Hi Everyone!

I wanted to share my final project with you all. I really enjoyed working with you all this semester and I hope we see each other around!

Happy Holidays!

Melissa

The Ludic World of Twins

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Most people are fascinated by twins. There is something otherworldly about twins, they are slippery and hard to pin down. There always seems to be something happening between the two of them that the people around them aren’t privy to. Personally, I love indulging in this dynamic. As an adult, most of the new people I meet don’t know I have an identical twin, which stands in stark contrast to how I grew up. Due to sheer randomness (identical twins (monozygotic) do not have a known genetic component, unlike fraternal twins (dizygotic), which are genetic due to hyper ovulation) my father is also an identical twin. He is close to his brother, they lived within 5 minutes of each other throughout my life. They now live maybe 20 minutes away from each other, but have plans to spend their golden years with each other living together in I assume quiet solitude since they’re both quite deaf. It reinforced for my sister and I that we were to be each other’s #1 priority, everyone and everything else in our lives came second to our twinship.

I think this particular experience allowed my twin world to flourish in more obvious ways. My sister and I were encouraged to lean into our own “magic circle” rather than being forced to conform to individuality and normalcy. There is a childlike playfulness that exists between twins long after we’re supposed to have grown up and become serious people. Play is something that is celebrated and encouraged in children, but not something we generally accept with adults. This can also be said for twinship. When we see young twins we’re delighted. We love to see these two small people dressed the same and acting the same while we revel in their intimacy (twintimacy). Much like play, this scenario is supposed to be abandoned by the time twins are adults. The special bond the twins share is meant to be replaced by preferably heterosexual romantic life partners, where the twins are now seen as individuals.

Some twins will follow this path, they do not ascribe to the myth that twins share a more special bond than any other sibling, or the dynamic was harmful for one or both of them so they’ve become estranged, and for some twins it’s just not that deep. But for others, they hang onto that “magic circle” well into adulthood. My sister and I live across the street from each other, we went to the same college, shared a dorm room, and lived together into our mid 20s. We both majored in History, but I double majored in English and she did Women and Gender Studies. We share many of the same interests, style/appearance, friends, etc. We are used to receiving a range of reactions from being called “cute”, pointing and staring, silly questions, being totally freaked out, etc. It is weird to see adult twins out in the wild together. In order to cope with this objectification I find myself trying to gain agency by engaging in play and playfulness. Sometimes the observer is in on it and sometimes they aren’t.

For my final project I would like to explore the sites of play and playfulness that exist within twinship. I would love to make an interactive fiction/hypertext that explores this ludic world, but I worry a research paper might need to come first in order to pin down the sites and root them in the theory we’ve been studying all semester. Where is playfulness rooted in twinship? Is there actually a game being played? How are passersby drawn in? What can be learned from this site of play? What does it mean when the game being played is intentional (tricks) vs cases of mistaken identity (genuine confusion)? What does it all mean? If I am able to pull together a hyptertext, I would use Twine to make an interactive world that takes the reader/interactor through scenarios that twins find themselves in from the point of view of the twins themselves. Does the reader/interactor enforce societal expectations on twins and discourage their play world? Or do they encourage the twins and then get to witness the site of playfulness that is happening? I will explore mimicry and ilinx and the ways that twins unsettle the status quo. The reader/interactor will have the opportunity to choose which order in which they gain the full context of the twin world and the sites of play therein. Otherwise, I will do a traditional research paper exploring the sites of play in twinship through the lens of some of the theorists we have read this semester.

My project will be informed by Flannigan, Sutton-Smith, Bogost, and Whitson. I will also be drawing on insights (twinsights) from How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins by Helena de Bres (a twin herself and Philosophy professor). Is there anything that can be learned from this project? At minimum I hope that it gives singletons a sense of what the relationship between some twins is really like. Ideally it would allow everyone who interacts with the text to find these areas of play and resistance in their own lives and relationships. For my own personal satisfaction I would like to articulate thoughts that have been swirling around in my head for a long time and add something to the conversation on twins from the twin perspective.

Location sharing is a frequent topic of conversation among my friend group. Generally when I share my location with someone it is because we are coordinating meeting up or we’re in a crowded place and want to find each other if we’re separated. In these situations I select Apple’s temporary options that allow me to share my location for 1 hour or until the end of the day. My wife, Google Map stan, is also a fan of location sharing. She has the location of a gaggle of people – my sister, some close friends, an old acquaintance or two, and her cousin. It’s been a point of contention between us up until very recently when I finally relented and shared my location with her… indefinitely. She convinced me to become one of her Sims when I started school last month, but if I’m totally honest I was more willing to give in to the request because my sister had become a Sim a few weeks earlier. If your friend jumps off a bridge…

Foucault’s Fitbit: Governance and Gamification by Jennifer R. Whitson analyzes the Foucaultian concept of the panopticon through self-tracking and gamification. In this framing the governance comes from the self, rather than the state. I find the more predatory side of location sharing capitalizes on fear. Whitson says “this data-driven heterotopia provides a contrast with the messiness and fallibility of physical human body” (349). A type of heterotopia is created by the “data”, in this case friend and family Sims, where we feel like our loved ones are safe because we think we can see where they are. Our Sims aren’t their messy, fleshy selves, they’re a neat little contact photo bubble that is hopefully located on the map where it should be. But, what if it isn’t? I guess this is the knifes edge that Whitson refers to, where a heterotopia can turn into a dystopia (349). You can almost feel the world start spinning and an anxiety attack set in at just the thought of the neat little bubble not being at the proper coordinates. Does real time location data actually make us safer? Is some cases, absolutely. But, in my personal life I am not sold that the safety element of location sharing, especially when if it involves a 3rd party app. I was unable to find anything specific about what Apple does with the data of location shares between users, but in general there was plenty of legalese on what location data Apple keeps. It feels silly to be preoccupied about consensual location sharing when the phone itself is capturing more data than I would care to imagine and doing who knows what with it.

Sharing your location with friends or family is pretty low stakes. As long as your not conducting an affair or wildly lying to your nearest and dearest then there probably isn’t anything all that incriminating to be found if your friends and family know your coordinates. That said, it does influence our behavior. According to my wife, the knowledge that she could be caught in a lie keeps her honest. She believes it builds trust with her friends because they’re not going to lie to her. Does this kind of self surveillance make us better friends? Better people? More honest? Maybe. There does seem to be something fun or playful about the simulation element in this, but I can’t quite articulate it. Nightly my wife will open her phone and check on her Sims, the name we’ve given the avatars of our friends in her phone. She list off “so and so is home”, “I wonder what X is doing there”, “looks like Y got tickets to the Liberty game”. There aren’t seemingly any consequences to become one of my wife’s Sims, unless you are skittish and don’t want her rolling up to the exact isle your perusing in DSW, like she did to our sister in law once. Despite the low stakes I remain suspicious even though I’ve given in to being Simified.

Prior to this assignment I had never read Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll before, but I had seen the Disney movie so I thought I knew what to expect. The entire time I was reading I kept waiting for the twins to show up and contemplating the ludic world of twins. Sadly, the twins never materialized (wrong book!) and I had no idea where to begin. I found reading the text itself to be surreal and maddening and illogical and I wanted the game to make the player feel the same way. Initially we weren’t sure what kind of game we wanted to make. Did we want to take advantage of Wiktor’s game design skills? Would we use Twine? Eventually we decided to utilize Tasha and Matthew’s coding skills. Matthew designed the layout and look of the game and Tasha coded it in Javascipt. They were the backbone of our group! From there we decided that the structure of our game would be text based and a branching narrative and we each assigned ourselves a chapter to play with. Murray’s kaleidoscopic narrative informed our choice for the branching narrative. We decided to use the text as the structure of the game, which acted as our guardrails for the multiple narratives. In our conversations we talked about agency and control. We wanted the player to feel like their choices had an effect on the narrative, but regardless of the player’s choices the story ultimately moves along a set path and ends the same way every time.

I approached the project first by going through the text and creating an outline of “actions” in each chapter, essentially using those moments to allow the player to make a decision for Alice. Eat the cake? Drink the bottle? Follow the rabbit in the first place? I wanted to invoke Murray’s concept of simulation and exploration in games (168) where the player could skip to different parts of the story, end the game on accident, or experience something disorienting/maddening/surreal, but ultimately at the end they still get the whole story. Once we decided that we would each do one chapter I had to decide how I wanted mine to look. I was really inspired by Loss of Control (Serge Bouchardon, et al.) and Sea and Spar Between by Nick Manfort and Stephanie Strickland and the way the text was manipulated and how that evoked a certain experience and even nonsensicalness. In the game I wanted the player to feel like Alice did when she drinks the bottle in the White Rabbit’s house and she grows so large that she’s nearly busting out. I wanted to show this by have the Drink Me button trigger the text to become so large that the player would be unable to even read it. They would then have to select the Eat Cake button in order to trigger the text to shrink, but click it too many times and the text is so small you cannot read it. There ended up being a lot more text in Chapter IV, which lead to needing more breakpoints than I had initially planned and based on our time constraints we were unable to really make the text manipulation happen to that extent.

In the end I thought this project was really fun. I felt really intimidated by this project at first because I can’t code, am unfamiliar with Twine, and didn’t really know where to even begin with the text. I was so impressed by everyones different skills and what they contributed and how we all worked together. I think it brought a surrealist quality to our game that I really enjoy. It was so exciting for me to see what Tasha, Matthew, Wandi, and Wiktor did with their chapters and the collaboration was actually fun. This whole experience was rewarding and I’m so proud of what we created. In our first meeting I was filled with dread and anxiety about how this was going to work and in our last meeting I found myself beaming with excitement as Tasha walked us through the game. As I finish this I am thinking about Bogost’s Play Anything in the introduction when he says “Play is a way of operating a constrained system in a gratifying way” (xi). I feel like this project really brought that concept of play to life for me.

This past spring my wife and I drove out to Long Island to see her family. On this trip my sister and her wife joined in the car to attend a party for a college friend happening nearby. My sister and I share the car, which means that all four of us share the car. We travel together a lot on trips that can involve 4+ hours of driving/being trapped in a car, so an hour and a half out on Long Island seemed like nothing. Regrettably, that day we were all kind of testy and antsy (we were going to a baby shower for my brother-in-law and his wife who were expecting the first nibling of the family, VERY EXCITING!) and inevitably there was traffic on the LIE. As tension in the car was rising my wife did something she had never done before – she suggested we play an alphabet game that she had played on car rides as a child. The rules were simple: you scanned the passing surroundings and called out when a word on a sign/car/billboard started with the letter of the alphabet we were on. Bogost said “play invites and even requires greater attention, generosity, respect, and investment than its supposedly more serious alternatives do” (4). I have made this drive to Long Island a hundred times. It’s always boring, there’s almost always traffic, and we’re always mad about it. But actually surrendering ourselves to the situation and making a game out if it completely transformed our drive. All of the sudden, we went from being miserable and angry to actively engaging with each other and even observing our surroundings. It made the ride go by faster and being stuck in traffic actually gave us more opportunities to find what we were looking for. Rather than being stressed, frustrated, and angry about something we had no control over (traffic), we were able to play and even have fun together.

I try to surrender myself to things I cannot control, but as seen above I am a work in progress. When Bogost writes “adults also don’t live in a world designed for us” and “misery gives way to fun when you take an object, event, situation, or scenario that wasn’t designed for you, that isn’t invested in you, that isn’t concerned with your experience of it, and then treat it as if it were” (3) it highlights all of the potential sites of play in everyday life if we can find them. Bogost later argues that play isn’t the goal, but the tool (12). To Bogost anything and everything can be play. I like the idea of thinking of play this way, its something I am using to entertain myself, not the thing entertaining me. Does this mean that there is possibility for play in something as mundane as packing the car for a vacation or going grocery shopping? Of course once I think about this I know its true. For example I hate the grocery store, but I hate cooking more, so I grocery shop and my wife cooks. The boundaries and contents are my budget, what we need for the week, and what is available in the store – voila! I think looking at it this way allows you to not fall into the David Foster Wallace trap where you have to somehow find empathy in every interaction in order to get through life. Maybe dodging other shoppers is a little bit more like Frogger than an exercise in imagining what is happening in the personal lives of the surrounding shoppers. To go into the other example, my wife loves the Tetris like challenge of packing the car for a long trip. As mentioned, I travel with an entourage, which typically means the trunk of our car is stuffed to the brim with duffle bags, suitcases, food, drinks, bags of board games, etc. In this case the boundaries and contents are the physical space available in the car and how to fit all of our stuff while still ideally being able to see a sliver of the rear window through the rearview mirror. These everyday instances of play do help ease the stress and mundanity of day to day life in late stage capitalism. I have found myself thinking a lot about this piece in the time since I finished it and how play can be freeing in a world where it feels like I’m always doing something I don’t want to.