APD - Week 5 - Play and Forces

Theme:

Play & Forces

Context:

Roger Caillois describes play as having six key features, one of which is:

“Free: in which playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its attractive and joyous quality as diversion” (Caillois 1962: 9)

Another feature he defines is:

“Uncertain: the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained beforehand, and some latitude for innovations being left to the player’s initiative” (Caillois 1962: 9)

Following my work in APD Week 4 (in which I created a room where you could break the walls and throw various objects), I had become interested in how people had engaged with / enjoyed playing with the objects in the space – eg throwing a ball around and trying to catch it. This was a type of free play, with uncertain outcomes.

With this in mind, for this week’s exercise, I decided to further enquire into this space. I thought I would experiment and add more objects to the experience (which I hoped would inspire more play) and to see what happened when I changed the rules of gravity (differently for the different objects). Ie There would be more objects in the space – so more possibilities - and more uncertainty because the objects could bump into each other and their surroundings at unpredictable velocities - this might become more chaotic and add some unquantifiable value for the player.

I also wanted to see what happened when I applied explosion rules to some of the objects, which would add further to the unpredictability of the objects’ behaviours in the room.

Artist Jackson Pollock used gravity to his advantage – placing his canvas on the floor and then pouring paint in unbroken lines straight from the tin. This method was born out of: the frustration of constantly having to reload his brush and also; the frustration of friction - as his hand had to physically brush the paint along the canvas.  - The Subversion of Gravity in Jackson Pollock's Abstractions

Claude Cernuschi and Andrzej Herczynski

The Art Bulletin

Vol. 90, No. 4 (Dec., 2008), pp. 616

Although this exercise doesn’t answer them, it raised some interesting questions for me: Like, what would Jackson Pollock have done in antigravity? How would it have affected his painting style and his work?

And what would happen if he could have actively changed gravity settings/rules at wish as we were playing?

I also found a smash game in VR, aptly called “Smash Party VR”

This was also inspired by real life parties where you can smash things. In this game however, gravity is applied fairly standardly.

Effing Meteors is a game where you launch rocks at meteors

Method:

I applied different rules of gravity for different objects in a pre-prepared VR space using Unity.

The VR place/room had originally been set up as somewhere that ordinary rules didn’t apply (ie. you were allowed to break things) and I felt that there was something fun for players in messing with the gravity of an object so that it behaved differently to what they were expecting.

I continued to develop and tinker with this in between different people playing in my VR ‘smash room’ and added things.

I gave glass bottles a mass similar to the real world and the rules of velocity were also similar.

I gave the smart phones no gravity and I made some of the bouncy balls behave as you would expect in ordinary life, but some I applied gravity differently to some of them.

I also applied explosion rules of some objects so that they would ‘explode on collision’ which had unexpected results. Some of the glass bottles exploded at the start of the scene, causing the walls to destruct right at the beginning of the experience. In turn, the bricks bumped some of the objects and sent them flying – around the room and sometimes out of reach.

Players then had to act quickly if they wanted to catch the objects. Most people played a number of times as they wanted to try catching different objects each time, or they wanted to try doing something different with the objects.

After some playtesting, I added a bat (a cylinder) into the space, which you could pick up and swing and hit things with, which added to the chaos.

Response:

I attached different rules of gravity to different objects in a VR experience/experiment in which you had 1.5 x 2m of space to move around in.

People then played with the objects in a physical way. I had balls; a smartphones; glass bottles and then later I added a bat-like cylinder.

Some of the objects exploded as the scene began, causing some objects to move around unpredictably and also causing the bricks in the walls to fall down.

When I invited people to play, some threw the objects, some tried to juggle the objects, some tried to catch the objects and a couple of people used the smartphones as bats to hit the balls with. Each time, as soon as people realised the normal rules of gravity didn’t apply to objects, they expressed delight and excitement as they experimented and played in the space.