No Fun by Eva and Franco Mattes
This is my response to a class free writing exercise. For 8 minutes, I wrote about my visceral, affective experience with my research project so far.
I want to create that visceral experience for my viewers/players. After leaving the session with Rachel I felt like I needed to recreate a moment of friction, an interesting social experiment, in order for my project to be valid. I would hold a play test; I would call everyone in a room. I’d reach out to the anonymous author of Twitch Plays Pokemon. I don’t know why I’m so shy and reluctant to engage online but I want to research these things at a distance. Like animals at a zoo. I get scared even to log on to Twitch and show people my name.
I wonder why Rachel Falconer really leaned into the introvert part of me and framed it as a personal journey. She doesn’t know anything else about me. Maybe it was an interesting thing to grab onto? Does art require going outside your comfort zone. At any rate, there’s this personal, visceral, interactive side and then there’s the theoretical reading, which I am also removed from. Maybe I can find some way to write speculatively. The speculation in this lecture was not the kind that I was envisioning. Here it was black, alternative histories, alien encounters; very woo. I want to learn more about speculative design. I wonder if that’s even relevant.
I have to think of one interaction, one moment that I think is new, interesting, challenging, and find out how I can stage it in microcosm. If we’re all play acting in a room it’ll be different but immediate. If I send out a survey, or send out the site, it’ll be hard to get traction. I could send it to the whole Comp Arts (Comp RATS, was my typo) and IGPED chats. I’m sure it’ll get some traction there but there’s really no substitute for long term, addictive engagement in something. The kind you stay up at night to watch, like Shibuya Crossing, not the polar opposite of my timezone like it was in NYC, but now just 7, sometimes 8 hours away.
I should write about what attracts me and challenges me to these games. Difficult interactions. Challenging configurations. Uuugh, not something I want to put myself through. But I have to. Maybe i’ll emerge on the other side of it. With more questions. like Chris Salter. A different person, for sure.