Sisypiss – 9/4/23

https://artgamesthesis.itch.io/sisypiss

What were we trying to accomplish and what did we do to pursue the goals we set for ourselves?

The prompt we chose for the week was “Make a bad game”. The primary objective of this project was to get us to loosen up and get a sense of what we could make in a week. It should be noted that we have between thirty-six and forty-five work hours among the three of us per project. This includes everything from picking a prompt, digging into relevant terms and concepts we want to explore, ideation, and the actual production of the idea. We spent a fair amount of time discussing what parameters to use to understand how we can go about making something bad. These are the following categories we established to figure out what kind of “bad” we were interested in exploring:

Lukewarm art:

Games that try to engage with something deep and philosophical but end up with superficial renditions or experiences is a trope that none of us like playing. This applies in the context of artsy games, but also to any content in a game that just feels like it lacks depth or meaningful engagement/interaction. We found this category uncomfortable to consider as we all care quite deeply about the art we make, and there’s always a chance that we accidentally make something lukewarm.

Buggy or unusable games:

Games that are unplayable because you just fall through the floor every two seconds are bad (unless for some reason that is an intended part of the experience). When a game is unplayable because: corners were clearly cut, or features are presented in an un-usable way with poor interaction mechanisms, or assets and features are scrappily implemented, the game is bad in a more technical sense. We weren’t particularly interested in making a game that you simply can’t use, but this category helped refine the types of ideas we were interested in.

Parodies

Games that are parodies fall in a fascinating category. The Looker as a parody of The Witness was incredibly successful and is something that we as individuals found super engaging. Using this type of game as guidance, we started to talk about what would a game that is a parody of the genre of experimental art games look at and how we could make something that was a “bad experimental art game”. We started to hypothesize that we could make a bad experimental art game that could still be a good parody game. This nuance of something bad only being bad in a specific context and that same thing being good in another context is what somewhat surprisingly led us back to something lukewarm. 

At this point, we had decided to refine our prompt to be “make a bad experimental art game” as this would in theory get us to explore what we don’t want to be doing over the course of the thesis. Hence: piss game… The idea felt crass and terrible in principle, and while someone certainly could have done something artistic with the idea (Duchamp did?), that would not be us over this week.

What is the game? (Spoilers)

You know that feeling when you’re really tired and want to go to bed, but then you need to piss, and then you’re really tired and want to go to bed, but then you’re thirsty and you drink some water, and then you’re really tired and and want to go to bed and need to piss…

That’s the game.

That’s it.

For the sake of documentation, here is a description of all the playable content in the executable:

• The camera fades in and a disembodied voice says something along the lines of, “I need to piss”
• The player can walk to the toilet at one end of a hallway and click to piss
  • A eye close animation plays
  • Piss SFX
  • Eye open animation plays
• A disembodied voice says something along the lines of “I’m parched”
  • The player can walk to the fridge at the other end of the hallway and click to drink water
• Halfway down the hallway is a bedroom the player cannot enter
  • There is a chance that a disembodied voice yawns when passing the bedroom
• After a player completes seven actions, when the eye opens, the world is empty except for the toilet, the fridge, an edited copy of Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisypiss and an enormous ocean of piss
• The world goes back to normal once the next action is completed
• If the player does not move for a minute, the character controller will be pushed to the next action
  • If this happens and the player does not act for another minute, the next action is performed

Austen’s Reflection

I can’t believe we made piss game… After we made the decision to actually go through with this project idea, I was worried that the end result would not be bad according to the constraints that we set for ourselves. Interestingly, I think we didn’t actually end up making something bad in the way we set out to, but made something that was bad only when considered in a very specific context? (the context being that Sisypiss is a terrible artistic/experimental game (but is maybe a decent parody of some artistic/experimental games??) It sits in a weird spot for me with hindsight enabled: on the one hand, it is an incredibly silly thing to have made; on the other hand, it really has provided some clarity on what kind of ideas I am interested in pursuing through this thesis. I am mildly discomforted by the amount of clarity conversations about piss have brought to my understanding of art… Additionally, having made Sisypiss, I feel more grounded in our current location in time as it pertains to art and media that has been explored and art that I am interested in exploring personally and collectively.

David’s Reflection

This was a really interesting project to work on. The idea of a ‘piss game’ has been floating around as an inside joke during our ideation sessions for a while. I honestly never thought we would actually make such a game, but I think it turned out to be the perfect project for this prompt. The goal of this week was to loosen us up and prevent us from being too precious with our ideas, and Sisypiss definitely accomplished that. In addition, our early conversations defining a ‘bad game’ turned out to be very constructive and helped me frame my understanding of how these projects would progress in the future. Coming in, I underestimated the amount of time that is required for us to first deconstruct and delve into the prompt itself before even ideating on the game. Another interesting outcome of this project is a practical example of the phenomenon of accomplishing something by trying to avoid it. We set out to create a bad game, but in the end we’ve been able to retroactively prescribe a lot of meaning and commentary to Sisypiss that was not intended during development. It feels like a game that could be overly examined for subtextual commentary about the world and what it’s like to be a human being, despite there being none intended. After asking our friends to play it, we’ve found that it has the ability to incite a great spectrum of emotions to a rather extreme degree. Putting these things into consideration, I could hardly call Sisypiss a ‘bad game’. Maybe a turbulent experience without intent would be a better way to put it?

Zach’s Reflection

For one, I think the project absolutely accomplished the goal of loosening us up; it’s great to have a quick, finished project under our belt to build some confidence and start to understand our timelines and processes better. Other than that, Sisypiss really helped to orient me towards what we value in artistic games and what we are setting out to make this year. In conversations about what a “bad game” even is, I came to understand the fact that our top priority this year is to make bold, risky projects and to try to get as far away from “lukewarm” art as we can. Even if the projects crash and burn completely, I want us to really throw ourselves towards some extremes to really push our own boundaries here. It was also really interesting to see how quickly we were finding artistic ideas that we found interesting and engaging in a project that was meant to have none of that; it gives me a sense that we will be able to find artistic interest in some really diverse places this year.

Takeaways and Postmortems

As we debriefed about what we had made, we came to realize how often in and around development for this project we told ourselves that we were in fact making a bad game. We seemed to have an internal/group need to validate and sort of proclaim what we were [trying to] making as we were making it in order to get through the ordeal. While making the game itself did loosen us up, being able to look at it as something complete and understand and interact with the pressure we had put on ourselves to achieve a very specific thing has made it easier to accept that over the next couple of weeks we will likely make a fair number of games that do not at all do what we would like them to do. In simple terms, we felt like we had failed at achieving the prompt a little, but were also happy with what we had made and how we went about making it. 

Did we make a bad [experimental art] game? Probably? The final product is a bit of a crass, lukewarm parody on what experimental art games are sometimes, and the game itself doesn’t say all that much. As we talked through the feeling that came from this evaluation, we started to talk about what this meant to us when considering how we want to approach the rest of this thesis and what kind of games we are actually interested in.

Sisypiss felt lukewarm to us as we didn’t really take any risks with what we made. Making something bad holds a lot of potential to make something risky and horrible, which led to us talking about transgression in art and politics. As we spoke with our advisor Peter Brinson, he told us a bit about how in the US, the political culture and narrative around transgression has shifted over the last sixty years. The political left in the sixties was all about transgression for freedoms and equality, and in recent memory (our lifetimes), the political right has been a transgressive force of bigotry and outrage for the sake of virality. We’ll be reading a bit about the history of American political identity in hopes to relate that to the idea of transgressive art.

In a more general conversation, informed by our clear lack of experience with making art or games that take risks or are transgressive in any sense, we spoke about the meta-objectives art has had through the narrative of art history. We have been discussing what we want to accomplish or communicate through our art and found that the ideas surrounding the depiction of standard reality was not really an area we were interested in. Making something for the sake of newness, weirdness, or novelty sits in a bit of an ambiguous place. We ended in a place were we considered the way in which art engages questions and answers and found that we were interested in using games as a way to have players encounter questions (without us explicitly solving said questions/blatantly depicting answers); though, this is something we have only superficially explored in conversation at this point. Peter gave us an interesting direction to consider: “To expose and complicate, rather than to simplify and answer.” 

Moving into our next week, we are left with more questions and directions to explore which is exactly where we want to be. Though we hid behind humour a bit in what we made this week, we have gained vocabulary to describe what we hope to make, and are developing an understanding of ourselves as artists, the tendencies we have, and how to push out of our own comfort zones in order to explore the questions and ideas we encounter.