Fluxus Games

For this week's "Tabletop Tuesdays," class, we will explore the Fluxus art movement, a neo-Dadaist movement, originated and named by George Maciunas from his pioneering SoHo loft, but involving also many other artists in the 1960s and early 70s, including George Brecht and Yoko Ono. As an art movement, Fluxus was, like Dada, "anti-art," poking fun at the seriousness of modern art; it was multimaterial, involving the use and interaction of different media; it fostered "simple" works (meaning those that were short in length, size, or duration); and it was intentionally fun and often humorous. "Play," in other words, was a central value.

Many, though by no means all of the works created by Fluxus practioners were games (or game-like objects); and many other works, while not games in a formal sense, are sets of rules designed to create an artistic effect, and therefore related to the game qua game.

One example: Yoko Ono's White Chess:
White Chess is simply a Chess set, but one in which all the pieces are white and the board itself consists of alternating squares of white and, um, white. If you view this as a game in a formalist sense, it is nonsensical, since it is essentially bad UI for the game of Chess; but if you think about the implications, it is something very different. You can play White Chess with someone else only so long as you (and your opponent) are able to remember whose piece is where; if you, or your opponent, have a lapse of memory and disagree, the game is impossible to sustain, because both sides' pieces are identical. The game is specifically, and very intentionally, an anti-war statement by Ono, relying on the common trope of Chess as an metaphor for war -- and of course the idea of the moral equivalence of all humanity.

White Chess is only one of many Chess variants created by members of the Fluxus movement; but their interests were not restricted to Chess alone. As an example, here is Maurizio Cattelan's version of Foosball, which can be played by up to 24 players:

via Fluxlist Europe

Or as another example, consider "Jaroslaw Koslowski," a piece by Maciunas:
via Rhizome

It is a box containing a variety of items -- a Chess rook, a key, an acorn, some seeds -- along with the instructions "Spell your name with these objects." It's an example, actually, of a whole series of little boxes that Maciunas sent to his friends, with the same instructions but different assemblages of objects. Indeed, many Fluxus artworks, from other artists as well, consist of boxes of objects along with what they called a "score," by analogy to a musical score, which is a set of instructions to musicians; here, they are instructions to the user, the audience, the viewer -- the player, if you will.

Of course, Maciunas's instructions are absurd; playing his 'game' is impossible, since only objects that do not produce letterforms are provided. But we still have here the external indicia of a game: a set of instructions, an inventory of game pieces to use in following them.

In a similar vein, many of Ono's "texts" are instructional in nature: e.g., her Tunafish Sandwich Piece:

This is poetry, of course; but it is poetry in the form of a set of instructions for an activity in which you could, in principle, partake. The activity is certainly absurdist, a combination of a meditation exercise and a prosaic lunch, but it is possible to perform. Just as a game is an experience, crafted by a designer but instantiated by its players, guided by rules, so Tunafish Sandwich Piece is an experience, crafted by an artist but (at least in potentio) instantiated by members of its intended audience, and guided by rules. I won't tempt another argument over the meaning of 'game' by describing it as a game; but there is a connection to games here.

Fluxus artists did not restrict themselves to "games that cannot be played," of course; at the Fluxfest in New Brunswick in 1970, a number of "Flux sports" were introduced, including soccer played on stilts, ping pong played with paddles with holes in them, and a "slow speed cycle contest" in which the goal was to reach the finish line -last- by cycling as slowly as possible without, presumably, falling over.

This is all somewhat amusing, but what, we may reasonably ask, can modern game designers learn from a decades-old absurdist art movement that happened to experiment tangentially with games?

Mainly this, I think. Just as absurdism in art is designed to explore the boundaries of a form and poke fun at its more pretentious commentators, so "absurdist game design" of this kind is useful in making us think about what games are, what they are capable of doing, and how they achieve an effect on players. Moreover, Fluxus games challenge the sort of reductionist, formalist approach to game design championed by Eric Zimmerman and others. They say that games can be funny, games can be entertaining in ways beyond the interplay of rules and struggle of players, that a creative, off-the-wall, try-anything approach may well be more fruitful than the sort of disciplined, systems-oriented design philosophy that is today the conventional norm in our field.

Crossposted from Play This Thing!