Last weekend, @stinacomics and I made it to the Portland Zine Symposium for a day of tabling! We were doing our best to sit still and manage the heat in a sweltering auditorium.

Check out my table set-up below! It shifted around a few times but someone I was chatting to said I am “prolific” and that made me feel vindicated a bit.

The Revolutionary Game is a political theory of sorts that calls for better literacy of games in order to more and better social systems in our world, to replace our shitty ones. It’s been a thought for a while, and after I did a workshop about it earlier this year, I got around to putting it on paper.

10,000 Feasts is my collection of travel diaries while I was in China in January. Though I made Hexwalk with Christina a little earlier, this one feels like My First Zine, in its style and format.

poemlings at the bottom is my tiny collection of poetry, all of which originally came from poetry I started writing on my twitter account in the past year. On the back of each is a set of hand colored illustrations to accompany the poems.

Hexwalk kept faking everyone out because they thought we were selling music, totally understandable. But it’s not! The contents of the CD slipcover is laid out above: a map of Portland, with locations corresponding to packets that offer some poetry and actions to perform as the player wanders around a city. It is my first of what I’m exploring as zine games: simple, thoughtful play experiences packaged in a tangible way, hand made and matching the aesthetic of zines.

Scroll Break in the cigarette box was made all day in my open workshop behind the wares (I’m working on one in the picture). It is an exploration of the rituals of a smoker that may be accessible by a non-smoker: an opportunity to break from work and spend 5 minutes doing nothing. I also discovered throughout the day that there is a particular joy in freely giving from the box.

Cut Up Curator in the little coin envelope ended up selling well. None of these zine games are particularly “worth it” in terms of the time it takes to put them together but I really enjoy making them anyway so who cares. This one is a game about making cut up poetry with the word scraps provided, creating a museum-style object label, and attaching them to stuff in the world to call attention to the mundane and perform a little poetic so-called vandalism.

Among the other freebies was a stack of Slingshot papers (there was a visitor who was really excited to see it because they said they didn’t have the budget to travel much this year and Slingshot was something they thought they’d only get when visiting the Bay Area).

I had a great time talking to everyone who came by the table! The games in particular I think are a rarer offering in the zine space and it was nice to see that some people were excited about it. Also, I’ve been bashful about putting The Revolutionary Game into the world, and a number of folks were excited to see a way to understand games as a meaningful part of contemporary political thought; I’m really curious to see if they write back and share their thoughts and critique.

See you at the next zine affair!

@stinacomics​ was off at a residency earlier this month at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, working with Oulippo-influenced comics artist Matt Madden. Their cohort of interdisciplinary artists explored making art that is heavily process-driven, with heavy constraints and explorations of form.

That is some of the context for this piece she made while she was there: SILT/MOLT. It’s made with Twine, which is a wonderful little tool for creating interactive fiction, digital Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style linking texts.

It’s a little hard to say what makes Tide so beautiful to me. There is no such thing as out of context, and perhaps a conversation I had this morning about art and storytelling has as much influence on my reading of it as the fact that she is my partner, but if you’ll take a look, you’ll see this gently unfolding, wistful and haunting world. There is an image of the world that appears not through information and details but moods, moments, glimpses, zen views.

You could say the whole piece is a zen view. I recommend making time for a brief visit.

http://sodelightful.com/comics/tide/

Last month I read Rise of the Video Game Zinesters by Anna Anthropy. I was developing a workshop for that conference to talk about how the understanding design, philosophy, and practice of games can introduce a revolutionary paradigm shift that gives us more agency over our lives among social systems, more than the normative framework of playing for status in a single, broad, monolithic, complex. Anyway, my favorite chapter in the book was a chapter she writes about the modding community.

The big budget video game industry process is like a caricature of corporate management theory. Giant teams, “managed well,” organized hierarchically, sustaining cumbersome franchises, that simultaneously accumulate profits for those at the narrow ends while limiting choices and options. Redefining the prototypical game as high production, fully rendered, impersonal beasts that speak to a specific, dominant demographic of consumers. This was even more true in 2012 when the book was published, though that was a period of the emergence of an indie industry, which is another topic… Anyway, even with an expectation that a game required an army of developers to make, a community of modders were going in and using the infrastructures to create new games, hacking the physics engines, art assets, and captured audiences to make new stories.

The concepts of intellectual property and auteur theory have really only been around for a little while (1883), and perhaps it is only a fluke of history that the intentions of the creators of a thing are supposed to be the ultimate authority on how the thing is used. The general technique behind modding definitely has roots preceding video games, in hip hop sampling and remix culture, in cover music and oral tradition. And it has applications beyond, too.

I think that my practices of parkour, live games, experience design, and interpreting social systems all have an inherent aspect of conservationism in them, a kind of practice of recycling pieces of the environment around us that have already been created for other purposes, introducing rules that allow them to be more than what they are supposed to be. Making and playing games that use public space is a reminder that we can appropriate, co-opt, and repurpose environments to represent values of play instead of whatever e.g. a concrete wall represents – deterrence, exclusivity, control.

Why limit modding to changing video games? There are plenty of exciting spaces to temporarily take over and remix in our everyday experience of the world.

I think when you become an artist, especially the kind that is multidisciplinary, avant garde, or exploratory, it becomes really difficult to find a label that quite fits. Part of the art is to create an entire medium.

Throughout the 20th, the art movements that have emerged have tackled this problem by not creating labels according to medium but according to values and rules. The surrealists were not just painters, though many of their representative works were paint; there was a surreal edge to music, literature, poetry, and even political philosophy. The fluxus movement similarly included visual art, compositions, performance art, happenings.

Still, it’s useful to think about existing genres metaphorically to understand the work that we’re doing right now better, to figure out historically what we can learn, what we can steal, what we can recycle to better define (or undefine) our work and ourselves.

I’ve been borrowing from theatre a lot lately. There’s really beautiful and thought-provoking stuff behind the scenes of theatre: in the workshopping, rehearsals, backstage. Maybe because it’s so collaborative, it necessarily acts as a magnet that pulls in aspects of many disciplines in order for it to function and evolve. Beyond writing and acting, we see music and dance, abstract performance, even video art on stage. And then of course, there’s technical theatre. Stagecraft.

I think stagecraft is a beautiful word. Like playwright, there’s something physical, tangible, classic that comes at you when you hear it. And in contemporary immersive theatre and embodied real-world games, I’ve been saying that these are new media where the stage managers and house managers are as or more important than the directors. These are spaces where space and participation are the primary concern, rather than virtuosity and spectacle. A game designer is defining the boundaries of the place space, the environment, scenes, props, etc. A game facilitator is helping the audience to become or replace the actors, to take the stage, to turn the stage into the house and create a meaningful experience.

My work has been in designing participatory performance, immersive experience, real world games, and redefining space to allow for play. My work is stagecraft, not for plays, but for play.

I wrote a zine about my experiences traveling in China at the beginning of the year, from the perspective of a 20something Chinese-American who’s been in the US my entire life, but has heard all sorts of tales from the elders. 

I decided to put it up on Itch.io, and you can get it there! Or you can contact me and ask for a copy, really, whatever. Trades are cool too.

Until then, you can hear me rant about China! Christina and I did a zine reading a bit ago at our house, a release party for two new zines that we put together in March. We really enjoyed sharing, so we are putting on an online reprisal of the zine reading, via video call, on Monday, April 23rd, 7PM Pacific.

http://sodelightful.com/misc/reading/