Designing A Degradable Video Game

“A set of prompts to think about how video games have been disposable, are not separate from infrastructures involved in the destruction of ecosystems, are part of our futures and the potentials in futures and economies of loss.”

“Participants sit in a circle. Inside this circle will be the city. Each participant contributes (out loud, with gestures and descriptions). Start by laying out streets. Trace them on the floor with your hands. Add houses, fields, churches, squares. Add restaurants and bars. Shops and shopping malls and apartment blocks. Government buildings and schools. Add walking paths. Add cycling paths. Add train routes. Add utopian buildings. Add dream architecture for a world we don’t know. Add statues. Add new types of transit. Add new kinds of food, life, power. Build inside and over. Let it climb onto itself. Let it contain its own ruins. Hold the city in your mind. Walk yourself along its mainstreet. Imagine life here.”

“Then, together, stand up and let it dissolve.”

“Think about game tools, which contain their possibilities within them.

Dice, cards, controllers, rendering pipelines.
Invent a new tool to play games with.
Let the games follow.”

“There are only so many polygons in the world, and every game must share them. Dole them out accordingly, with due process and input from the collective group.”

“Write yourself a fetch quest. Interlink it with other participants’ fetch quests (require an item that someone else gives; give an item that someone else requires). Be ready to perform the duty of this fetch quest for the rest of your life.”

“Games die the second no one is playing them, never to be regained. Organize a system of players to keep the games you love most alive. Take shifts.”

“These games and the workshop itself were created with inspiration from Fluxus and Situationist performance art, as well as from the work of Ben Abraham on climate in the games industry, James Newman’s work on video game degradability, and artists such as Kara Stone and Harriet Horobin-Worley”