Friday 11th of March. 7:00 pm. No.55 / The Wolf Game-Death by Hyperstress. Rodrigo B. Camacho
Performed by members of the MNE ( New Music Ensemble )
The book Rules of Play, Game Design Fundamentals, pretty much THE BIBLE for interactive system designers, quite simply defines a game as “a set of parts that interrelate to form a whole”. This is true for all games, but for some, the statement seems not to be completely accurate. In the case of emergent systems (i.e. cellular functions, a colony of ants, our own brain, urbanization, or society itself) the whole seems to “know” more than the parts.
THE WOLF GAME – DEATH BY HYPERSTRESS is Rodrigo B. Camacho’s own version of Dmitry Davidoff’s MAFIA (1986), a social emergent game, where an informed minority is created and dynamically set against a tense, uninformed majority.
As an intersectionist artist and creative researcher, Rodrigo uses this piece to problematize several issues at once: (1) intersemiotic translation processes, (2) social play, and particularly, the incentives for acting either in favour or against someone, (3) game-flow, engagement, and probability theories, (4) the emergent generation of relationships and the process of class-assumption, (5) symbolic violence, dominance and power maintenance processes, (6) governance and the tensions between the players and the game master’s predications.
In the end, we must always ask ourselves: “Is the narrator a bloody dictator?”
The “Bananagraph”. Rodrigo’s own understanding of how flow operates social games ( based on Mihaly’s “Flow Theory”)
Entry: Free / Donations welcomed