Trial Run Wrap Up: Our House vs Your House

Well the site looks snazzy in her new dress, and it’s exciting! And we’re loading up on a few new pages to unleash on you (or “unload” depending on how you like your metaphors). Midst this, we decided we wanted to play a game, because games are great. We played a game called Our House vs Your House (or OHvsYH for meme-ing) and we learned some stuff while playing, so here’s a wrap up for fun and memory’s sake…

Our friends have game nights and sometimes we miss them because Elran’s working (I think most code happens at night) and I fall asleep instead of getting up to go solo. And we had ideas for different kinds of games we might play - I am a font of half baked ideas, as anyone who knows me will tell you. This is because I’m testing out recipes -you can’t full-bake every idea without getting spread too thin. Before the cooking metaphors make me too hungry, let me just say- there were and are lots of games we could play, and there are many more yet to be invented. Games are fun, they’re a bit like programs human write for other humans instead of for machines. And because humans are uniquely able to invent and make subjective descisions, games for humans are bound to make more creative fun. Especially when you get to help make up the rules, as was the case on Saturday night. Some good folks came over to play and be beta testers and we had such a good time that we think we might make it monthly!

Robyn and Roseanne arrived first, which was good. I was nervous to play my made up game and I find friendly, artsy girls from BC who studied writing together very reassuring. Then Max and Cassandra arrived, which was good because I was quite certain they’d be pretty great at the game- Cassandra runs her own zine and is in art school (cyber + performance equals awesome-school) and Max is Salgood Sam and he’s hosted Comic Jams before. He even started a website, which he showed us, generously directing us to the very page on which he had compiled descriptions of the different constraints Comic Jammers he knows have played with. Cheers to Max for a bevy of new ideas! One of his suggestions will be put into place for the next time we play- instead of playing on the backs of the pages of my thesis, we’re going to play on cue cards. The thesis sheets were fun because some of them were printed on mcdonalds paper (longish story) and because they inspired Tessa to screw with my arguments about machines speaking to eachother to make a recoded page for the game. But we ran out of space kind of fast, and we could play with more people with cue cards.

Anyway at this point, I started one game of exquisite corpse drawing , and one of writing, going round simlutaneously. Whether writing or drawing, exquisite corpse involves adding to a collective piece of authorship without being able to see what came before. It’s good warm up for thinking on the spot. Thanks be to Dada.

Then a few more people arrived, and then a few more, and then some left to attend other dear folks birthday partys (double booking is sad but inevitable, at least in the fall in Montreal.) Guests shifted a bit throughout the night around the cozy circle of chips, wine and cookies; and the couch, rug and chair we inherited. The cookies- delivered by Benjamin IV - were especially cozifying. Cheers to Ben!

To start the game I took Don Quixote off the wall in our living room to make a big intimidating white space just like the empty page only with scuff marks from the apparently rowdy and gravity-defying previous tenants, and I explained that anyone was welcome to put up a page of writing or drawing that was their submission for a first page. After this had been done- with 5 drawings and one bit of writing as potential opener- I expounded on the rules. The intention of this game was for us to make a good story, I proclaimed, and then explained that the first person to be Head Author would pick which page they wanted to continue from. The Head Author Position would rotate around the room in the order of people’s arival. When Head Author, you could choose a page to continue from, making that page the Official Next Page, or you could make an edit backwards to the choices made before. I am interested in the power of Authorship, can you tell?

It’s funny, because it’s the kind of game that you might think would bring out the catty in people, you know with people picking friends, or always picking their own pages as favorites or something, but I think humans are generally much more interesting then that thinking would suggest. I think we respond to the systems we end up in, for the most part. If we’re in adversarial systems where we’re cast as enemy then we’re inclined to respond in the way that’s expected. Habermas calls this the “spiral of reciprocal mistrust”. But if we create systems that expect and enable successful collaboration, and that are flexible to the ways in which the system might need to be adjusted to achieve that, then humans seems pretty generally able to get along dispite difference, delight and surprise. I think Art is evidence of this- Art is mostly games we’ve been playing for a long time. Perspective games, performace games. I have done some work with really really troubled kids and though it takes a while to get past their necessary defences, it happens in a natural and awe inspiring way when you trust them to make something following interesting (to them) constraints. And so now I make up games to play at “creative parties”. Really- the game was made up just because it could be, because other people have played such interesting games before and why not, and because I really don’t like to stay up late at night unless I’m having fun AND multi-tasking. True.

I think we made a cool story- you check it out and tell me what you think. You can see the posts as hey were put up during play on the Indyish blog by searching for OHvsYH or clicking on the OHvsYH tag. And you can see our first attempts at rules and graphs to explain the game which I think made the whole thing more complicated then it is. Good thing we had a trial run!