’ and why it might be important to my present line of thinking.

The kettle was coined, I think, because it contained and pressurised the ‘heat’ of the protest.  It’s a problematic term because it distances the scenario from the brute fact of forced detention and deprivation, but I’m going to retain it for now in the speculative hope that there’s some way of turning it back round.

So a kettle looks a little like this:

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The below is pilfered from a 11+ sample paper on non-verbal reasoning.  For the benefit of those outside of the UK, the 11+ is a test some unfortunate children have to take to determine if they are fit to go to the higher stream ‘Grammar’ schools.

It’s an element in paper which asks children to analyse the relationship between the first pair of shapes, and then make a pair with the same relationship.

So here the answer the answer is ‘b’ – the smaller of the two shapes appears as am even smaller, filled in shape inside the bigger shape.  What are we learning through doing such tests?  Surely it’s how certain relations, certain principles, can be cross-applied from one context to another.  One way of viewing this might be to say that it’s teaching the principle of analogy, another that of universal law.

Now this one excites the philosophy student in me:

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