Why I did do this...game (discuss)

World of art craft (raw)

This game is meant to extend, what is happening right now at art school in small groups to people exterior to the art school. To introduce this game, first I will tell some things about the performances of my co-students, concentrating on those, that have a tendency to build up fictional characters and go for farce, absurdity and the disturbance of world perception of those who watch them or take part in those performances. I will further try to explain the importance of context transitioning.

Performance can be enacted in an art context, but it can also take place in every day life. In the worst case, those performances are used to manipulate people and to evoke certain actions. In the best case, there is a short time of non-understanding and weirdness or even anger, and after a while, when brought into an art/music etc. context, the person experiencing it, might laugh, approve and/or feel some kind of satisfaction/redemption. He/she can would say before: "Why are you doing this?", "What's the matter with you?", "What is going on?" and later: "Oh, you are funny", "I think you made your point" , "I like what you are doing, continue".

Of course, these performances don't work when an important information is missing. For example, some days ago, WALD had a performance at a party, where money was collected for a friend, that had blood cancer. WALD did not know about this. Hence the public, that was obviously not in a very good mood and the performance group did not connect very well.
In a museum or on an art fair, it is tradition to make fun of the connection of art and money or the behaviour of the visitors/galerists, elitary, overly fascinated or self-sufficient. On the street, performances often have the thematic of breaking every day routines ("free hugs").

I think, that a performance is excellent, when it is almost context free, when it works in almost any context at almost any time (by "working" I mean from disturbance-->approval). At this point a performance can state a point that is quite general or give an essential information. Of course the absolute context-deliverance cannot be achieved and it might also come to a point, where the information is so essential, that it is absolutely useless for everyday life, like: "We are all living on planet earth and there is time and space."

So maybe, I should not say, I'm going for a "context-free" - but for a "multiple context"-performance. For example a performance by Britney Spears is a very "mono-contextual". In the "multiple context"-performance we achieve a broader view on peoples life. We are not so far away, that we only perceive the whole picture, but we can look a little bit from up above on some parts of the labyrinth, while still walking around in it as a performance experiencer/enactor.
This rarely happens in a "mono-context"-performance, because, when for example going to a concert, there is almost no disturbance (or only expected, like light, sweat, or giant balloons falling from the ceiling) and therefore there is almost no thinking necessary. A concert can be like a tunnel, with a high amount of safety and non-responsibility.

For a "multiple-context"- performance a lot of responsibility is demanded. I do not say, that the the labyrinth-overview is better than the tunnel. I think it is nice for people to sometimes give away responsibility and to take responsibility in other times. Of course I would not want to force people to do one or the other thing. I think it is more fun, when people can choose, what they want to do, as it can be very painful, f.e. when you want to have more freedom/responsibility, when you're not given it and the other way around. This is, why I wanted to make this game. It should suite those and other social needs, and it should give the opportunity to broaden the view and to understand some social interactions.

It is inspired by the "Absurd Theater", Ionesco, Samuel Beckett etc. , facebook, myspace, youtube, 4chan and some of today's multiplayer online roleplay games.

The game is called "LERKE" from the character that I invented, and that is the hero in the first story. Any person can join now, making up his own character/hero (or several characters) and tell its story. He can do this by dressing up, painting, writing, photographing and then blogging as a proof. I'll explain later, why there's a proof necessary. He/She can decide to join with other characters in a certain scenario or to stay completely off the radar ("All humanity was extinct. Meanwhile several light years away a lonely spaceship survived...").

First, I made up a story, which had to be quite absurd, science-fictional, philosophic and somewhat constructivistic in order to suite my own preferences. There are also different versions of the story, that you can read them in the blog, that explains and starts the game. I also put the story into the bansai story bot (link) for several times, rewriting it each time.
The story takes place in three different places, the player can choose from: Earth, a different dimension and Space. They can choose a nickname and a character they want to level with. For LERKE Episode 1 there are 10 Levels. Each level contains has certain tasks (like: "Go buy french fries with your character. Make a proof photo and blog it."). It is not necessary to do all Levels in the order of 1 to 10. Of course the lower levels are easier and do not imply as many tasks as the higher ones. The leveling is necessary to give the game some kind of fake competition and to be interesting to people that are competition-motivated. This is why a proof ("me writing", "me drawing", "me as my character eating French fries") is necessary, similar to a 4chan "rule", "proof or it did not happen". So this game (if it works) will tend to constantly run in the gray space between fiction and reality. The goal of the game itself is to link together people, that are interested in trying new things, but did not find a platform/context yet.

On the other hand the game should not be the same thing as a classroom break situation, where people sit around and play little games in order to not get bored. There should be an easy access and not very complicated, but I would like to avoid the player going through a situation, where he plays the game, feels, that what he's doing has no use, makes him dumb and keeps him from fighting the everyday survival war.

In some parts of our society, people that play roleplay games are seen as outsiders and loosers. It is mainly because of the nature of roleplay games, which is that you have to put some effort in knowing the rules in order to play the game, which makes you an insider. Hence you can make jokes with other insiders and feel in a kind of community with them. Those who hear those jokes but cannot understand them will feel outside and (when they do not want to play roleplay games) try to connect with others outsiders and make jokes about roleplay gamers. I would like to avoid this (generation) split and create the game in a way that everyone can relate. For example when I say it is "science-fictional" I mean "Stanislaw-Lem-Science-Fictional". The first term is more or less "outsider-style", the second one is mostly accepted by those, that fear the primitive aspects of "science-fiction", because they miss a point where humanity, existence and other philosophical or everyday elements are reflected and looked at in a new, in their view more appropriate way, which is clearly the essence of Stanislaw Lems Science Fiction Stories.

When creating a myspace page, many people acknowlegde this work, because it can be very useful to have a homepage for a flourishing business or a portfolio. It is not necessarily about hustling but more about showing, that one is capable of domesticating the internet and accomplish something in life. Those who play and get sucked into the game for a very long period, become part of an interesting phenomenon. In society today we still have the rule of the "survival of the fittest." Those who try to be the best in whatever goal they have, may achieve. Those who don't do anything at all about it, will fail. There are also those, that try very hard and fail anyway. But those may win in another way, because they have the sympathy of the masses, they get an "A" for effort. Those, who play, because they think they did, what they could, may not become have worked to their full potential. There are also those games like chess, where someone plays, in order to get better brain skills, or in order to win in a strategy-game-competition like counter strike. But whenever people play, they try to have some fun in life too, which is a goal that puts other goals, like being the best in something, down to a lower standard. When I was younger, I wanted to be the best painter in the world. I did not lower my standards because I saw, what other painters already did, but because I started playing computer games. There I could very often have the feeling of being very good at something. This feeling of course is basically a drug, that keeps the fight for survival going, because those, who are the best in society, will most times be supported and will not have to fear loneliness and starvation.

In art, those who put no effort into being seen, make no exhibitions and so on will never have any influence or be acknowledged as a very good painter by anybody. The self-marketing is a very important aspect of the art world. Of course, not everybody can be the best. But not being in a world, where knowledge or work is exchanged makes people almost non-existent, they become part of a mass of people that has no face. They will never be a hero, whereas in the roleplay games or even in myspace/facebook communities everybody can be a hero, without having done anything special, just by showing off his existence.

With LERKE people make a character take part in a story and at the same time, produce something that could also work on the outside of the game, like an object of art. Sadly, the every-day-writers and painters might not play this game, because they will want to see their work in a different context, like a gallery. But as soon as the game has been declared as art by some acknowledged art authority, the game will allow some of them to enter the game, without them risking their status. It could also be necessary for people to play it in order to keep a status (like the necessity of having a catalogue or a gallerist), which would be disastrous in my eyes. Maybe it is possible to keep a balance from the beginning: It is not cool to play LERKE. Neither is it uncool. It is not useless and not useful at the same time, and so on. Those contradictions can work in the same schizophrenic way as one can be desperate and awfully happy on the same day.

In buddhism the "survival of the fittest" principle is quite low, but they also are very cut off from the world. For LERKE I want everybody to feel like a god, and everybody to treat each other as gods. This also means, that everybody playing this game has to put some effort into it and to be able step back in a buddhistic way. This game should not be an "outsider-game" it should be played in the center of reality and everyday-life. I know that I am asking for something impossible, but this is the only way, because maybe LERKE is the last possible game on earth. I know, that it is not very attractive yet, but this is because it is not yet, what it could be.

There is antoher text about memes and memesis (how images/pictures influence us//who produces images today/) coming up.