Summer Project 2 - Game for 6 (Sept 2009)

The main summer project that I had to tackle was the invention of a game for 6 people to play.

To start with you have to know what is classed as a game:

A game is a structured activity, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more concerned with the expression of ideas. However, the distinction is not clear-cut, and many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator sports/games) or art (such as jigsaw puzzles or games involving an artistic layout such as Mahjong solitaire).


Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. Games generally involve mental or physical stimulation, and often both. Many games help develop practical skills, serve as a form of exercise, or otherwise perform an educational, simulational or psychological role. According to Chris Crawford, the requirement for player interaction puts activities such as jigsaw puzzles and solitaire "games" into the category of puzzles rather than games


Definition taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game

Now there are more games than you can imagine and some date back thousande of years, so rather than sit down and try and invent a masterpiece that I thought could be on the shelves by christmas, I thought I'd look at an idea that could be useful in the environment I was going into at University and also be fun.

I wanted to come up with something that allowed you to produce sculptures, using things that were at hand in the studio and to do so as quickly as possible. I decided upon using paper as the base for all the structures and the throw of a dice would then tell the players what to do with it.

The image above shows the three game dice used to decide the paper to be used and what action the player needs to carry out.

Idea

I have since thought of developing this idea further. Not to make the game itself different but to actually use it to create art work by involving groups of people.

My idea is to present this to a large gathering, maybe a class of school children, Uni' students etc.

( A few different age groups would be interesting to see how varied the results would be). They would be split down into groups of six as with the original game idea and play the game repeatedly, producing multiple 3d objects. All the resulting objects could then be combined and displayed as one large sculpture, (per group).

The entire process could be recorded on video/ photographed and this could be used as a part of an exhibition when/if all the larger sculptures are brought together.