The Preface:
I have spent a lot of time lately reflecting about the ways in which play has always been deeply interconnected to my understanding of personal identity. From the gravitational pull of youth sports on my childhood existence to the policing of my body at play as an effeminate young boy in Hawaii, play occupied a space of tension. Learning and internalizing that the play, interests and curiosities that felt natural to me were acts of disobedience and dishonor to my family, meant a growing weariness in a trust of self or identity; a distrust in intuition and instinct. In this sense, the question of self was not inherent, but introduced.

Without belief in my own sense of self, the craving for systems and rules to understand how to live life “well” became a fixation. The “game” afoot was to learn the unsaid, invisible guidelines for the performance (mimicry) of passing as straight. Growing up in the closet demanded a rigorous archeology of culture and constant governance of the body and self. Finding the rules, embodying the rules and believing the rules meant success; protection is promised in the magic circle.

Needless to say, there are moments in this lifetime that have both inspired self acceptance, and others that have slammed the closet door shut. I didn’t come out as gay until five years ago, and I have been wondering about the inflection points that exist in my memories, and in my journey to the present, that serve as a kaleidoscopic memoir — a winding web of moments of consequence.

I believe that games and play have the ability to serve as a radical tool for self reflection. This final project is an opportunity for me to experiment further with the idea of play through a queer studies, narrative studies and archival studies lens. I hope to build a game — or rather, a system that is anchored to my own experience of sexuality, acceptance and coming out of the closet. I believe that both “playing” the game system and the process of creating the system itself will offer a cathartic experience of self-reflection. Especially right now, in a political environment that endorses a mentality of threatening different identities and peoples, there is an imperative to continue the act of reflection, of finding acceptance outside of the system.

The Project Overview:
I plan to develop a game system, inspired by tabletop role-playing games (such as Dungeons & Dragons), but pointed at narrative and reflection. The goal is to employ the mechanics and structure of TTRPG systems, which are most frequently understood as play mechanics for war and violent conquest, towards reflexivity and an exploration of identity and acceptance. This isn’t at all to assert that TTRPGs are unable to deliver an exploration of identity (I actually believe that these kinds of games are inherently good at critiquing society’s belief systems on identity), there is always an argument of identity that’s made in the codifying of a player in terms of measured attributes like strength and intelligence. My hope is to explore how this kind of play experience transforms when the system points at different metrics of identity.

The Project Process and Details:
There is a scale and time factor to this project that I’m still in the process of working out completely. I’m excited about this idea so I’ve imagined a huge undertaking with lots of parts (and hopes). But I also know that I’ve got to be realistic given how fast it has already become November, and soon enough the end of the semester. For that reason, I’ve decided to break down my process and what I hope to produce at each phase to introduce a bit more pragmatism into the ambitions of this TTRPG system project.

The final project will come together as a multimedia presentation that details the process and outcomes of each phase. This could take the shape of a chapbook, zine, or website — or some kind of graphic “packaging up” of the game system for sharing. I’ll likely pair it with a short essay or reflection that unpacks the choices I’ve made as well as the inspirations, references and scholarship that I hope my project is in dialogue with.

Apologies for the length of the proposal, I wanted to make sure I was able to contextualize the project with larger aspirations for continued development this beyond this class.

I’m eager to spend my blog post reflecting on the Bogost reading from Persuasive Games, which I found to be incredibly interesting given my background in advertising, design and media. In fact, I had originally planned on writing this entire blog post on graphic design — and the ways in which constraints or rules drive both the design process and design outcome. I will write a short bit about this, but will promptly pivot to an unrelated topic: Role Playing Game!

Speaking directly to the tension between rules and creation, Bogost writes, “While we think that rules always limit behavior, the imposition of constraints also creates expression” (Bogost 7). In the world of design, I find myself thinking immediately of the design grids that (often) invisibly guide the placement of visual assets and typography on anything from printed material to a website, especially in Eurocentric or western cultures. It’s a tool that frequently drives aesthetic, accessible and commercial outcomes. That being said, as Bogost’s piece explores the ways that there are cultural, historical and social layers embedded within processes or procedures that can often be obscured. Far too often in graphic design, the ideologies behind designer “logics” and choices are hidden, similar to the ways “enthymemes” are utilized in persuasion. Graphic design has a history within capitalism and around currency, which values credibility as a kind of metric of success. As such, it’s in attaching historical context to process that new meaning is formed or new recognition of the system that design occupies might be generated for designers, like myself.

But, but, but… I actually want to utilize this blog post to contextualize and reflect on this reading in a completely different way, one which doesn’t use advertising (which is very on the nose with rhetoric) as a key context because the industry, myself included, is often wound up and caught in a feedback loop of incentivization reaffirming dominant ideologies and processes. In short, it’s always about the tried-and-true processes without a critical lens — this is something that I specifically think about often, and this blog post could very quickly become a rant. So, I want to explore how procedural rhetoric might come to life when placed in an RPG game setting like Dungeons and Dragons, and more specifically, character creation.

“Because people are inherently separate from one another, we seek ways to join our interests. Burke identifies this need as the ancestor of the practice of rhetoric. He extends rhetoric beyond persuasion, instead suggesting “identification” as a key term for the practice. We use symbolic systems, such as language, as a way to achieve this identification” (Bogost 20).

I am a fan of Burke’s move of rhetoric from persuasion towards identification. In this sense, of the word, I am compelled to explore the ways that process drives this outcome — of discovering identity. On the surface, something like creating a character offers an example of process that I think speaks well to Bogost’s arguments — choosing attributes like your age or hair color, or assigning physical/mental aptitude statistics (i.e. strength or intelligence) are a constrained system of choices. In the video game world, we often see this as quite the spectrum of simple to complex character builder interfaces/processes — there’s also so much to be said about these constraints as they pertain to things like choosing your character’s gender (and often lack of options beyond strictly man or woman).

But to dive one step deeper — I am even more fascinated with the procedural rhetoric of embodying these characters, whether that is in a video game or in role-playing around the table. Moving through a fictional world and story, acting as character, players are asked to make choices and are then met with consequences. Players naturally begin identifying with their characters not only because they are embodying them, but because inherent to exploration or adventuring (commonplace narratives in RPG) is the work of understanding the processes and systems of the world that these characters occupy. My characters’ values do not equate to my own, but the procedural task of role playing allows me to explore new ways of moving through the world — a kind of experimentation that I found to be fundamental to every game/interactive media example that Bogost highlights.

To conclude, though I reckon I’ve mostly introduced big ideas without paying many of them off, I find that I am most curious about the ways in which ethics exist in the “how” or process. The examples that are showcased throughout Bogost’s reading speak directly to this reality. As such, I think there’s incredible potential for inquiry into the ideas of procedural rhetoric through the lens of role playing. As a product of the destabilization of self that comes with embodying a character in a fictional world, RPG propels an inquiry and investigation of systems and processes that may not happen otherwise in life. I worry that I’ve deduced procedural rhetoric to placing oneself in another person’s shoes, but my point is that there may be great strength in coupling the rhetoric of process with the character performance of RPG in investigating systems without the barriers of our own preconceived notions of the way the world works.

Before I dive into my blog post, I wanted to first mention how much I appreciate the series of individual presentations that we’ve been doing across the span of the semester. It’s been quite special getting to know everyone in our class through the games that are meaningful to them. There’s something personal about sharing the kind of “play” experiences that we are drawn to and the ways that these games shape us. 

For this blog post, as we explore gamified online environments, I am going to be looking closely at the Apple Watch, extending some of the thinking and discourse around the gamification of fitness and health as explored with the FitBit and Nike+ in our past readings.

I was given an Apple Watch a few years ago and have been a bit on-and-off with the device. And by on-and-off, I really mean: my relationship with fitness and exercise constantly ebbs and flows from intensely regimented to nonexistent and on top of that, I’m typically only wearing the device when I’m working out — so I’ve never really immersed myself in the full-on days- or weeks-long Apple Watch experience of bio-metric health tracking. That being said, what I am most keen to explore is the ways in which Apple asserts (or doesn’t assert) the “good life” and the consequences that result from that strategy.

The Apple Watch (and the supporting advertising/marketing campaigns) introduced the phrase, “close your rings” into the popular vernacular. The phrase is a result of the Apple Watch’s main interface, which displays the wearer’s stats prominently with circle-shaped progress bars. One feature is directly comparing your own progress to friends that you can add and “compete against.” Competitive health is quite the metaphor for surveillance capitalism.

The wearable device prominently displays a user’s progress across three key metrics: move (how “active you’d like to be” in calories), exercise (how many minutes of activity “above a brisk walk” per day), and stand (how many hours per day that you’d like to be standing for “at least a minute”). In looking purely at the three metric areas and the language used to describe them — I’m initially fascinated by the measurements that are being used, particularly the calories. For a general audience (which I believe the Apple Watch is targeted to, especially after being so many generations along in the device’s evolution), it’s fascinating how comfortable people have become with calorie-tracking even compared to just years ago.

Apple Watch users are disciplined for how many calories they have or have not “burnt” in the span of a day, and it’s not unlikely that this recurring, daily tracking of calories may shape eating behaviors — or even on a larger scale, an understanding of food, movement, and play! What becomes of a stroll when it is measured in minutes and miles? What does it mean to live when consistency and calories act as our compass for routine? I think also about the ways that these health indicators, or more specifically the prioritization of these three metrics, are pointing to a very specific kind of lifestyle — a “good life” that is offered to the desk-familiar, frequently-seated people who just needs to leave their seated position of low-physical intensity work to get enough movement and exercise required of a healthy participant of a capitalistic society.

But to reel it back in for a second — away from my cynicism of the Apple Watch— I have to also temper and contextualize my assessment of health gamification as a modern invention, or even a digital one. I find that I gravitate towards looking at gamification as a novel aspect of digital life, but the feedback loops and measurement of progress have always been quite embedded within the fitness and health world. The written logging of weights and repetitions. The distance of runs.

Are all well-tracked goals an act of gamification? The Apple Watch allows the user to set their own goals. With that, success can be made easy or difficult. The game is always played with rules set by the player. And maybe that’s where it’s unable to be a game, where it becomes too “productive” to be a form of play.

An overview of our game: Cheshire is a digital game that animates the story of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll through a new focal point: The Cheshire Cat. Assuming the role of the mischievous character, players shape Alice’s adventure throughout Wonderland. Through banter with the story’s conventional protagonist, players (as the Cheshire Cat) decide whether to guide Alice further into her adventure or draw her back to reality. Will you wake her up or keep her dreaming?

The development process of our group project can be broken out into four key stages: ideation, narrative mapping, visual storytelling and production.

Our ideation approach was expansive at first, with the team offering up a range of different general ideas for our game — a mix of tactical thought starters (such as “erasure storytelling” and AI chatbots) and conceptual ideas (such as exploring Alice’s relationships with each of the Wonderland characters). Eventually, we landed on a game concept that centered on the Cheshire Cat. Alex had initially suggested an incredible idea for developing a Cheshire Cat that the user (as Alice) can actually dialogue with, which would insert the character into new parts of the story. Inspired by this, I shared a provocation that had the potential to transform the source text even further — what if the playable character wasn’t Alice but instead, the Cheshire Cat? 

As Alex & Leila led the narrative mapping (and the writing of net new dialogue) of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland — identifying the inflection points across the story where the Cheshire Cat can influence Alice — I went ahead and began working on developing visual assets for the game, while Brandon and Leonard started experimenting with game flow, user interactions and the coding of it all.

Only as I began developing the visual language for the game — primarily with a typographic title (a logo of sorts), the illustration of characters, and the presentation deck — did I begin to recognize how consequential the decisions that I was making would be on the final product. In some ways, visual design can often be seen as an afterthought for a game, especially one with such attention to narrative structure and decision trees. But in turning to John Tenniel’s illustrations as inspiration, it dawned on me how important the images in the original text are to telling the story and immersing the readers. Moreover, in considering ideas like “representational play” or “mimicry” or even “quantification,” it’s clear that visuals are a critical stimulus in both world building and player feedback.

In hopes of transforming the text further, guiding my design process, and perhaps taking a bit of a risk, I proposed to the group a “narrative wrapper” for our game, Cheshire. Thankfully, my group was willing to “play ball” with my zany suggestion of setting our game in the distant future. Considering that the motivation for the player to “wake [Alice] up or keep her dreaming” doesn’t explicitly show up within the game itself, I wrote a narrative that situates our game as an early invention of a society rebuilding in space — our game is essentially the interface of a device controlled by a doctor or nurse that serves as an anesthetic for surgeries that didn’t require any chemicals. Our game Cheshire, now an outdated digital artifact, was once a dream simulator that leveraged the immersive storytelling of classic novels to keep patients unconscious during various surgeries.

I know, it’s a bit of a stretch…creative writing is not something I do very often. But that narrative then propelled the futuristic illustration style and (matrix-esque) color scheme of the game itself. It also gave us permission as game designers to incorporate and view the NYPL’s scans of Tenniel’s original illustration proofs (and Carroll’s story) as the source material for the game itself (while still within the “magic circle” of the play experience).

To conclude, I found that building the game was an experience that allowed me to reconsider many of the texts we read. A specific example being, Whitson’s “Foucault’s Fitbit: Governance and Gamification.” After reading this text and revisiting the designs I put together, it became clear that I was emulating a kind of data visualization or quantification aesthetic that’s reminiscent of FitBit and health tracking. In fact, I’m sure that my own (and the group’s) familiarity with tools like sleep tracking made the game that much easier to conceptualize and put together. Unsurprisingly, a feature that I would add to Cheshire, if we were given more time, would be additional visual feedback stimulus while the player navigates the game — perhaps, Alice’s vitals, some kind of decision map/tree, how close she is to waking up, etc. — as a means to further guide the player.

I’m very appreciative of my group, what a talented and kind bunch!

I grew up spending my summer weekends at a Japanese festival called “Obon” or “Bon Dance,” as it’s more colloquially referred to back home in Hawai’i. It’s an annual festival that happens between late July through the month of August, with a different Buddhist temple across the island hosting each weekend. Bon Dance celebrates and honors ancestors. But for a good majority of the folks back home on the islands, this festival is simply an annual gathering for the community to eat food, share culture, and dance together.

I bring up Bon Dance because I was shocked by how much of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens reading was focused on rituals and festivals. It was the oldest reading of the bunch (and it shows), but a lot of the concepts and frames were quite timeless, which in and of itself is an interesting quality of play. I’m primarily interested in this broader idea of “play as a social function,” as it pertains to cultural preservation and heritage.

My late grandmother was a dance leader, which meant she performed the folk dances in the innermost ring of several concentric lines of people, encircling the yagura (a wooden structure that sits in the center). In other words, my grandmother set the “order” and “rhythm” for the broader group, instructions on the movements to perform. It is the dance leaders that establish the rules, for lack of a better word.

But beyond the ideas that Huizinga expresses that directly conjure up a connection between dance and play, I was fascinated with his assertion that play is a form of world-building. He writes, “Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns. Here we come across another, very positive feature of play: it creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection” (10). Order in this sense is not only the rules of play, but a shared experience that allows for the suspension of time and space, the “pretend” or representational quality of play.

My grandmother was born on a sugar cane plantation in Maui. I think about what Bon Dance means to her as suspension of time and space — and I believe that this festival represents an opportunity for her to be grounded in a culture that she never fully experienced for herself. The kimonos she wore and the movements she knew by heart (the “order” of the experience) allowed her to embody a self that doesn’t exist outside of these festivals, a connection to culture that doesn’t exist so tangibly beyond those weekends in August. It’s both the suspension of reality and the order of play that is felt so strongly by an annual festival like Bon Dance.

But to wrap this up and perhaps, spend a bit more time reflecting on this experience for myself, I keep thinking about Huizinga’s notion of the “mask” or the “underlying consciousness of things ‘not being real’” (22). Without even getting into the religious or spiritual aspects of Bon Dance, I keep thinking about the circumstance of Bon Dance in Hawai’i as I experienced it growing up. It is not only a festival that has evolved over time (my grandma’s temple plays a lot of the music with CDs over speakers), but also across cultures. The food of the festival is different in Hawai’i than in Japan. Some of the simple choreography has taken on different moves, the folk dances remixed and reinvented by younger generations. Some people dance in full kimonos, others just in t-shirts and board shorts. Even the rusted, brown metal chairs that would be set out (in concentric circles mimicking the dancers) for non-dancers represents a dissonance between the festival in Japan and the festival in Hawai’i. One could argue that participating in this cultural festival requires an admission or acceptance of the illusion of it all — the performance of a tradition or ritual from Japan, a recreation of sorts that never perfectly succeeds. But that’s often just the experience of a diaspora and perhaps, that’s where play is most crucial. These rituals and festivals and games, with all their limitations and suspensions of reality, offer value to the collective and community. And as Huizinga writes, “But with the end of the play its effect is not lost; rather it continues to shed its radiance on the ordinary world outside, a wholesome influence working security, order and prosperity for the whole community until the sacred play-season comes round again” (14).