Crayons, snips, and code: Where Playschool meets online gaming

Low and high tech collided in two charming re-examinations of the video game in Auckland in recent months. Te Tuhi’s exhibition of Video Game Machine by Douglas Bagnall closed on February 10th, only a few weeks before Window hosted a “special one-night only videogame show” on Friday 28th March entitled ‘Play It, Make It’. Curator Luke Munn invited game designer Jeff Nusz to run a two hour high-speed low-tech game making workshop involving paper, snips, markers, a xylophone and no adult supervision. Attendees were invited to contribute a drawing of a character or a recording of a sound to the collaboratively produced game.

The resulting game, now available to play online through Window’s site, is extremely simple, but sweet in its deliberate naivety. The Playschool craft aesthetic of the drawing workshop has survived the transition into cyberspace as players navigate through diorama style landscapes by clicking on, and animating the hand-drawn characters. Munn is obviously a bit of a low-tech video game specialist: a work of his entitled Click Clack was exhibited through Window online in late 2006 (and is still available through their archive):

“A series of 5-second Flash sequences, Click Clack by Aucklander Luke Munn illustrates what computer games become when stripped to an essential gaming cycle of problem and solution. The micro-games test the user to interpret, orient and understand each situation and then to respond before the 5-second time limit expires.”

Reducing video games to their bare bones of action and reaction reveals the interaction of player intentionality with the language of gaming. Each 5 second sequence in Click Clack functions like a mini IQ test: as a riddle to be quickly solved. The simplicity of the task is offset by the wit of the designer: for example, the juxtaposition of an instruction to ‘rock’ with the image of a fist requires the player to make the digital hand into the universal symbol for “I’m having a great time at this rock concert”. With each successfully solved riddle, the player moves ‘up’ a level on a graphical representation of a hillside: scaling the metaphorical mountain indicates an understanding, or commonality, of symbolic language.

In this sense, video gaming can be seen as a form of community creation. Players apply common interpretations of symbols, interacting with the computer and by extension with the designer of the game, and through their success in understanding prove their affinity to the group.

This sense of community was strong in the workshop at Window on the 28th. Exhibition openings inevitably attract members of a particular social scene, but participants on this particular occasion also enjoyed a shared understanding of gaming and an appreciation for getting involved with craft: mixing physical creativity with collaborative digital authorship.

Bagnall’s Video Game Machine at Te Tuhi openly invited visitors to the gallery to produce a drawing with supplied paper and crayons. His software would translate these images into a game that could then be played in the art gallery. This method, where the software operates as a stand-in for the artist’s collaboration with the player, is obviously a more mediated approach than the physical collaboration that took place at Window, but in a step which allows players to fully engage with, and potentially completely rework the project, Bagnall has published his software online http://halo.gen.nz/tetuhi/code.html.