:
(C) 2014 Ana Daldon

Come on! It's just a game

###isn't it? Thoughts collage
###isn't it? Photographic collage
 
###isn't Daldon
###2014
 
###Since 2600 BC games have been a universal part of human experience. Games are a structured playing with rules, challenge and goals. Often we play games for enjoyment and sometimes we use games as an educational tool. Games can tell a lot about the period in which they are developed and played.
 
###Approximately tree years later the Fukushima disaster and with the vivid memory of Chernobyl disaster it is impossible to imagine that in the early fifties optimistic games about nuclear energy were developed in Europe and USA. The “Atomic energy lab” was a science game for children furnished by a spinthariscope, an uranium ore deposits, a cloud chamber, the Geiger counter and an electroscope. Today the “Atomic energy lab” is a piece for collectors. This lab was strictly related to the after second world wave that wanted to give a new value to the atomic energy. The intention was to forget the “bad atomic energy” related to the atomic bomb and to celebrate the clean and almost infinite atomic energy as a top energy resource.
 
### “Monopoly” was thought to be able to explain the single tax theory developed by the political economist Henry George in 1903. Although the intention of the game was to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies, the game promoted the domination of a market by a single entity that drives the opponents to bankruptcy. The non-intentional goal of the game inspired and motivated several generations. In contrast to “Monopoly” and related to the contemporary discourse about sustainable development “Earthopoly” is a monopoly-based game that celebrates earth: players goal is saving the earth collecting carbon credits and trading them for “clean air”.
 
### Herodotus wrote that games, particularly dice games, were invented in the kingdom of Lydia during a time of famine. They introduced a policy based on playing games: one day everybody would eat and the next day everybody would play games intensively ignoring the fact that they are not eating. After 18 years of this policy the famine wasn't getting better, so the king decided they would play one final dice game. They divided the entire kingdom in half. The winners of the dice game would leave the country, and they would go out looking for a new place to live, leaving behind just enough people (the “losers”) to survive on the resources that were available.
 
### Chess is a two players game. Each player begins with 16 pieces: one king, one queen, two rocks, two knights, two bishops and eight pawns. Usually the two sets of pieces are one black and one white. Each of the six pieces has a different role and moves differently.
 
### I extended the structured chess game adding, erasing and twisting different rules, playing with the idea that the world of chess, with its rules, is not “real”. I tried to create a “more realistic” chess, that reflects some everyday life situations.
Some examples:
  • avoid the differences between the pieces: as in real life you have to understand, based on how a piece is moved, which role it plays in the game.
  • if one of the players is distracted you can do whatever you want, like stealing opponent's pieces (eating it right away!) and so on.
  • avoid the difference between the two players (all black or all white): you never know, when you are in a battle, if you are fighting against an enemy or not, you have to figure it out and construct it during the game.
  • insert more pieces per each players.
  • tree or four or more than four players chess
  • everything I wrote above mixed.
 
I took some pictures of the new “angry-chess” games. I asked to play the “angry-chess”to some chess-players.
### Are games “just” games?
 
### Bibliography- Videography - Inspirations
  • Jane McGonigal Ted talk “Gaming can make a better world?”
  • Bernd Kraeftner talks about the use or mis-use of the word “just”
  • Massimiano Bucchi's article “Quando Disney faceva i cartoni sul nucleare” , La Repubblica, 20 March 2012
  • A is for atom, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5JGA3KmOYE,
  • Our friend the atom, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDcjW1XSXN0, Disneyland, 1954
  • Chess rules
  • Monopoly rules
  • Earthopoly rules
  • Atomic energy lab instruction and description
  • “Green tris” by Milani Wood presented at Civica Project – Art and Design, March 2014
 

Fact Box

Come on! It's just a game
Date
May 26, 2014