public space | Playful Revolution

Media and Performance Lab II

I’ve rounded up another week of experimenting in the Media and Performance Lab II (see my post on the first Lab for more info on MAPLAB). I continued looking for answers to the question of ‘How do you design spontaneous behavior ‘. This question holds a design dilemma; once a behavior is designed, or pre-conceived, it ceases to be spontaneous at once. In a reply to one of his post over at deepfun.com, I had a short e-mail conversation with Bernie DeKoven in which he emphasied this dilemma.

Designing for spontaneity. A good problem in deed. Just the kind of task that people who don’t understand fun, or spontaneity, would assign.
-Bernie DeKoven

Someone else, a family therapist, continued:

Although I don’t think we can design spontaneous behavior, I have observed that we can create a climate wherein its occurrence is highly likely.
-Michael Bean

This brought me to approaching the question a tad differently: ‘How can you design a rigid structure that facilitates spontaneous behavior’

The first experiment was inspired on a work by Marie Sester. It’s a white box piece where audiences are provoked to spontaneously interact by using motion tracking and a bright white spotlight.

What interested me about this project is the simplicity of the installation and also it’s rigid nature. The light does nothing other that track a single person. Eventhough participants probably know this, they still show playful behavior.

I took this idea and took it into the Lab and experimented with different modifications. By adding more rules along the way, I was curious as to what rule-set would evoke the most spontaneous (physical) behavior. Another sub-question I’ve been jugglin’ is ‘Does more Ludus evoke more Paidia?’ This is quite the playfulness scholar jargon so to translate: Does a more confined set of rules evoke more spontaneous behavior?’
At first participants are released to ‘roam free’ in the test environment, then certain rules are added ‘don’t touch the red light’ and ‘catch the red light’. Let’s take a look

The most immediate conclusion is that adding certain rules to the environment does evoke more physical spontaneity. Participants are leaping around, hunting or fleeing, playing a schizofrenic game of cat-and-mouse. The immediate question that arises following this conclusion would be ‘is this actually spontaneous behavior?’ Since the behavior is clearly ‘game play’ as participants are conforming to an imposed rule-set.
The question that remains is ‘does it matter?’. On philosophical note: Playfulness is about being present, being totally in touch with your surrounding and (can’t get enough of the Bernie quotes)

being open, responsive, yielding to the moment, catching hold and letting go.

To enter this ‘playful state’, as I like to call it, requires a certain willingness of a participant. It is in this respect that Jaako Stenros commented on my presentation of my findings of the Media Lab that there is a certain aspect of evoking playfulness that involves modding the player: Influencing the participant to such an extent that he or she is more receptive to playful behavior. Anyone who’s played Twister after a few beers will know what I mean.
Speaking of Twister, as it’s a good example of game-play that evokes physical spontaneity, it provided the inspiration for another experiment in this Media Lab.
An important distinction in this experiment was that participants were not given any rules prior to participation, removing the inhibitions of any imposed behavior.
The experiment started with an empty floor where the participants were asked to enter. Gradually colored hands and feet were projected onto the floor. After a while music started to play, and then suddenly stopped. When the music stopped the ‘system’ created a coloured plain on the surface a player was ‘occupying’. This process was repeated until most of the floor was completely coloured.

The first ‘free-form’ part was received with little spontaneity. The clear symbols of hands an feet implied a certain interaction, to stand on and touch the symbols with the shown limb. After a minute or two the participants started making up rules for themselves, ‘only touch the red symbols’, ‘let’s try to reach out to each other when the music stops’. It was this last ‘spontaneous action’ that sparked the cognitive leap of understanding the rules of the system. Immediately they sprung into action and started to cover as much ground with their bodies when the music stopped. This introduced a certain element of competition that might have subdued any undirected spontaneity, like in my limb-ball experiment.
Still an important conclusion in this experiment was that the knowledge of a rule-set did evoke more physical spontaneity, albeit that the behavior in itself was implied by the game. Again, does it matter? The fun was there, the spontaneity was there, the players were playing.
playas gonna play

The Rules of Public Space

I’m at the brink of an important phase of my research into evoking playful behavior in public space: Defining the rules of public space. The first step in this process would be to define ‘ public space’ . Then I want to analyse the behavioral patterns that make up the conditioned behavior we show. To make a correlation with my research project I will to use the analyses model I plotted, according to the 5 dimensions of play postulated by J.N. Liebermann

I like to think of human behavior in public space as living inside a semi-permeable bubble, It’s a theory I developed in conjunction with a colleague Wieger Jonker, he wrote about it on his blog over here (in dutch)
image courtesy of Wiegerjonker.nl

The thing about the bubble: It’s quite a necessity to keep your sanity in public space. It’s an instinctive defense mechanism against the overload of impulses we are confronted with everyday: colorful commercials, hassle-some street salesmen, cacophonous urban soundscapes and, above all, dreaded social interaction with strangers!

To give some context to analysing this behavior I’d like to introduce the 5 dimensions of play, postulated by J.N. Lieberman. I’ve plotted them in this diagram that can function as an analyses model for playful behavior.
Here’s an example of the model in action, analysing the game of tag.
Lieberman describes 5 dimensions of playful behavior being: Manifest Joy (it’s experienced as fun), Sense of Humor (it’s funny; makes you laugh), Cognitive Spontaneity (as in crossword puzzle), Physical Spontaneity (as in dancing) and Social Spontaneity (in for example theatrical improvisation).
In this diagram the game of ‘Tag’ is analysed, Physical Spontaneity has a strong presence in this game, whereas cognitive spontaneity does not, as there is little ‘intellectual challenge’ in winning a game of tag. There’s also some points in social spontaneity, as deciding ‘who am I going to tag’ or ‘I’m going to tease the hunter and run away at the last minute’ is based on social spontaneity.

To put this into contrast, here’s the model analysing how playful ‘behavior in public space’ is. There is room form some social spontaneity, but any extravagent approach (Hé! Wanna share my banana!) would be frowned upon as it will puncture the ´social acceptance bubble´ described earlier.

The goals of my quest for evoking playfulness in public space is to dissolve this bubble and broaden the spectrum of playful behavior in public space. I want to achieve this by presenting a playful counter-image, or ludic intervention, that audiences can relate to by interacting with them.
By participating in a ludic activity in public space, audiences might broaden their view on how you should behave in public space, and incoroprate more playfulness in their day-to-day life.

Playful revolution! Share banana’s!

Experiment 1: Limb-ball

Last week me and some of my fellow research-based practice colleagues decided to set ourselves a deadline. A deadline for delivering a first experiment, each in our own individual research practices.

Some words to start off with:
Playfulness is interacting with your environment in a way that provides fun (joyful expression). A definition of play, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, is ‘free movement within a rigid structure’. In my quest for evoking play in public space, I need to present a ‘rigid structure’ to which a supposed audience can relate to. By interacting with this rigid structure a player will ‘move freely’ within it. In doing so, any free movement in this structure that provides fun can be seen as playful behavior.

This leads me to the following question:
How can I design free movement?
or
How do I design a rigid structure that facilitates free movement.

The concept I experimented with:
Players are engaged in a game where they are to score a ball in the opponents goal, by all means necessary. By gradually adding rules to the game the freedom of movement is constrained, players are prohibited to perform certain actions (like touching the ball with their hands). Then, one-by-one, the rules will be taken away to examine if players exhibit more spontaneous playful behavior.
In other words: will the players move more freely within the rigid structure of the game than they did the first time round? Will they will interpret the rule, or lack of rules, in a new way and explore new ways of interacting with them.
I think that when people play (games) they are never aware of the full potential of the ludic activity. It is only in engaging in playful behavior (entering a playful state) that players discover new forms of behavior within the rigid structure of the game.

As competitive games do, the experiment turned out to be very run-aroundey-screamy, an impression:

The experiment was geared towards evoking spontaneous playful behavior. Afterwards, I asked the participants ‘what was the most spontaneous outburst?’ All the participants agreed that the most constrained set of rules evoked the most spontaneous behavior, like this young man resorting to more primal modes of transportations, when the rules dictated the ball could not be touched with neither hands nor feet.

So more contrains lead to more sp0ntaneous behaviour, touching Jesse Schell’s statement I wrote about earlier. It’s something I could have come up with before hand, but it was good to experience it first hand to see it happen.

The element of competition somewhat tainted the experiment. The participants said their inventive, spontaneous behavior never got the chance to erupt, as they were simply looking for the most efficient road to victory, eyes on the prize, so to speak.
I think the next (multiplayer) experiment should be geared towards collaborative play. By taking away the element of competition, winning will no longer be the main goal, making the playful behavior a goal in itself.

Me and my friends used to play a made-up game we called limb-ball. It’s a modification of the dutch ‘hoog houden’, which is Hackey Sack with a soccer ball. We’d done away with the constraint of only using our feet, mostly out of laziness, and decided we could use the whole of our body, hence the name limb-ball. It was the inventiveness and spontaneity of the game that kept us playing it for hours, where the fun peaked when someone made a never-shown-before move prefferably resulting in someone ending flat-out on the ground.

It’s this game that inspired me for this experiment, I might want to conduct another experiment focussing more on the spontaneity of playing with balls.

Another inspiration for this experiment was the great work of Tom Russotti and his Institute for Aesthletics, some of his inspiring words to end with

[megasoccer] does not aim to create a final rule set, but to allow for a constant shifting and reinterpretation of the rules, creating a more investigative, responsive and interpretive approach to playing the beautiful game.
-Tom Russotti, play artist

Evoking Play in Public Space – Flowchart

In my quest for evoking play in public space I’ve come up with the following flowchart.
It’s divided into three different phases, ranging from tickling the curiosity of a non-suspecting onlooker, to engaging a player to the extent of entering a ‘playful state’.

Let’s take a closer look at each step. In public space everything and everyone is part of the ludic activity, whether you want it or not. Even if an onlooker is unaware of anything ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ happening, he can still have an influence on the ludic activity, hence the name unaware participant. To be involved in the ludic activity an unaware participant must become an ambiguous participant² , this is the exciting phase of triggering an audience to investigate ‘what the hell is going on here’. This makes curiosity the driving force in this phase. This curiosity phase reaches a threshold when a participants recognises the activity as being ludic of nater, e.g. the audience ‘understands’ what’s going on. When this happens the audience will enter the motivation phase, reaching a threshold when a participan realises, ‘this looks cool, I want to join in’. This is when the participant needs to be lured in by being offered in invitation. When the participant accepts the invitation, thus becoming a player, he will be engaged in playful behaviour. When engaged in ludic activity a player will get more and more immersed in the playful behaviour, to the extreme of being totally immersed in the activity, which I’d like to call the ‘playful state’. See my previous post on this.
(click on the image to enlarge)

This model can serve as a flowchart for designing and analysing (ludic) interventions in public space.

²I borrowed this name from the great book on pervasive gamese, see:
Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, Annika Wærn (2009) Pervasive games: theory and design. Morgan Kaufmann

My personal definition

playfulness is interacting with your environment in a way that provides fun (joyful expression)

To engage in playful behaviour, one needs to be confronted with a ludic activity, and accept an invitation to join in. Play is voluntary, when it’s not, it ceases to be playful at once.
When engaged in ludic activity a player will get more and more immersed in the playful behaviour, to the extreme of being totally immersed in the activity, which I’d like to call the ‘playful state’. In this playful state a player is receptive to everything in his surrounding, reacting to the impulses with the sole purpose of maintaining or increasing the pleasure of the activity. In this sense play clearly exists outside of ordinary life, and the activity aims to uphold itself.

In my research I am curious to the phenomena of ‘transformative play’, meaning: to engage in playful behaviour within ludic activity (outside ordinary life) that influences your personal behaviour (inside ordinary life).
I see different methods for achieving this effect. The first would be to simulate real-life encounters and activities within a ludic activity. By engaging with the ludic activity a player will show behaviour that might trigger a reflection on his behaviour within his ‘ordinary’ life.
A second method to achieve transformative play would be to cross the boundaries, or magic circle, of the ludic activity and traverse into the realm of ordinary life. By fading the border between play and ordinary life a player might gain the insight that play is not only useful for it’s own sake, but is can also be applied to day-to-day activites to complete them with more joy than before, improving the quality of life.

I’m aware that the last few sentences contain some assumptions on the social value of playfulness. By stating this I see the need for asking the question: How can I test the (transformative) effects of any ludic activity?

Playful Utopia – part 1

Heads up!

I barely have time to duck when a fluorescent yellow frisbee zooms past my head. Further down the street a man in a grey business suit throws down his briefcase and with an athletic leap catches the frisbee before it lands on the ground. He get’s to his feet and with a graceful movement throws the frisbee further down the street. After brushing the dust off of his pantaloons he picks up his suitcase and proceeds around the corner. The man in the grey business suit holds pace, looks left then right, and steps backwards into the shadow of a doorway.
‘You have the merchandise?’ an invisible voice asks. Without replying the man in the grey business suit opens the suitcase, revealing it’s content. Two identical guns, gleam in the half-light. Medium calibre, long barrels. The hidden figure picks one up, they’re fully loaded, judging by the weight of them. ‘My payment?’ The man in the grey business suit is here for business. A hand, dripping with water, comes out of the dark holding a plastic bag filled with what seems like hundreds of multi colored bouncing balls. The man in the grey business suit accepts the bag and takes one of the balls out. He tests the ball, bouncing it on the ground. He nods approvingly after bouncing the bouncing ball on a few different angles in the doorway. The hidden figure takes the briefcase, he’s still holding one of the gun’s. The man in the grey business suit freezes when he hears, out of the darkness, the gun being cocked. Repeated pumping noises fill the deserted doorway, then the dripping hand once more reveals itself from the darkness, this time holding the fluorescent pink and yellow gun, aiming it directly at the face of the man in the grey business suit. ‘I’m sorry.’
The man in the grey business suit splutters when the high calibre water stream hits his face. He’s blown backward onto the pavement, struggling against the force of the water stream, the stream pushes him of the curb and he’s spreaded across the hood of a parked car. In the fall the bag of bouncing balls is launched into the air and is ripped open.

A soaked woman, in her mid fourties, comes running around the corner, armed with two Super Soakers. Without even looking me in the eye she forces one of the water-guns into my hands and, with the same movement, grabs one of the balloons dangling from the ammo-belt around her chest. The, evenly soaked, middle-aged man skidding around the corner is greeted with a water-balloon in the face and two streams of water coming from our super soakers. The man is helpless, overpowered by our superiority. He produces a deafening war-cry when a white van screeches to a halt behind us, the side-door slides open and an attack squad rushes out, armed to the teeth with water-assault gear. We take a few water balloons to the head before being thoroughly soaked by five high calibre water streams. I’m disoriented in the choas of water and pumping sounds, after a minute the chaos stops. Everyone’s empty.
Smiling broadly everyone looks at each other and disperses withing seconds, the van screeches off.
I’m left standing alone, drenched, holding a fluorescent pink and yellow water gun.

Media Lab I – Day 2

The past week has been dedicated to the Media and Performance Lab. After conducting my first experiment here, I wanted to try different approach. In the first experiment I wanted to evoke playful behavior by presenting a context, an environment an audience could relate to, that implied ludic behavior. It was successful to a certain extent, it worked, people showed playful behavior and engaged in the implied ludic activity. By conducting this experiment I came to a deeper understanding of Salen and Zimmerman’s definition of play: ‘free movement within a rigid structure’. As said before the ludic activity was implied: ‘kick the football into the goal’. This resulted in superficial playful behavior, conforming to the implied interaction, rather than stimulating spontaneous playful behavior.
As a side note: this conditioned behavior was emphasised by the context of ‘experiment’, inviting a test-subject into a space where ‘something is supposed to happen’. Making an audience realise that anything out-of-the-ordinary is happening at all will prove another challenge to overcome when conducting experiments in public space.

In the next experiment I wanted to create an environment that evokes ‘free movement’, spontaneous interaction with the (presented) environment. The Performance Engine functioned as a reactive space, by using fiducials (shapes that can be recognised by the sofware) the audience can influence the music composition that is playing. By showing or hiding the fiducials, different elements of the music could be activated. Buy placing the fiducials on different locations in the space the volume could be influenced.
The possibilities of interactions were limited, I was curious as to how the audience would interact with the system: Will they show spontaneous interaction? How long will it take for them to figure out the system? and most importantly, will they have fun doing it?

The implied interaction, or code, was clear: move around the fiducials to manipulate the music. As the only parameter the audience could influence was volume, most of the spontaneous behavior, like waving around a fiducial, dancing or sudden movements, was not ‘rewarded’, that is to say, there was no feedback of they’re (inter)action. This lack of feedback seemed to be demotivating to continue showing any spontaneous behavior.
Half-way trough the video, another element is added. Instead of controlling another element of the music, this fiducial manipulated the overall speed of the music. This proved futile for the audience to understand the system. However, it did trigger further spontaneous behaviour, as the new ‘tool’ required a re-evaluation of the reactive environment.
I think this curious spirit of exploring the possibilities within a (rigid) structure is quite important for evoking playful behavior. It is, for example, what children do all the time: test their environment for it’s usefulness.

I’m still thought wrestling the dilemma of how to design free movement.