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

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