Day: December 22, 2009

Protest + Game = ?

At base, protest and play are in opposition. Play is the interaction with rules. There are rules, people break them and form emergent properties that become the new rules and game. Play is working with rules. In opposition, a protest works directly against the rules. A protest means to destroy rules or the system, not to adapt them (despite the possibility that this is all that might eventually happen). Protest and game run against each other but are they combinable?

State of Emergency is about rampaging. It’s about things related to protests, but while it has tie ins with the Seattle WTO protests it really isn’t related. There are also various Sim/Civ-esque games based around revolution, but again these are not exactly about protest, but the reinstitution of order.

Would it be possible to create a game that systematically broke the idea of rules by causing the constant creation of new rules through their breaking? It would maintain entertainment/pleasure by giving out points, awards, or achievements for disruption and for changing the system itself? Instead of giving people the ban hammer for cracking the code, breaking the rules, or finding interesting use of mechanics, it would reward the players. I suppose this is really called “life” and “hacking,” but what if, what if…

What Type of World is it Again?

I’m sure the above is not something you need to question if you’ve sat through Disneyland’s Small World ride in either its new or old forms. We all know it’s a small world; we all know that all the people in the world are represented; we all know that everybody’s cute, singing oh so happy. What you/we might not know are some of these interesting particulars.

Like that in each of the rooms there exist Disney characters: Lilo and Stitch in the island/Hawaiian area, Aladdin in the Arabian world and so on and so forth. Is the world Disney or is Disney the world? And just what is the relationship between the Orientalist fantasy of Aladdin and whatever we may claim Disney(land) is?

And again, what of the happy warnings in the beginning that rotate between English to French to Spanish to English to Japanese to Spanish to English to German to Spanish and on ad infinum. Obviously that says something about the French, Japanese and German visitors, dying to hear the message about keeping their arms and legs inside the tram as well as those visitors that don’t get a personalized message. But it also says so much about the relationship between English and Spanish in a park, and corner of the country, that is indebted to Spanish speaking workers.

So what type of world are we in again? This time let’s not just call it small, or fun, or even troubled, but perhaps complicated.