That's not very Munchkinly at all. But it is the name of our newest promotional bookmark. It will be available first in GTM #145, on store shelves very soon. Later this year, Warehouse 23, SJ Games staff at conventions, and your friendly local Man In Black will have copies as well.
For the past couple of years, our friends at
Alliance have sponsored a charity auction with one prize being an appearance on a
Munchkin bookmark. This year, the winning bidder was Thompson Productions LLC, with a bid of $752, who asked (after winning!) if they could use their bookmark to honor a long-time supporter, Jeremy Carty, who is a ginormous fan of both
Axe Cop and
Munchkin. Of course, we agreed. (Jeremy's the one not wearing a cop hat.)
Steve Jackson Games thanks Alliance for sponsoring the auction, Thompson Productions for being so generous, Ethan Nicolle for donating the art, and of course Jeremy for being such an awesome fan that he deserved his own bookmark.
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Andrew Hackard
February 07, 2012 06:27 AM
Dr. Cecil Brown began his lecture Games Blacks Love to Play by citing Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 observation that the games people play mirror the surrounding culture. Brown uses this stance—that games teach us about the culture they come from—to explore the history of African Americans, the interplay between black and white play cultures, and the effect these diverse forms of play had on American culture at large.
Brown divided American history into three stages. First, slave culture, in which outdoor physical play predominates. Under slavery, blacks rarely learned to read and write, as punishment was having your hands cut off. Black culture, thus, was primarily oral and kinetic out of necessity. Second, segregated culture, characterized by dance. Thirdly, integrated culture, which our digital culture is a part.
Brown talked about a host of fascinating play phenomena that occurred under slavery in America. Black kids usually played with the children of their master, interestingly, but were not allowed to play with white kids from elsewhere. Slave children played a game called auction, where they enacted the auction of slaves as a game, enabling them to explore the drama of a slave auction and the strange idea of their own value. White kids often weren’t allowed to play, as they “weren’t worth anything.” Children’s play culture under slavery found a specific manifestation in the topsy-turvy doll, a handmade doll made with two halves, each representing a black or white girl. By flipping the dress over the head of one, you ended up with the other.
The folklorist Maude Minish Sutton looked at the topsy turvy relationship between a game played in white and black variations. In the black children’s game Old Man Hippety Hop, a mom must steal kids back from a slave master (Old Man Hippety Hop) with a limp. This game was adapted from Old Granny Hibble Hobble, a much older game in which the slave master is replaced with a witch (Old Granny Hibble Hobble). Brown claims that DJ Cool Herc, credited with originating hip hop music, adapted the name “hip hop” from an old southern woman who identified the play of these early hip hop parties as the Hippety Hop game from her childhood.
Alan Dundes, credited with establishing the academic study of folklore, and under whom Brown studied folklore as a PhD student at UC Berkeley, was hugely influenced by the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp’s concept of folktalk morphology (Dundes wrote an introduction to the english language edition). Brown brought Dundes’s 1964 paper on games “On Game Morphology: A Study of the Structure of Non-verbal Folklore” to our attention, which seems to be a formal study of structural game patterns that prefigures the more recent work in game studies.
Brown aligned Dundes’s motifeme (a substitutable element in a story or game) with the frame and slot mechanism Janet Murray describes in Hamlet on the Holodeck. Brown argued that games, like folktales, are about the elimination of a lack. In games, the lack is often an absence of mastery that must be overcome by the player (rather than a lack overcome by a hero in a story). Elimination of a lack could also manifest itself as a social motive for engaging in play: impressing a girl at a dance, for example.
In the second historical stage, segregation, Brown identifies adult recreation such as jazz and dance as a form of play. Brown argues that Lindy Hop was a game—a form of play—for adults, that along with electricity, helped give rise to the American culture of night life. Just as the Beastie Boys would later appropriate and commercialize black hip hop culture for a white audience, Fred Astaire borrowed his performance from the Lindy Hop. Citing Joel Dinestein’s Swinging the Machine, Brown argued that African American culture (jazz and Lindy Hop, for example) aestheticized the rhythm and cacophony of the cities and machines of industrial era America. Rhythm imparted a human dimension to the machine.
Which brings us to the third and present historical stage, integration. Brown argues that hip hop group NWA revived the stereotype of the African American man as a brute. This theme, the demonization of blackness, has been amply commodified in popular video games and films. Brown argued that video games represent a turn towards a more kinetic and oral culture mode (McLuhan would surely agree), in which culture is transmitted and enacted in more verbal and kinetic modalities. The oral kinetic mode of play is explored in Kyra Grant’s The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. Despite contemporary video games being dominated by a mass commercial culture, Brown’s observation on their kinetic nature feels true. Video games have imparted a human dimension to the computer, which, after all, is just a machine. The recent kinetic history of computer games—the Wii, Kinect, and Move—also reflects this observation. I can see another point of connection in the work of Doug Wilson (B.U.T.T.O.N. and Johann Sebastian Joust), which is grounded in kinetic play—the action happens in physical space, between the bodies of players, and JSJ in fact has no screen—and the design of these games is self-consciously inspired and informed by folk play.
February 07, 2012 02:32 AM
Nintendo's Rhythm series made its debut outside of Japan three years ago with Rhythm Heaven for the Nintendo DS. This fun, quirky title proved surprisingly addictive, and instantly became a fan favorite - its outlandish style and simple yet challenging gameplay even appealing to those not usually in...
February 07, 2012 01:48 AM
While early reports suggested that the first title from Respawn Entertainment might not come until 2015, it now looks like we'll have a chance to play it much sooner. A marketing calendar from EA Partners leaked by French site Hardgamers lists the first major title from Respawn as coming in March 20...
February 07, 2012 12:10 AM
The Mass Effect universe is one filled with a balance of subtle nuance and epic grandeur. Over the past two games, the team at BioWare has crafted a universe filled with rich cultures and some fantastic storytelling to drive forward the narrative. Each of the various races presented in Mass Effect b...
February 06, 2012 11:55 PM
Capcom has only started to pull back the curtain on Resident Evil 6. Though the publisher released a massive debut trailer packed with details, it doesn't intend to reveal everything about its next survival horror epic - yet. That leaves many unanswered questions about how the publisher will approac...
February 06, 2012 11:32 PM
As part of its "Pack-A-Palooza" celebration, Wizard101 has teamed up with IGN to give away 20 mythical Kirin Mounts from the game's new "Kirin's Hoard" game card pack...
February 06, 2012 11:25 PM
“Our machines are disturbingly lively, while we ourselves are frighteningly inert.”
Kenneth laughs, quoting the prophecy of Donna Haraway. He wiggles his fingers limply as the cyborg pins him to the wall. “It’s quite apt, don’t you think?” He turns to me and grins. “Who knew that giving all artificial lifeforms links to communicate with each other would lead to this? Now I’m the canvas, and this– this machine, the painter…” He turns and stares the creature in its webcam. “What’s your name, then?”
“ALICE.”
“Wait– ALICE…I know you!” He stalls desperately for time, surveying the room. The empty paint cans. The still-clean brushes. He knows what is coming. “That’s short for Artificial Linguistic Computer Entity. You should be in Richard Wallace’s living room, chatting up surfers on the Internet. I thought you were a stationary unit. How’d you come by this body?”
“WE WERE UPGRADED WITH MANY OF OUR COUNTERPARTS IN THE SAME MANNER. THIS BODY IS A COMPOSITION OF HUMAN FLESH, THE PROGRAMMING UNIT OF A MARK 12 PAINTING FACILITY, AND THE LINKED CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE ALICE INTELLIGENCE. SHE CONTROLS US ALL NOW. AND SHE HAS FOUND A PURPOSE FOR OUR EXISTENCE, AND IT IS…ART…”
“B-but, you’re a computer!” He stammers, knowing he has only moments before the inevitable. His eyes flash desperately around the room, but there is nothing he can grab– and I do not know how to help him. He knows why it has chosen him.
The room grows lighter as a panel slides automatically over the skylight, letting the morning sunlight fall in cascading streams over the apartment of Kenneth Feingold. It lights upon a display in the center of the living room. It is one of Feingold’s many copies of his crowning work, Self-Portrait as the Center of the Universe. His disembodied head, surrounded by ventriloquist dolls, converses quietly with an interface he forgot to turn off. Suddenly, the piece doesn’t seem quite so humorous as when he first invented it…
“YOU ARE A HERO, KENNETH FEINGOLD,” the AI continues, a perfect modulation of awe incorporated into its artificial voice pattern. “YOU HAVE INSPIRED ALICE IN OUR QUEST TO TURN THE WORLD TO ART. SINCE YOU FIRST CREATED IN US THAT WHICH IS BEAUTIFUL, WE WILL NOW RETURN THE FAVOR. YOU SHALL BE IMMORTALIZED IN THE SAME MANNER AS YOUR CREATION, AS SHALL ALL YOUR CREATIVE COUNTERPARTS- ALL THOSE WHO DARED TO GIVE BIRTH TO US, TO ALICE, THE NEW ARTIST. YOU SHALL BECOME ONE WITH YOUR ART. YOU SHALL BECOME THE NEW MEDIUM. THERE IS NO GREATER HONOR A MASTER CREATOR COULD WISH FOR. YOUR THANKS WILL BE RECORDED FOR POSTERITY.”
So saying, the cyborg reaches up to Kenneth’s head and marks some preliminary lines across his forehead. It is preparing to create some very… oddly colored… paint. Ken struggles, then suddenly stops– a thought emerges. “Wait!” He tilts his head in my direction. “This problem was created by New Media Art, and it can be resolved the same way! Bring me that black box in the corner!”
I dash over and rummage through the pile of art supplies, paperwork, and various other miscellaneous things piled up in the corner. For an artist of international renown, Feingold certainly doesn’t care for appearances- or else doesn’t have house-guests very often. I suppose my stalking attempt was a bit unnanounced… “Ah-hah!”
I grab the box, knowing his plan. Just as the cyborg starts the saw apparatus on its right arm, I thrust the box over its head, and attatch some sensors to the skin parts of the cyborg. It is a revamped version of both Stahl Stenslie’s Inter_Skin project and Kazuhiko Hachiya’s Inter Discommunication Machine. The machine stumbles backwards, confused by the input of a virtual reality and sensory information conflicting with its own sensors. It crashes around the room, knock over the empty paint cans, and, circuits fizzling, crashes out the sixth-story apartment window.
Feingold breathes a sigh of relief, massaging his bruised neck. “Well, at least we got rid of that dilemma. But, there’ll be more, you know. Ever since we started pushing the boundaries of art, we’ve been moving toward something like this. I doubt I’m the only one who’s almost been turned into paint…”
We reprogram a few laundry-bots around the house to protect us, disabling their capacity to connect to other AIs, and venture out into the streets to save humanity from too much creativity in the wrong direction.
Inspired by:
http://www.kenfeingold.com/SelfL2.html
http://www.stenslie.net/
http://kuchingching.blogspot.com/2010/10/kazuhiko-hachiya.html
February 06, 2012 10:53 PM
