The Games We Play
From Bingo to an Exquisite Corpse, we start as kids and just keep playing.
If you are a regular or if you have just landed on Tarantula: Authors and Art, welcome. This year, we hope that our stories and the artists that we present will inspire you to start your own creative journey, and our house team of writers will join you on this ride. Our contributor, Karen Grace, an art teacher, historian, and lover of games has an old game for you to take a fresh look at! If a friend forwarded you this article, welcome; if you like it, share it or why not subscribe?
The first time I saw Marcus MÃ¥rtenson’s work, full of enticing bright colors and pop culture references, I was especially drawn in by his use of games. His piece, entitled Dungeon, gave me all the nostalgic vibes of Dungeons and Dragons from years ago but then I looked closer and some even stranger things came into view… among the pretend monsters with too many teeth and eyes, we also find real (and scarier) threats like cyber bullying, phishing, and identity theft.Â
I wandered over to his Surveillance Technology game, hoping for top hats and retro cars and there it was again… pop culture, with a twist. Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, and Google loom large on this board and what’s at stake is your privacy and individuality. The games aren’t playable (it would be wild if they were) but no matter, the whole point is that they’re rigged and none of us win. Mårtenson uses games that offer their own narratives and layers them with new stories waiting to unfold.
We tend to think of games as just play but they’re so much more than that. Baby wolves and foxes learn important hunting and survival skills from the games they play. Human children learn vast amounts from their own play and make believe, so I wonder, what do we teach with the games we play? And perhaps, what could we teach?
Games are enjoyable diversions but they also help us make sense of our world. They offer us a plethora of metaphors if we’re willing to look them in the eye. Politics, love, and war are all regularly described as nothing more than games. We respond so readily to games, perhaps because they ask players to take on a role or a premise and try it out to accomplish a goal. It’s super satisfying to complete a cycle, tell a story, or score some points and maybe even win. Be it chess, checkers, telephone, darts, or bingo games help us pass the time and try our luck. Modern life, with all its traps and pitfalls, rules, strategies, winners and losers can make a little more sense when seen as a game.
Because they’re so irresistible, we seem to gamify anything and everything we can. Games are in virtually every teacher’s toolkit, but these days I use Duolingo to work on my Swedish, libraries offer summer reading bingo, and don’t get me started on Wordle! Everything that wants a greater share of our attention (Starbucks, Kindle,…) wants us to try a game!
Since games are such powerful teaching tools of course they also can be used to enhance and grow creativity. Dungeons and Dragons accomplishes this with collaborative storytelling and world building. Charades lets you act it out and Pictionary encourages competitive quick scribbling. Surrealist artists in 1920’s France played a game they called the Exquisite Corpse to enjoy creating something unexpected together. It’s based on a word game called Consequences, where players string random phrases together into funky sentences, but instead players draw imaginary bodies adding to each other’s drawings without knowing what came before. Accessing the realm of dreams and the unconscious in this way led to some wild and outlandish creatures… apparently Frida Kahlo loved to make her contributions naked but it’s up to you I suppose.
To play Exquisite Corpse you just need paper and pencil for each player. (3 or 4 players is great) Fold the paper up into 3 or 4 sections according to how many players you have. In the first round each drawer starts in the top section drawing a head, of absolutely any variety they can imagine, being oh-so secretive. Maybe set a timer so the rounds are all the same length. Then you fold the page so the head is kept hidden and pass it to the next person for their contribution. If you’ve got 4 sections you can think head, shoulders, knees, and toes (or fins, or tentacles, or whatever you’d like!) In the end, after everyone’s had a turn, you reveal the completed images with tremendous fanfare and all have a great laugh together. No hotels or mortgages required!
Games, the great escape. I’ve already done WORDLE for today, while enjoying coffee and watching birds outside my window.😉