Cross-Species Game Design
Cross-Species Game Design is an art piece in the format of a workshop. As part of a research project on cross-species game design it engages conversations on play, games, pleasure, humor and the “other” across difference and species categories. The workshop format uses design practice as a twist to Clara Hemmings “technology of the presumed” (Hemings 2011). Thinking game design with the radically different bodies help us tease out presumptions that often goes unnoticed in our conversations around games, game design and games studies. How do we know what play is beyond an intimate knowledge placed in the body? Do we identify good play by a smile, a cheerful child, a healthy looking flower, a fixed gaze on a screen, or the number of coke bottles in the corner? Can we design such intimate experiences for other bodies than our own? Surely, the literature is generous with definitions of games but which one are we going to manifest in the conversation with plants? And by which understanding of botany can we see the plant as anything else than an efficiency machine?
In the midst of questions without answers, design practice urges the designer to make decisions, to become explicit about which presumptions are actualized in any given design creation. Game Design For Plants is a three hour workshop for up to 16 participants.
Hosted by ReFIG Conference, Montreal, 2016.