Smarter than you

Are you going to write about this?

It’s a bit of a shadow. I was gesturing with my notebook for some reason at the ARTery on Saturday, at a art-show party (it’s not clear if it was an opening or a one-night show—the Facebook event didn’t say). One of the artists didn’t want me to—I sort of understand; there was some terrible stuff. I might be breaking my word; I don’t remember how I responded. I do remember Kristy saying “do it, do it”.

One of the first things I wrote for Vue Weekly back in 2009 was about a show co-curated by Amelia Aspen, whose drawing is up on the wall this week. I didn’t like it very much and I flatter myself with the idea that there were some ruffled feathers about it. Small circles. Lots of people have asked me if I am writing now though. Or planning on it. I tell them I don’t know—that goes for lots of other questions about the moment too. “We’ll see.” It’s nice when they are enthusiastic.

I thought about it a lot when I first got to Glasgow, assumed that that’s what I would be doing. But it didn’t seem as necessary. I spent lots of time at work complaining about The Skinny, being slightly awkward because of small circles that I hadn’t seen all of. I never met the arts editor/main writer for them (their problems go way deeper though—it would have taken some dramatic format changes to improve), I don’t remember if I slagged his writing in conversation with Jac who writes for them sometimes. But there were lots of writers working in different categories, especially all of the “creative” stuff. I miss it.

I still smile when I think about Edmontonian reactions were to Scott Rogers writing in the Glasgow house style for our show. I never saw the show, it was when I was covering at Latitude 53 “for a couple of weeks” from a distance.

This year was going to be different though, that was the plan: I was sort of comfortable with the place, maybe enough to write too. Before I figured out that I was being an artist I was awkwardly trying to find a justification to write, but I think I just needed some time.

This weekend it sounds like I’m missing a lot of good stuff over there.

Edmonton’s dirty spring is in full swing.

At the ARTery I had another conversation. The space is changing, new owners, who knows what. We talked about how it kind of sucked for visual art anyway, I don’t think it’ll be remembered for that. But I fell into talking about my subject two weeks ago: those complaints of inaccessibility in Vancouver. At least it makes people aim high, I said. Because in poor edmonton they just get Curtis Ross to put up some drawings for some reason. There was something in there about the danger of curating your friends too: “We Are The Golden West” is just some people, you know. I don’t know why you would put up a show if you didn’t want people to talk about it. And if they’re talking, why shouldn’t they write?

That post two weeks ago: someone described it as very Edmonton. I don’t know what to say; I’m aware of something about what I’m performing, partly naïveté. I go back and forth about what it means, though. I miss the feeling of having peers who you can see are working on the same stuff as you but are a little bit ahead (this makes me sound like an asshole).

I just don’t feel very attached here right now. I’m waiting for the summer, I guess—that seems silly though, too. I should make up my mind. I procrastinate about sending applications. But it’s hard to put in the investment to write when I know I’m going to be disappointed, like I have been at almost every show I’ve gone to see here this spring. I actually couldn’t bear to write an article about “We Are The Golden West – New Work Art Exhibition”, or any of the stuff I saw tonight at another artist-run centre. It’d be awful. So everybody sort of wanders about without committing to anything except for complaining about how outrageous it is that the Wildrose party seems to be exactly what we all expected it to be what a surprise. Small circles.

The best bit was the part that felt like a secret.

It seemed like a pretty sad way for the ARTery to go out, anyway.

• ↩
• 1 month ago
• 2 notes
• Edmonton
• Review
• Art
• Melancholy
• Glasgow

Dirt City¦Dream City

Dirt City¦Dream City is a collaborative effort with fourteen of Edmonton’s most talented artists and artist/curator Kendal Henry to create site-specific public artworks throughout the Quarters district. These collaborations will delve into the past, look to the future, wallow in the grit and radiate in the sometimes-hidden beauty that is alluring and unique to the Quarters to conceive provocative and innovative public interventions. These celebratory and challenging works can be experienced this summer between July 20 and July 30, 2012 throughout the Quarters Downtown.

Open house: May 5th at the ARTery, 12–5. With Kendal Henry and artists Aaron Paquette, Adam Waldron-Blain, Andrew Buszchak, Carly Greene, Destiny Swiderski, Emily Van Driesum, Holly Newman, Jackson McConnell, Jes McCoy, Jill Stanton, Mackenzy Albright and Rachelle Bowen, Matt Prins, Nickelas Johnson and Tiffany Shaw-Collinge.

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• 1 month ago
• 8 notes
• CV
• Edmonton
• Art

An invitation (and warning)

On Sunday I am going to start an open-table game of Dungeons and Dragons (ish). At the Empress ale house, 7pm (a little late can be OK, spectators welcome as long as they are ready for me to trick them into actually playing). It is, in the words of one curious potential player, “a really really informal low key…D&D day”. It will hopefully continue on a weekly basis. There is no expectation of attendance, and if you are at all interested, dropping in occasionally is a totally good way to play.

Edmonton readers: maybe you should come? No experience preferred.

At the same time that I extend an open invitation (OK, I can handle 15 people probably, maybe even twenty, above that things get pretty tough), I want to lay a few things out. Some thoughts that I feel ready to explain for the first time. Perhaps to the kinds of people who I imagine/hope read this blog, this is an explanation for why I find D&D interesting as play and as part of my practice. But I’m also very conscious of the fact that my desire to run an open table is going to make my job hard, the part where I have to establish a safe space for play and direct the tone to allow the players to do interesting things.

Yesterday I tricked a bunch of people into rolling up characters—they were largely male gamer types to start with, some with a pretty good idea about what D&D meant to them, or even regular players. I want some of these people in my game. But I want more people who have no clue, because they have better ideas. My job is going to be preventing or managing culture clash, while still keeping the liveliness of conflicting expectations at the table. Here it is then, a warning: if you like D&D I hope you’ll think mine is better but it’s not what you expect.

D&D is fucked

Take a look—well, actually probably don’t—at this mess of a story-games thread in which “Gygaxian naturalism” (the principle, invented by one of D&D’s co-authors, that monsters should be in some way naturalistic, believable, possessing of ecosystems) leads to squicky situations like: oh yeah, of course all of these monsters live in “primitive” tribal societies as well as being inherently evil. Which is to say: Trouble with a capital T that rhymes with G that stands for Gygax.

The thread itself is an example of why these things are dangerous as much as the material it’s actually about. As it’s approaching godwin’s law, someone asks: why would Gygax write something fascist? and I have to say: because he was a disgusting fucking colonialist neo-con. Another story.

So this is an explanation of why I’m running D&D (not D&D), in a custom little rulebook that I assembled from open source documents and rewrote big sections of. Not only does it hark back to the early days when playing something someone had mimeographed was pretty normal (not that I remember such days), but because I am making a better game. I don’t think I’m being unreasonably pretentious here.

How am I escaping from the bro-world of published games, how have I dealt with this same dangerous subject, and how will I do even better in the future?

My game has a very simplified set of rules compared to currently published versions. It’s based on open designs from the “OSR”, a rough group of bloggers and players who approximate imaginary old versions of the game. Great. I’ve talked lots about this: increasing player agency by not codifying their options, exploring constructed authenticities, mixing in a little bit of modern story-game design junk, ritualizing play. What else?

The game, like its source material, is about travel and transformations. Unlike a lot of fantasy literature, we’re going to be clear about how that plays out: that literature has spent a lot of the last two hundred years erasing the fact that european folklore is as full of transgendered folk heroes, travel in other worlds, troublesome land spirits and terrible bargains as the folklores that we white people like to act all shocked about (oh my, “trickster figures”). That’s the good stuff.

I am thinking very hard about how to set up my games to enable players to challenge the narratives of “fantasy” as genre. I think I have some ideas beginning. Here are a couple of reflections:

• I mentioned above, twice, that my preferred method of recruiting players is via trickery. It’s very simple: the game is based around a powerful ritual of rolling the dice to test your vision of ordered narrative against the unpredictable group. More or that test in a minute. But I start by offering the dice. Once you’ve rolled a few stats—and even more once you’re shopping for equipment, you’re in. And you get to roll again and improvise desperately as soon as you bring that character into the game.

  But as I foreground this ritual I leave some parts out. I have not yet asked a player what gender their character is, despite this for some reason being a pretty common thing to see in a rulebook. Yeah, generally it results in yesterday’s situation: a bunch of people, then male, rolling up characters that are assumed to share their gender. But in Glasgow a female player was playing a dwarf of unspecified gender named Chad—and didn’t bother to even address in passing this conflict of expectation until well into the game. That’s nice. I won’t ask you to write anything down until it makes a difference, or until you chose to. This is part of why I am attracted to the simplest rules.

• In the Glasgow game, the first time the players discovered otherworldly creatures—goblins—there was a stop. Because fantasy literature trained them to see them as primitive people, and they didn’t want to be playing a game about genocide, thank goodness. I will fight Gygaxian Naturalism to my last breath. Here’s how it works:

  The player characters are necessarily people on the edge. Law and Chaos is necessarily trouble: the characters are neither of society nor of the wild, but are engaged in a kind of dialogue of colonialism on the edges of those two spaces, neither of which is actually very nice. That’s why they are magic. Monsters are a manifestation of this: in the rules they emerge spontaneously (“random encounters”) caused by nothing other than the player’s exploration. Unlike Gygax, I don’t see why this can’t be true in the fiction too. That’s what monsters are—the players’ characters are an aberration in the world that cause all kinds of trouble. “Heroes” in quotes like Bowie.

• The big one: when tough questions come up, it’s for the players to answer them. Where do monsters come from? Ask the cleric.

And where from there? Let’s play and find out.

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• 3 months ago
• 7 notes
• Games
• Edmonton

INTERNATIONAL ESPIONAGE EDMONTON

manhunt-edmonton:

SATURDAY 18 JUNE 2011, 2:00 PM

MEET BEHIND THE STANLEY MILNER LIBRARY

International Espionage is an exciting spy game about thwarted expectations and failures in communication, with water pistols.

You’re on a team. You’ve got a briefcase packed with secret documents and supplies, sealed hand-out assignments, a map, and a rendezvous to make - but double agents are everywhere, you don’t know what your opponents are trying to do, your group is disorganised, you don’t actually know what the supplies are for and you have only got an hour to straighten it out and win. Somehow.

You’ll have to take things into your own hands.

We played in Edmonton last summer and this year International Espionage went to IgFest, the Interesting Games Festival, in Bristol, England. Now it’s coming home with a few tweaks and improvements. Bring a water gun if you have one (we’ll have more on site) and come dressed as a spy for a special assignment.

Donations to help cover costs will be graciously accepted.

MEET BEHIND THE STANLEY MILNER LIBRARY, 2:00

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• 11 months ago
• from manhunt-edmonton
• 1 note
• Edmonton
• Games