Did a little debriefing about the happening. Talked a bit about what went down (besides knobs, yuc yuc yuc), what was the response, how the players felt about it. It's funny. Across the board, it seems, the knobs were written off as an experiment to see who would help. In one sense, i guess it was. Helping would be engaging in some way. But it quickly began to feel like an obligatory kind of helping, with this air of suspicion, and unvoiced accusation that we were fucking with everyone else, that you all were our resentful guinea pigs. Or else it was dismissed as some "art thing," or psych thing.
So, i wonder how to get people to play. How to eliminate the alienating, hierarchical factor, the feeling that you're *just* being fucked with. Something to do just because the opportunity is there, or because it's fun, not because you feel weirdly obligated.
What happens when something insists that it be seen?
What happens when it insists that you play with it?
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2 comments:
well the reason its impossible to get away from the hierarchical feeling that folks get of being fucked with is that, well you are just fucking with them.
As you said, whatever is being dropped onto the situation and "insisting" you play with it is forced play... which doesn't sound like much fun at all. It takes away that choice to engage or not. Actually, with the knobs, which I think are pretty funny, its not really imposing but the fact that its an experiment that happens over and over is inherently going to make people suspicious and get the feeling their being fucked with. However with the twine, and was it hemp twine? i love hemp twine..., it is a situation where you are definately forcing folks to interact with it. I mean not entirely, the could walk around the whole set of hartzfeld but still its really forcing the situation. What if half of the walkway was set up with twine and the other half not... see who walks past and who plays hopscotch....
I think what's key is smaller, much more subtle things to play with. Perhaps board games with knobs left all over the campus in front of buildings. or drawing hopscotch games all over the place.
Another thought, on the subtler and less intrusive route is what about replacing everyday items with 'life art'. One of my personal favorites is taking tables and painting chess boards on them. One could do this to scrapped tables and leave them around with a box of pieces. this way if folks don't want to play they don't have to climb over tables with their bikes because their in a huge line, hahaha.
a board game with those knobs would be super dank though!
in short...
intrigue not insistance
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