ANNE-MARIE SCHLEINER
Bumping into Walls: Spaces of Ludic Possibility for Artists, Digital Architects and Designers
Abstract
This presentation maps a few telling trajectories through virtual and digitally augmented architectures, artworks and games, revealing patterns that respond dynamically to the limits of potential movements imposed by spatial boundaries and other forces. Players stumble through single player 3-D environments, bumping along the peripheries, searching for passage into further zonings, iteratively looping through a reconnaissance algorithm of bump, circle back, and repeat , (and often fight and save), to actualize one course from an apparent plurality of “interesting choices”. (Sid Meier, designer of Civilization) The level designer’s task is to craft alluring zones of possibility but also to eventually contract those zones into a single discoverable channel. With unforgiving collision detection, semi-transparent obstacles such as fences, fallen post-apocalyptic detritus, and magnetic tazer fields confine the player, (or art mod viewer), and concurrently seduce with peeks of spaces beyond.
The reverse engineered level designs and movement drawings I will analyze differ from the solo to the multiple experience, from the curious to the telic interactor, among other configurations taking into account author and player singularities. (There is no one all-encompassing generic player). Multi-player maps may indulge in the tidy symmetry of mirror imaged blue prints or engage in other less obvious spatial means of constructing balanced team play. I will present a few of these maps and discuss their implications for artists, virtual architects and level designers aiming to build innovative virtual play environments.
Contrary to recent claims by newly prominent ludologists privileging and differentiating coded algorithm and time over the “artistic window dressing” of spatial aesthetics, this presentation posits a space-time correlation integral to creation and play with such environments and experiences. Algorithms unfold in space, and space frames the possibility for actions. Roger Callois’ fourth, mostly forgotten, category of play, Ilinx, games of vertigo, is projected into the vertical jumping abyss of the game. Space itself could be more plastic in 3-D games, as were some 1980’s arcade games that allowed for real-time reconfiguration of environment as a core play mechanic. According to Situationist architect Gilles Evian, architecture of the future will be modifiable, yet most architecture is only modifiable by designers and level modders, (or by 1st life architects), rather than dynamically through play.
Ruptures and warps in Cartesian space/time such as teleports, referred to by Jesper Juul as disruptive “game time violations”, are also reframed as creative ludic devices . Drawing on the Situationist influenced ludic art practice of the author and other artists as source material, the paper concludes with some thoughts on designing for play in less “designable” augmented urban spaces with pre-existing, unpredictable flows of living Non Player Characters.
Speaker's Bio
Anne-Marie Schleiner was born in 1970 in Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A. She is engaged in gaming and net culture in a variety of roles as a writer, critic, curator, and gaming artist/designer . Her work investigates avatar gender construction, computer gaming culture, hacker art and experimental game design. She has curated online exhibits of game mods and add-ons including the exhibits "Cracking the Maze: Game Patches and Plug-ins as Hacker Art", "Mutation.fem", and "Snow Blossom House." She has designed the games Anime Noir and Heaven711. She runs a site focused on game hacks and open source digital art forms called "opensorcery.net", and has been actively involved in the anti-war game performance art initiatives Velvet-Strike and OUT.
She has taught at universities and artist workshops and participated in art residencies in Germany, Belgium, Spain and Mexico and was an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder for four years. She has exhibited online and in the New Museum, the Whitney, Centro de la Imagen Museum, Mexico City, and international galleries, museums and festivals. Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications and by press such as N.P.R. and the New York Times. She currently teaches game design in the Communication and New Media Program at the National University of Singapore in South East Asia and is pursuing an international doctorate in Ludic Culture at the University of Amsterdam.