Minecraft Text Pack

Like many people, my initial experience with Minecraft involved first thinking, 'this game looks terrible!' and then coming up for air 48 hours later, charmed and hooked.

Many of my thoughts while playing have been about the relationship between the visual look and shape of the game, and its underlying structure. The blockiness, I think, is one of the keys to the game's satisfaction -- the system is simple enough to make any individual action predictable and satisfying, while being complicated enough to allow for grand schemes and emergent complexity.

For the most part, when I play, I mentally edit out the textures in the game to their symbolic meanings -- I don't care so much what dirt looks like, so long as I know it is dirt and understand its behaviors and relationships to other blocks and items.

But when I saw that people were playing with texture packs, I looked again at how I play. Would giving the game a different look make for a meaningfully different experience?

Most of the texture packs I downloaded attempt to make the textures look better without making them much different. A block of dirt that looks more dirt-like or matches a specific esthetic theme. Patches to support higher resolution blocks that look even more dirt-like.

At first I started (and am still in the process of) making a texture pack that is simply more visually appealing to my eye. But I still wonder how far the relationship between the look and the structure can be stretched. Is the game playable when stripped down to its symbolic meaning? Would it be feasible to add a drastically different system of narrative interpretation onto the same set of blocks and attendant behaviors and relationships?

As a first step, and to while away some of those London-is-shut-for-the-holidays hours, I made a text-based texture pack. Almost everything has been changed from an image into text on a white or transparent background.

It's still a bit rough around the edges, but it gets the idea across. As a side benefit, the image files themselves serve as a sort of cheat sheet for block IDs.

The shapes remain. The relationships remain. And it's (mostly) playable.


To install:
*Download TEXT.zip.
*Follow these instructions on the minecraft wiki.

The Three Houses

an alternate reality game for two players

The Three Houses is a highly immersive game designed for two players. It was played once in the winter of 2007. Developers and puppet masters included Michael Dory, Leah Gilliam, Kate Hartman, Adam Parrish, Ruth Sergel, Adam Simon, Daniel Soltis, Scott Varland, and Kyveli Vezani.

The game took place over a weekend in the streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Through solving verbal and physical puzzles and searching for hidden items, players uncovered aspects of their own and New York's history and decided how to respond to the developing story. Game elements included communication via email, phone, and letter; physical artifacts (including flowers and magic boxes); and live performance.

In addition to presenting a story, the game moved players through different relationships with each other and with the game itself. The players were initially led to believe that they were playing alone, and then that they were playing in opposition to each other. By talking outside of the clearly defined game activities, the players forged an alliance and ultimately abandoned the puppet masters' instructions (and supervision) and sought the game's conclusion together.

Rumpelstiltskin: an Artefactual Performance

developed with Adam Simon

This is as head-achingly academic as I've ever gotten. Rumpelstiltskin is a two-player, gesture-based video game in which players unknowingly act out a pantomime of the fairy tale "Rumpelstiltskin."

The game is built on a small stage, and players progress through the game by following screen prompts to perform various gestures. Each gesture, however, is part of a choreography, and (theoretically) by successfully playing the game the players also perform a story.













This game was a response to some topics I'd been thinking about that year -- boundaries between play and performance, and between intentional and incidental movements; social interactions within a game and between players and non-players; boundaries of public and private in the context of physical movement. I decided to take a head-on approach and throw all of it together into one monstrosity (while also having some fun with using Processing for color tracking).











I don't think it ever resulted in a coherent performance (in part because the story we chose was too complex), but it was a good avenue for looking at some of those topics--from performativity to how well people translate visual cues into body movements--in a writ-large context.

It was performed at the 2007 ITP Winter Show.

Competitive Picnicking

designed with Michael Dory, Adam Simon, and Scott Varland of Social Bomb.

Throw down your blanket! Will you end the day surrounded by friends and eating a delicious meal, or will you be invaded by ants and left stranded and hungry on the edge of the party?

Competitive Picnicking is a large multiplayer game of trading items and claiming territories, set on a big lawn on a sunny summer day and using food as game pieces. Players come to the picnic with the basic ingredients for lunch and play a culinary variant of go fish to assemble the highest-scoring snacks and sandwiches.

Competitive Picnicking has been played at the June 2008 Come Out and Play Festival in New York, NY, and the February 2009 Adelaide Film Festival in Adelaide, Australia, and it looks like the Indianapolis Theater Fringe Festival played a variant in August 2009.

Photos from NY and Adelaide: