The Fluxus experimental art movement, a community of artists that emerged in the 1960s in the United States, informs contemporary experimental game design practices. In 1969, Alison Knowles described the Fluxus “event score” as a “one- or two-line recipe for action.” Though rarely described as games, these scores feel like invitations to social play. Ludic event scores have fallen out of fashion since their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. What, then, would such scores look like 50 years later in a culture where games are no longer a peripheral art form but culturally dominant? Instead of simply serving as precursors to contemporary video games, might speculative Fluxus event scores have something new to teach us about game-based worldbuilding?
This talk delves into an artist book project, Otherworldly Games: An Atlas of Possible Realities, which Jagoda has been composing in collaboration with designer and visual artist Sarah Edmands Martin. The book seeks to offer a response to precisely these questions by advancing the spirit of Fluxus in the 2020s. Otherworldly Games uses fictional game rule sets as a way of imagining alternative worlds and speculative realities. Through his analysis of contemporary games, and this practice-based project, he argues that ludic engagements have the potential to help us better understand ways that rules, laws, norms, and constraints demarcate spaces of the social and political, as they currently exist and could be otherwise. Throughout this analysis, Jagoda approaches games not only as entertainment objects or pastimes but as tools, techniques, and technologies for staging playful thought experiments.
Patrick Jagoda is the William Rainey Harper Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, English, and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Chicago. He is director of the Weston Game Lab, and co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab. Patrick’s books include Network Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016), Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020), and Transmedia Stories: Narrative Methods for Public Health and Social Justice (2022). Patrick designs transmedia, digital and analog games, including the climate change alternate reality game Terrarium (2019), which received the 2020 IndieCade award for the best Location Based and Live Play Design. He is a recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.