Becoming a Spider

+ photo by: automania

Justyna and Clara successfully transformed a corner of our classroom into an interesting spider-maze web. Their no-technology game consisted in a maze of intersecting glow in the dark strings that had to be crossed by each team member, without him/her touching the strings (the first time, one way to pick up an object at the other side and then back again to the starting point). The group that was able to perform this in the least amount of time won the game. I appreciated how they came up with a game that was very simple and very adaptable to any space. The interaction limited the user into a strange space that made him/her hyper aware of their own body. This space changed depending if you where outside or inside of it, which created an interesting interaction dynamic. The solution they came up with of attaching bells to some strings to tell by their sound if a team-player had touched a string, gave the whole game a magical touch. As well, the idea of not having every string sound was very interesting (although I believe it needs to be expanded upon). I was very interested in the fact that their starting point was numbers and for this, I think that this game would benefit from a process of investigation of numbers systems, spider webs, etc.. so it could eventually have a true system of its own and not just a random arrangement (although they had a number grid it seemed as though it was more random than not). Scott Pobiner, the guest critic for our class mentioned the importance of consciously determining what the objects that each team player had to bring back where. I believe that this is a key point to give some type of second level meaning to this game (perhaps some type of "inner narration"). I see in this game a lot of potential. I think that Justyna and Clara would benefit from gaining control of all the beautiful details of their game that came about unconsciously. Once acknowledged, this details, can be given a specific purpose and control that could make this game more interesting.

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