User:Barbs/SI30

[🧱] Unbordering

Thoughts & ideas

• The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin & Annihilation - Jeff Vandermeer are very unbordering-coded
• Make a wiki for me & my friends
• 1 page TTRPG / character designing / worldbuilding

Log

Week 1

The Art Department

This was my fourth time attending TAD, a yearly conference/festival celebrating the art behind film, animation and games. I was feeling a little weird about it before the event, as this was the first time I would attend having started a different journey compared to what I expected to be doing with my career right now when I first started attending TAD. I felt nervous about interacting with the entertainment art industry again Unexpectedly, I had nothing to worry about. Multiple talks I attended stressed the importance of focusing on doing your own thing

May break

More-than-human TTRPG

Lots of (TT)RPG's come with a promise that "you can be anybody!" inside of the worldbuilding of the game. I relistened to a podcast interview with Gareth Damian Martin in which they argued instead for RPG's as vehicles for roleplaying a specific experience, putting ourselves in someone else's shoes, not having complete free choice.

When players create and play a non-human character in a TTRPG like Dungeons & Dragons, they are usually anthropomorphized, like cats that talk or trees that walk. From an anthropocentric lens, they are ascended to being-human, so we can relate to them and speak through them without effort or difficulty.

The challenge of speaking-for/speaking-with the non-human that we discussed during last weeks class really stuck with me.
Can we use the act of roleplaying as border-crossing / border-breaking to embody non-human perspectives and experiences?

"It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with." - Donna Haraway

Design thoughts/ideas:

• Important to keep things small! Aim for a small group of participants (a select amount like 3 or 4), and a short playtime (0.5/1 hr?). It can always grow bigger later.
• Each player chooses a different role in the ecosystem, work together or against each other. Plant/animal/fungi? Bacteria? Rocks? Something even more abstract like water or oxygen?
• Are there human characters involved? Are they player characters or NPC's played by a GM? I think I would prefer to remove the human as the main character and focus on the non-human.
• What are the challenges and goals of the game? Navigating human spaces as non-humans? Migration? What is the "goal" of an ecosystem, does it have one? Mushrooms processing the old world to fertilize a new one.
• Is it played using dice, or cards, or something else? What is their function? What if you use other objects around your house or from outside? What if you have to play it outside?
• Therolinguistiscs coined by Le Guin, each species has unique method of communication, ants use seeds.
  • A Therolinguistics Manifesto

“Therolinguistics (n.): the term ‘therolinguistics’ was coined from the Greek thèr (θἠρ), ‘wild beast’. It refers to the branch of linguistics committed to the study and translation of written works by animals (and later plants), whether in the literary form of the novel, poetry, epic, pamphlet or archive… As this science explores the so-called savage world, other expressive forms will emerge that go beyond human literary categories (and which will then fall into another field of specialization, that of the ‘cosmophonic and paralinguistic sciences’).”

• Will there be a GM or not? Is that role needed?

Possible sources of inspiration:

• The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics - Ursula K. Le Guin
• Annihilation - Jeff Vandermeer
• Story of your Life - Ted Chiang

Also I found this! Would be cool to submit to! https://posthumanpress.com/pages/therolinguistics

Clip Studio Paint through Wine on Linux!!!

I AM FREEEE! I got CSP to work on Linux! I tried multiple methods which I will detail here soon. But the thing that worked for me was this bash script someone made to install all the dependencies and fixes needed to get everything working smoothly.

Ikiwiki adventures

I found out Claudio and Eleni are also interested in ikiwiki so we've been discussing our progress on installing it! Eleni made a super helpful wiki page.

My progress is detailed here.

Week 3

My entry for the second zine we made this week

Feedback on TTRPG from Ana

• Scope
  • Think about limiting complexity instead of time
• Pen & paper vs tabletop game mechanics
  • Pen & paper (design through limitation): Too little guidance for such an abstract thesis. Risk of too much freedom for players, try to break the game or don't know what to do. That's why D&D has so many rules. More human-like interaction with world, play through talking.
  • Tabletop game rules (design through building from the ground up): Give clearer options to the player of what they can do. Makes experience more situated and allows for perspective shift.
  • Challenge of core is already big enough, keep mechanics easy for yourself to design
• Non-human player characters
  • Focus on the senses.
    • Bend them to something more than human - tree roots are like constantly multiplying and branching fingers.
  • Communication through (inter)actions, behavior and choices. No speech.
  • No "you are THE animals", but make player character delve deep inside a very specific and situated species. Easier to design too! Rat!!!
• Setting
  • Don't know if this profits from a fantastical setting, might cause alienation from the non-human experience. Suspension of disbelief would extend to character abilities as well.
  • Player already has to make a jump in perspective so keeping the world close to realism keeps focus on character experience of the world.
  • Non-humans having to navigate in human spaces, what borders do they encounter?
• Goal
  • TO BE. For a short play experience this could be interesting and provocative.
  • Very dependent on setting.
• GM
  • Only way of communicating is through your actions instead of talking. GM's role is to gather and distribute situations/interactions.
  • Role of fascilitator in service of game system
• References
  • Fate: Human-centric, but could be conductive, nonhuman character traits & goals inside of human players
  • Look for games that also have different ways of communicating.
  • Games for blind/deaf people? Using different senses?

Reference searching

Boardgames with a nonhuman POV

• https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/218603/photosynthesis
• https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/376740/undergrove
• https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/378476/mycelia

Boardgames with limited communication

• https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/284083/the-crew-the-quest-for-planet-nine

TTRPG's with boardgame elements (or other way around)

• https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/342900/earthborne-rangers
• https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/302723/forgotten-waters
• https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/429293/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-t

Theory

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93network_theory

Week 4

To make a game I have to define roles and mechanics and rules, and simplify the complexity of the real world.

Kind of like map-making, this simplification is inherently political. Choices in what to include and what to leave out.

Choosing very situated characters is a step in the right direction, but even then there is an important choice to be made in simplifying behavior, movement, communication, actions.

https://www.veralistcenter.org/publications/transcending-movements-weeds-as-queering-species-boundaries

Prototyping: Small-files

Following this video tutorial on optimising images for web.

In Gimp:

Starting file size: 13.1 MB

• Quality:
• Smoothing: Reduces image size by removing pixel information, it helps mask compression artifacts. Recommends 0.1/0.15. By itself, doesn't affect the file size.
• Progressive: Checking this loads the image on a web page all at once at low quality and then increase detail, instead of loading high quality from the top down.
• Subsampling: Fewer color information, pixels share color from neighbors. Setting this to chroma quartered, it lowers file size to 8.4 MB.

Batch process using https://imagemagick.org.

In website code:

• Image size: Keep the original image size and the image width/height in the code the same. Loading a large image with smaller width/height in the code is more intensive.
• loading='lazy' html tag: will only load when reached by scrolling down.
  • Can cause layout to shift while loading. To avoid, specify width:100px & height:100px in same html tag.

Week 8

INDIGO

INDIGO is a 2-day conference aimed at the benelux games industry. I was kind of nervous about attending, expecting to feel a dissonance between my current evolving practice and returning to The Industry, but I actually talked to a lot of cool people that were very interested in what I'm up to at XPUB!

• One of the showcased games was Astral Flux Origins, a newly developed Game Boy Color game! I talked to the dev Nathan who was super kind and said I should reach out to him if I want to know more about retro game dev stuff or if he can help with my research. I also found their devlog.
• I spoke with Willem Hilhorst from Beeld & Geluid in Hilversum, he maintains the Dutch games archive there. He said I should reach out if he can help with my research and that I could visit the archive sometime!
  • Been thinking a lot about retro gamemaking which is currently mostly fueled by nostalgia for older consoles and games, but could also be an avenue for more climate-friendly game development practices because of the technical restrictions and re-use of abandoned tech. Current retro game dev is mostly targeted at millennial consoles like the Game Boy or even older consoles, and an issue arises that those consoles are becoming less and less accessible and hard to find and maintain, so publishers will sell remakes of the old console to play the new retro games on.. There is a gap where nothing is being made for the Wii or 3DS, consoles that a lot more people still have lying around their house in working condition.
• I attended Marie Janin's talk about Sickhouse in Enschede and building communal art spaces and spoke to her afterwards! This was probably the highlight of the event for me, I was like yaaaay I've found my people!! Sickhouse sounds like a really cool space and I would love to visit sometime, I'm definitely keeping my eye on the Overkill Festival
• After the talk I also spoke to Zuraida Buter who has worked on soooo many cool events and communities over the years and is curator for A MAZE in Berlin (which I intend to visit next year if time & money allows). She invited me to a Discord server for women in the Dutch games industry :) <3