Pawns Unite

Tournaments for Cooperation- a Tautology?

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Sun, 24 Apr 05 18:41:00 UT

Tournaments for Cooperation- a Tautology?

I'm starting to research possible approaches to building an online tournament facility for 3 Player Chess and for Mary Flanagan's [six.circles]. "an internet based, one or two player turn based networked game which explores the consequences of cooperation and competition through the construction of simple geometry objects."

These are the things that I'm currently considering:-

Graham Harwood of Mongrel saying a while back that it's an important role of the contemporary artist to test the limits of legality.

a correspondent in Minnesota said last year, "I also think that the "game " must have a real place in one's sense of fortune and fortunes. If it is too speculative, i.e. didactic, it floats off into the blue vacant space of inconsequence."

Critial Art Ensemble's textual explorations of the 'Body Without Organs' or the data body which is attached to each of us - a non-negotiable authoritarian body constructed of electronically stored personal data:including nationality, age, marital and financial status.

Heath and Kale are dealing with this in the Status Project "A relational database of personal legal status, labelling civilians and their dependencies, exploring âwhat it is to be a human being in the United Kingdom in terms of social economic law.â

--------------------------
These suggest to me that what I am searching for is a way to hack the mechanisms and communities of existing tournament facilities which strip back the gamer's identity to one figure to identify rank.

I am also looking for a way for players to negotiate the forms of their own existing data bodies in resistance to current enforced structures.

Preparations for Tournament at CCA

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Sun, 24 Apr 05 00:42:00 UT

Preparations for Tournament at CCA

Making preparations for the 3 Player Chess Tournament this weekend online and at the CCA in Glasgow.

I'm looking for an appropriate existing tournament system to use or to hack.
After a quick Google search on Chess Tournaments, this is the set of assumptions that I am starting out with.

Tournament systems are competitive mechanisms. They are very rarely authored. They do not credit their inventors. They have the authority of law. They determine and regulate the levels of competition between a community of players. They seek to balance the rewards for winners against the despair of the bad player to heighten the drama, sustain the tournament and to find the best man. Step on the head of the guy in front to get a look at the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Tournament systems promoted by groups like the US Chess Centre sell on the "sophistication" of their mechanisms.

"The USCF developed, and is constantly modifying, a sophisticated rating system for its members. By playing in tournaments, players earn a rating, which rises each time a player wins, and falls each time a player loses. The rating of the opponent is the major component of the formula."

The main elements are:

Rounds- a pre agreed number of games to be played by each player
Ratings- this affects pairings of players
Scoring - lose=0 draw=1/2 win=1
Byes and withdrawals- dealing with non-programmatic tendencies and Asymmetry in the group of players.
Tie-breaks- when players share the same scores
Awards ceremony- where every competitor receives some recognition but the winner receives the most

These elements are what influence the health of the chess players' data body.

Jim Andrews/Ruth Catlow net-art-games (3)

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Sun, 22 Aug 04 17:11:00 UT

Jim Andrews/Ruth Catlow net-art-games(3)

RC:... Yoko Ono's 'Play it by Trust', in which the board and the pieces are all white, was very much in my mind when I started this project. In my correspondence with chess players I have not heard a positive word spoken about this art work. It is treated as heretical. (Yoko's feminine subversiveness often seems to invoke this "witch!" response).

JA:
a little odd in that you'd think chess players would be interested to see what yoko had to say bout/with their game, given yoko's popularity. i didn't know yoko was into chess. googled yoko chess and got quite a bit of information. often, the fact that yoko enjoys chess is quoted as a kind of 'not just geeks play chess' thing. and that she gave a high school chess team in new york $2500 to go to a tournament. i saw a few graphics of her "play it by trust". it seems that it's had many manifestations over many years, which is interesting. the white board and pieces shows up in all sorts of different ways in her work, i gather.

RC...I find it ironic to be hacking a game that has been universally known and played for centuries by people of all ages and classes, just as it seems to be slipping out of popular culture.

JA:
hmm. perhaps it is slipping; i'm not sure. when i played the most chess was when i was living at a youth hostel during a winter in edmonton alberta. lots of people, not much money, so chess in the evenings was popular with some people. cheap and a little more cerebral than most of the other games like cribbage or whatever. met some fine folks from montreal this way. do you think chess is losing ground? could be, i guess. it seems there are so many more games these days. lots of computer games, that's for sure. but there's so much more of so many forms of entertainment and art, it seems. as though everything is less numerous by dint of overall diversity. kind of an explosion through various media. computers. the net. about ten years ago i wrote a ditty called 'the impossibility of the mere existence of the great works of the late twentieth century'. not that people aren't doing 'great'
work. but there's very little widespread awareness of any of it. and when awareness is widespread, it's about shania twain or some such corporate wanker. the more interesting work, well, there are pockets of awareness about it. corporate culture is very centralized and high profile, but a lot of the more interesting stuff is very decentralized, sort of like the net, erm, maybe more or less exactly like the net.
when i type 'free chess' into google i get a whole subculture (or something) back.

RC: What is your position relative to the culture of asteroids?

JA: ha, 'culture of asteroids'. it's a wasteland/black void i tell ya. when i was a kid, i enjoyed the arcade games, from pinball and other non-digital stuff to pong, space invaders, asteroids, tanks, and so on. and board games like risk, monopoly, yahtzee, battling tops, and especially table hockey (with the twist players). all of these are fun but philosophically and artistically somewhat thin.

RC: Adrian (who did the Flash programming for the game) and I did discuss making an AI version of 3 Player Chess but it was beyond the scope of what was possible at the time. If I was really serious about hacking the chess community on a grand scale, to activate cooperative strategising, I think that this would be the route that we would need to take. It would allow players to practice and devise strategies on their own, and get good at the game, before playing with others in a public arena, in order to avoid public humiliation. The one player game
http://www.low-fi.org.uk/rethinkingwargames/server/single.html does allow you to play against yourself, to get the hang of the new rules, but this isn't the same as honing your skills against a brighter than bright computer.

JA:i'm not sure the computer would have to be really well-programmed for a 1.0 of your 3 player chess. the game is sufficiently new to people that there are no expectations about level of play.

i would say the algorithm would be like so:

when computer moves, it examines each of its possible moves. if it can capture, it makes that move and stops examining possibilities. the game's over. if it can't capture at all, then how does it decide what move to make? the best moves are such that when computer moves, no matter how the human subsequently moves, there's a computer move that leads to capture. a configurable depth of recursive look ahead. good but not great moves are such that when the computer moves, most of the responses the human can make nevertheless lead to capture...so you develop a way to 'score' a move. it doesn't have to be really good. but it has to leave room for being improved upon, in the programming, down the road. so it just needs to be really modular in construction and capable of configurable depth of recursive look ahead. chess brings computers to grinding halts unless the look ahead is done fairly cleverly if there's going to be look ahead deeper than a few moves. but you wouldn't have to worry about trimming the tree in 1.0; just don't do much look ahead.

i programmed a game of tic-tac-toe once. this is a 'classic' game to program in that the look ahead is pretty simple and you can look ahead completely (ie, examine all the moves) without having to trim the tree cause it doesn't have the combinatorial oomph of a game like chess wherein you must trim the tree or you end up with as many possibilities as there are atoms in the universe sort of thing. it's very recursive programming. which is zen of coding or something. whenever the coding gets into trees, it gets recursive. and here we have decision trees.

anyway that's my hot air about the programming.

RC:
regarding 'the response from the writers has been mixed, like the response from most other groups that have responded in one way or another. some like the directions it takes poetry in (the battle of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness); others see it as negatively destructive of good things in literary realms.'

What were the 'good' things that they were referring to? the words as concrete objects?

JA:
readability of the text, for instance. they sometimes don't like the way it turns from readable to unreadable as you increase the level in game mode or, in play mode, increase the level or velocity or density. or they feel threatened by this. it is disconcerting for some writers to feel it slipping away from poetry to video game beneath their fingers. as though writing on the net was about email and blogs. that's part of it, of course, but these are generally quite printy.

also, poetry is not a game somebody wins. or is it? it *does* have that appearance and even that reality in certain ways, but there is a certain level at which poetry is antithetical to simple notions of winning and losing. things like poetry competitions and awards and even the list communications paradigms of the 'knockout punch' eryk mentioned on empyre recently about lists...there's so much either overt or covert competition going on in art matters, quite a lot of rhetoric and competition. so that it would be funny to make some arteroids texts that dramatized this aspect of poetical culture. like the green text could be the names of poets from one 'camp'/'school', the blue text could be their critical buzzwords, and the identity could be a different 'camp'/or school with which the first camp 'wars'. Or an individual's name. or some publication...

or, erm, the green text could consist of the names of a few lists and the names of people on the green lists; the blue text could consist of the names of a few other lists and names of people on those lists; and the id entity could be some concept assailed by both the blue and the green...

>> I find this kind of literalism (or is it religiosity?) funny and a bit
>> scary. It reminds me of an email I got about Rethinking Wargames from a
>> maths professor in the States who said 'War is not a game Ruth'

ha. right, war isn't a game, but it is a game in all too many senses for all too many people not getting shot. a computer game or a political game for dickheads like bush...in fact war is the fundamental sort of conflict usually involved in competitive games. poetry is not a game either. but it is a game in so many ways, also.

RC:
...What I like about Arteroids is that it invites the player to activate their own poetic sensibility in a way that is separate from a self-conscious fetishisation of the 'Poet'.

JA:
yeah, you gotta be willing to take a drubbing by words gone wild. like email on a crazy list. or a literalization of the figurative observation that, when writing, you struggle with words, they have 'minds of their own'.

thread from NetBehaviour

linda reinfeld:japanese poetic game- Jim Andrews

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Sat, 21 Aug 04 17:16:00 UT

linda reinfeld's game exploring japanese poetic form- jim andrews

another game i have enjoyed is made by linda reinfeld from new york. she is a poet and has a serious interest in the japanese language and in japanese culture. she made a translation of a traditional japanese literary game called the hundred poems. i have played this with an old friend after dinner. he has an interest in poetry. each poem is a couplet of lines, erm, tankas, i think. there are all sorts of ways to play the game, but we do it like this: you see the first line of 20 tankas on the left on 20 cards spread out so you can read them all (one line per card); you see the second
and final line of each of the 20 tankas on the right (one line per card). when it is your turn, you select a pair of cards, one from the left and one from the right, that you think go together to form a tanka. you can tell when two cards are from the same tanka by the reverse side of the cards: the two cards can go together to form one photographic image. if you're right that the two cards form one tanka, you keep the two cards. the game is over when all 40 cards have been removed from the table. the person with the most cards at the end of the game wins.

it's fun to play this with someone else who has an interest in poetry. it's civilized. my friend made it. we don't care who wins. the pleasure is in coming to some understanding of the coherance of the traditional tanka form, how two lines go together. and he and i are evenly matched, an old pair of lines. tanka you. o no, tanka *you*. we talk about our choices and about the
form and particular content of the poetry as we discover it. it is a gracious and poetical game, an uplifting experience both because of the learning about poetry that takes place with friends and the contemplation of the poems. there is a competitive aspect to it but the competitive aspect is overshadowed by learning about japanese poetry together and talking about it together. it is one of the few games i know of that is an uplifting experience where you feel you have learned something worth learning, and experienced something together of art worth experiencing together. i have thought of making a shockwave version of this game, but i think the social aspect of it, playing with other people, is a crucial ingredient. playing it
alone on the net would be a pale shadow of the more social activity, and playing it with strangers over the net would be kind of contrary to the experience. linda has put together a nice package, also. the materials are artistically realized and practical and easy to use. i've played a couple of other art card games, one from eno i think, and stephen scobie, maybe bp
Nichol also. but linda's is memorable and uplifting whereas the others seemed arbitrary.

rule by not ruling- Jim Andrews

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Sat, 21 Aug 04 13:14:00 UT

rule by not ruling- Jim Andrews

i have an avalon hill game called the origins of world war ii. this is a game of diplomacy. i only ever managed to get a group together to play it once and the results were amusing. one of the players was a buddhist with a drinking problem. the buddhist was britain. the buddhist played for a few turns but drank himself into unconsciousness well before the game ended. so we took turns managing britain's tokens. consequently, nobody paid much attention to britain. britain 'won', and world war ii was averted. when britain/the boozing buddhist regained consciousness, i shook my head and told him that he had won the game. "well, yes, rule by not ruling," he said.

Jim Andrews/Ruth Catlow net-art-games (2)

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Thu, 19 Aug 04 16:52:00 UT

Jim Andrews/Ruth Catlow net-art-games (2)

JA:how would you describe your 'position' relative to the 'culture' of chess?

RC: I've known the game as a perpetual beginner for as long as I remember and have played sporadically with family and friends. After my recent immersion in the game I now know to call myself a wood-pusher;-)

When I was commissioned to turn Rethinking Wargames from a thought experiment into a multiplayer, online game I knew I would need to understand the game more closely in order to change the rules in a way that would present an alternate peace-promoting strategy whilst retaining the drama of the original. It also needed to retain its inherent chessness.

I was always attracted to its aura as a game; all the things you mention, the integration of its metaphors into our language and culture. Many parables and tales in western and eastern cultures back
through the centuries draw on chess as a universally familiar model of hierarchical and military society and I guess that this is why it is such a gift to artists. It is able to convey very complex metaphorical structures so that small changes to the rules of play are able to easily convey a depth of consequence. I documented a lot of these kind of discoveries in the project blog as part of the research for the new game.

I witnessed a couple of games of simultaneous chess (where champions play 20 people at a time) at the Art of Chess exhibition and tournament at Somerset House in 2003. It made my mind melt, literally, to try to begin to comprehend how moves were decided. I find chess a very masculine game (there are very few "GrandMistress" chess players) with religious overtones and as such I respect it's fantastic structure and complexity and historical tradition and despair of the conservatism and the refusal of related concerns by its keener players (obviously I'm generalising here-in the hope that I will be proved wrong;) . Yoko Ono's 'Play it by Trust', in which the board and the pieces are all white, was very much in my mind when I started this project. In my correspondence with chess players I have not heard a positive word spoken about this art work. It is treated as heretical. (Yoko's feminine subversiveness often seems to invoke this "witch!" response).

There is an interesting comparison between my chess game and your Arteroids in that I've recently realised (when presenting the project to 18 year old VI Form students) that lots of people under the age of 25, in this country no longer even know the layout of the board or the basic moves of chess any more, I guess since the advent of shoot em up computer games. I find it ironic to be hacking a game that has been universally known and played for centuries by people of all ages and classes, just as it seems to be slipping out of popular culture.

How would you anwer the same question. What is your position relative to the culture of asteroids?

Reading some of the references you gave for articles about Arteroids, led me to think about some of the key differences between our games. Interesting that in Chess, the player plays God, controlling the pieces from a safe distance, whereas in Asteroids the virtual body of the player is under direct attack and the issue of personal survival is felt more keenly in relation to kinesthesic response- a racing heart a sweaty brow- all as a kind of identification with the physical metaphor of the star-ship Not to say that I haven't worked up plenty of sweats in Chess with that sensation of impending defeat due to the comparative failure of my own personal cognitive ability.

JA:
arteroids, like your 3-player chess, is an attempt to create an actually playable game while also hopefully being an art thang that has something to say about gaming, art, and play. it appeals to some people and not to others. some people like the game-play, some don't. some like the conceptual parts, some don't. some people like the literary aspect, some don't.

i think these sorts of projects take a few years to 'play out'.

RC:
I have really enjoyed playing Arteroids- it conveys something beautiful and disturbing about the relation between destruction and creativity, chaos and complexity. There is something so horrid about those word chunks floating through space that it is very satisfying to blast them apart into much more aesthetic arrays of letters. I quickly preferred the 'play' mode to 'game' mode. It's great to be given permission to destroy and create in the same space and to hover somewhere between amusement, reverie and critical engagement. It's a new kind of space isn't it?

JA:
the response from the writers has been mixed, like the response from most other groups that have responded in one way or another. some like the directions it takes poetry in (the battle of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness); others see it as negatively destructive of good things in literary realms.

RC:
What were the 'good' things that they were referring to? the words as concrete objects?

I find this kind of literalism (or is it religiosity?) funny and a bit scary. It reminds me of an email I got about Rethinking Wargames from a maths professor in the States who said 'War is not a game Ruth!'

What I like about Arteroids is that it invites the player to activate their own poetic sensibility in a way that is separate from a self-conscious fetishisation of the 'Poet'.

One of the great things about games is that they allow you to suspend 'real world' values and morality in order to try out different styles, stances and strategies with no immediate danger to anything but your ego. They allow you to substitute the necessarily utilitarian, social-consensus morality of the every-day with a personal imaginal morality. This is very valuable.

JA: your project seeks to affect thought and attitudes concerning chess and militarism;

RC:I'd say more specifically that it sets out literally to affect change in people's behaviour, on and off the game-board;-)

JA:....at least in arteroids, it seems to me that there are some irreconcilables. there is intersection between game and art (in the notion of 'play'),butthere is also conflict between them (competitive/non-competitive, for instance).

RC:If one is a competitive person (which I suppose I am) then any environment can lend itself to the expression of one's competitive nature. One personal motivation for embarking on this project was to find some way of ameliorating my own competitiveness. Looking around the world at the destructiveness of unchecked competition I wanted to discover what it was for, what its function was. I discovered that competition only really becomes a viscious, ugly, destructive problem if competitive entities are working within a zero-sum model of the world, ie with the idea that there are finite resources that have to be won or stolen from another because there is not enough to go round. Robert Axelrod's books 'The Evolution of Cooperation' and 'The Complexity of Cooperation' provided very useful resources on various models of cooperation. http://www.journalscape.com/pawns_unite/2003-09-03-11:28

threads from NetBehaviour list

Jim Andrews/Ruth Catlow - net-art-games (1)

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Thu, 12 Aug 04 15:18:00 UT

Jim Andrews/Ruth Catlow- net-art-games (1): NetBehaviour

Last night, Furtherfield held a live online interview with Andy Deck in VisitorsStudio, a multiuser arena for live multimedia art events.

We discussed:-
1)the importance of artists cultivating a political awareness and taking a political stance in their work.
2)Visiting Artists, collective authorship and activating audiences.
3)war sim games and the potential to create counter-narratives against the corporate driven war inevitability myth.

Jim Andrews of vispo.com and creator of Arteroids, a shoot-em-up art game which he describes as 'the battle of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness' participated in the discussion that followed.

This discussion has since migrated to the NetBehaviour list

JA:
the group [those attending the Andy Deck interview] also talked a bit about games, addiction, the psychology of commercial games, and ruth mentioned that it would then be appropriate to tap into that psychology with hacktivist tactics. would be interested in hearing more about that, ruth.

RC:
I guess I was thinking about my own approach with Rethinking Wargames, a participatory net art project in which I worked with others to develop new rules for online, 3 Player Chess.
This chess hack retained an intensely competitive element whilst redrawing the game's hierarchical structure with metaphors of
grass-roots cooperation as a collective peace-promoting strategy. Rather than creating a game that would preach to the converted and appeal tohippies and peaceniks, I wanted to attract and manipulate the minds of alpha-type gamers committed to the virtues of strategic thinking, competition and winning- to change the way their synapses fired.

This project has had limited success so far in its hactivist aims because of a factor that I hadn't reckoned with- the apparently tightly knit, change resistant, status conscious and hierarchical nature of chess-playing communities. The new game has (predictably I suppose)found much more success with less advanced players.

JA:
my experience with chess is from an earlier stage of my life. i browsed a book or two on it over the course of a few years. mainly out of curiosity about the history and the nature of the game. though also to improve as a player. have you played much chess, ruth? i suspect you have. how would you describe your 'position' relative to the 'culture' of chess?

chess seems different from a lot of games that perhaps require similar skills in that it has quite a rich history to it in western art. chess has been used so much metaphorically in works of art, and much of the terminology is part of the language: 'pawn'; 'end game'; 'check mate', for instance. and it is phrased in terms of western national power structures that go back to christian medieval times: 'king', 'queen', 'rook', 'bishop', 'knight'. some people enjoy the historical aura and lore of the game, the'noble and clever warrior' attitude of it.

in other words, it seems like the static nature of the game is part of the appeal to many people. tradition. monarchy. religion.

your project is interesting to me. much of what you say resonates with me in my efforts to create a somewhat related game: arteroids

arteroids, like your 3-player chess, is an attempt to create an actually playable game while also hopefully being an art thang that has something to say about gaming, art, and play. it appeals to some people and not to others. some people like the game-play, some don't. some like the conceptual parts, some don't. some people like the literary aspect, some don't.

i think these sorts of projects take a few years to 'play out'.

arteroids has been published on quite a few art sites. and also a game site. i'd like to get it published on more game sites. i've worked on it off and on for three years. it's at version 2.6 now. recently 2.6 was shown in a gallery in los angeles called machine gallery.
and the texts are by Christina McPhee and Helen Thorington. It had its own machine and a projector. i gather that went well. apparently on opening day, a class of 7 year-olds trouped in and they liked Arteroids. Was glad to hear it. This is the first time any of my stuff has been shown in agallery. Also, I've published a few articles on Arteroids here and there on the Web. A while ago I wrote something for poemsthatgo when they did something on literary games and featured arteroids and some other literary games. And there are a couple of books coming out, one from the usa on computer games and art, that will include a new essay i've written about play games art and arteroids; the other book is from the uk/france on video games and art.

the response from the writers has been mixed, like the response from most other groups that have responded in one way or another. some like the directions it takes poetry in (the battle of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness); others see it as negatively destructive of good things
in literary realms.

your project seeks to affect thought and attitudes concerning chess and militarism; arteroids seeks to affect thought and attitudes concerning poetry and games and, to a lesser extent, militarism, though that is present also. the realms of poetry are not as inflexible as the realms of chess, but i've certainly experienced resistance. goes with the territory, i guess.

your piece, like arteroids, is, to a certain extent, at odds with itself. you create a competitive game that someone wins. yet you also make that process much more progressive than the normal game of chess. poetry is not a game somebody wins (though lordy look at all the jockeying for attention).
so i built in a 'game mode' and a 'play mode' because some of the features i wanted to create were appropriate to a competitive environment and some weren't. also, arteroids contains a gun. what to do with that aspect of shooting and destroying things?

at least in arteroids, it seems to me that there are some irreconcilables. there is intersection between game and art (in the notion of 'play'), but there is also conflict between them (competitive/non-competitive, for instance). i figured that some of the conflicts are irreconcilable and so arteroids explores such conflicts rather than seeking to resolve them. i'm not sure what your feeling is in that way concerning your project, ruth.

AgoraXchange- Make the game, Change the world

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Sat, 3 Apr 04 01:48:00 UT

Manifesto
Recreate the State!

'Our present political institutions are not natural or inevitable, but an experiment gone awry, a utopia for the paranoid. We seek collaborators for bringing an end to the system of nation-states, the demise of rules rendering us passive objects tied to identities and locations given at birth. We call on all communities of and for the imagination, for creative thinkers and visionaries, including citizens, activists, artists, scholars, political leaders, and the stateless, to eliminate those laws requiring us to live and be seen largely as vessels for ancestral identities. We seek to develop in agoraXchange and elsewhere laws that will privilege creativity, empathy, and freedom.'

agoraxchange.net

liscenced under a creative commons liscense

hmmm

EOAE vs FOAF- Rc

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Sun, 4 Jan 04 23:49:00 UT

EOAE vs FOAF

I've been thinking about community building in the physical and virtual realms and infiltration in relation to the combative chess community.

EOAE
Acronym for enemy of an enemy, built on the idea that my enemy's enemy would be my friend if my enemy could only be induced to release the appropriate information.

Antonym:FOAF friend of a friend. I feel sure that this a new form of software enabled community database just waiting to be created.

Your game is a gedanken-experiment- charles cameron's chess

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Tue, 23 Dec 03 20:21:00 UT

Your game is a gedanken-experiment- Charles Cameron's chess

I don't know if I told you, but the other day at the bus stop I was thinking that two ranks of pawns will always have a tough time defeating two rows of power pieces.
This led me to the thought that any newly designed chess variant will inevitably need its forces to work with one another in an appropriately "balanced" manner, and that tweaking the powers of those forces (adding or subtracting features like the pawn > queen transofrmation, or the castling power of rooks and kings) will almost certainly be needed to assure this balance.

What this means to me:

Your game is a gedanken-experiment about the nature of conflict. Its balance may need to be "tuned" for extended play -- but the notion embodied in the experiment is clear even if no playing is ever done. Your opening board, in a sense, says more than actual played instances ever can...

It's the intentional analogy with life that carries the strength of your idea.

*

And so to an experiment of my own, still at the bus stop, intended not so much for play as for the suggestion of moral agents acting at cross purposes to both sides of a conflict...

I wondered what a chess game would be like if the bishops on both sides were out in front of their pawns at startup, and if the rules specified that the player whose turn it is must first see if either of his bishops can intervene in such a way as to avoid the loss of a piece currently in threat -- regardless of which side the piece thus saved is on -- and make that move is one exists. And only if no piece is in threat may the player chose a ("normal") move with the intent of winning the game...

Bishops thus functioning as moral agents, cutting across battle lines in pursuit of a goal that is perhaps pacifist or at least Red Cross like...

*

Phase 3 of Rethinking Wargames/ Infiltration Strategies- RC

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Mon, 22 Dec 03 17:24:00 UT

Phase 3 of Rethinking Wargames

Plans are being devised for 2004 to infiltrate the international chess playing community on and offline with the rules of the new game. The idea is to spread new peace-promoting, non-heirarchical models of organisation and success embedded in the new game by changing the way clever chess players' synapses fire. Current thoughts and suggestions include:-

building an open online community, where players of the new game can compete in a programme of international online tournaments, compare strategies, propose and implement improvements to the game.
work with Hostel and the San Francisco Homeless Coalition to establish a tournament with the street people of the city who already have a strong tradition of playing chess in the open.
work with brooklyn-based artist, Sharilyn Neidhardt to stage a human chess game in a city of our choice. The first game of this form (based on conventional chess) took place in may on the lower east side of Manhattan.
running art workshops about cooperation with school chess clubs both on and offline.
enlist the support for the project of a couple of International Grand Masters- utilising the role of reputation in the conventional chess community.
get the new game reviewed on the respected variant chess platforms.

You never know we may have world peace by this time next year!

as always, mail me with other suggestions.

Art Works as Organic Communication Systems- Anna Couey

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Mon, 15 Dec 03 13:02:00 UT

Finding some time to go back through the pile of unread emails - found a reference to Anna Couey, posted to Rhizome Rare on 5 Nov 2003. A Google search turned this up.

Art Works as Organic Communication Systems
Anna Couey

The creative use of networks makes them organisms. The work is never in a state of completion, how could it be so? Telematique is a decentralising medium; its metaphor is that of a web or net in which there is no centre, or hierarchy, no top nor bottom. It breaks the boundaries not only of the insular individual but of institutions, territories and time zones. To engage in telematic communication is to be once everywhere and nowhere. In this it is subversive. It subverts the idea of authorship bound up within the solitary individual. It subverts the idea of individual ownership of the works of imagination. It replaces the bricks and mortar of institutions of culture and learning with an invisible college and a floating museum the reach of which is always expanding to include new possibilities of mind and new intimations of reality.

-Roy Ascott

The communities engendered via computer networks are organisms. Like physical communities they evolve and are influenced and defined through user participation. Like physical organisms, the extent of their impact on the ecosystem depends on their interaction with other organisms. Creative use of computer networks implies, from a user standpoint, experimentation with forms of communication and user interaction. From a systems standpoint, creative networking involves investigations into levels of user interaction in virtual space, community building and cross-pollination, or the creation of links between previously disparate communities. As organic communications systems, telematic art can initiate previously unknown behaviors and, over time, create operative new realities. Its meaning lies not in what it is (identity or objectification), but in what it effects. (continued)

Published in Connectivity: Art and Interactive Telecommunications, a special issue of Leonardo (Vol. 24, No. 2) edited by Roy Ascott and Carl Eugene Loeffler, 1991.
© 1991 ISAST

Nice work on the chess- Ben Godfrey

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Thu, 4 Dec 03 13:30:00 UT

Nice work on the chess. I played a game between three different incarnations of myself manifested through three tabs in my browser. Nothing crashed, nothing broke at all, no errors or unexpected behaviour. Thumbs up!

In terms of the gameplay I got into a situation where my pawn player wasn't getting many turns from the flipping. This meant that the big guns for my other two players were trapped on the back row. I played around with my knights for a bit until I got enough turns to move out the pawns. As a pawn tactic I suspect that this is a very good way to stop the warring factions from moving in on each other. It's basically a free and well policed DMZ.

I'm always online due to work issues, let me know when you're around and I'll be up for a game.

How is life treating you otherwise?

Ben

Anti-noise sculptor's stragegies to engage chess grandmasters- Ann Ros�n

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Tue, 2 Dec 03 00:24:00 UT

Anti-noise stragegies to engage chess grandmasters

Ann Rosén is a Swedish sound sculptor who we met at Teks' excellent Trondheim Matchmaking conference. She has been working collaboratively with artists, scientists, researchers and architects on a project to create volumes of sculpted silence in noisy public spaces using anti-noise; sensory subtraction in real space.

She suggested some excellent strategies to engage the interest of conventional chess players in 3 Player Chess. She suggested a number of things but the thing that stuck in my head was that I should invent another name for the "chance" spin of the coin. After I had described the exasperation expressed by the few chess players that I have managed to lure to the new game, she suggested that I imply that there was another level to the game, that there was a hidden algorithm in the spin of the coin- even give the secret pattern a name, challenging the grandmasters to solve it.

ha ha, this is a fantastic idea!- Ruth

Helen, played Activate:3 Player Chess from Wellington, New Zealand

ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org — Sun, 30 Nov 03 00:17:00 UT

Helen, played Activate:3 Player Chess from Wellington, New Zealand

Last night Helen, played Activate:3 Player Chess from Wellington, New Zealand for the launch of the game in Limehouse, London UK. This was her comment

"it was fun : ) thanks! i only figured out towards the end that the strategy for the pawns is actually to block your own colour pieces - which is quite a good metaphor for world peace, i think - eg people need to make sure their governments are doing what they really want them to, & get out on the streets if they're not ... now we just have to sell this concept to the americans ..."

Helen Varley Jamieson