Futuromania: Playing with Death
Heather’s research seeks to investigates video game mechanics and moves that represent death. Their work points to how these moves entangle and resonate with our current cultural responses to death and with the necropolitical horizon. Heather hopes that their research might identify some strategies for how games might encounter death that prompt its refamiliarization.
My research investigates the moves and mechanics of death in videogames, identifying how a pervasive culture of alienation resonates with and is reflected in the designed operations of gameplay. One facet of my research is the exploration of the ways in which games have the potential to enable strategies to refamiliarize death through playful encounters. Futuromania is a table-top board game that I have designed to speculate upon the potential for games to foster player engagement with death. Futuromania is a tool for further thinking; players are encouraged to use the scaffolding of the game – in which the players are asked to design a kind of collage of words – to support their own meaning making. As such, it is not fully completed unless it is played with by someone who will lead and own the experience. While based on Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, which was written by Barthes after the loss of his beloved mother, my design intentions are to support player interpretation of their own personal relationship with death. The limitations imposed by Barthes’ words are designed to encourage imaginative disruption.
‘as soon as someone dies, frenzied construction on the future (shifting furniture etc): futuromania’
27 October 1977
On Mourning Diary
Following the death of his mother, Henriette Binger (1893-1977), French philosopher Roland Barthes, began a mourning diary, allowing him to turn his chaotic and overwhelming grief into written expression. Despite Barthes’ concern that he not ‘make literature’ out of his mother’s death, Michael Wood (2011) notes, ‘Barthes worries about words, finds metaphors’. In Mourning Diary, Barthes dissects the language around death and grief and considers he relationship it has to death in the modern cultural imagination. I argue that Mourning Diary navigates grief through experimentation with expression and sense, seeking to test the limits and possibilities of language for meaning making. Through processes of imaginatively interpreting Mourning Diary there are opportunities to consider Barthes’ expressions of grief and see how they may reconcile with our own understanding of death, encouraging players to use Barthes’ writing as a basis to formulate ideas and for imaginative meaning making.
A Death Aware Game
Games scholar Ian Bogost argues that participatory requirements in gameplay position games as persuasive experience objects which foster player engagement through interaction with game mechanics. Futuromania aims to prioritise participation by asking players to play with and interpret Mourning Diary by reassembling Barthes’ expression on death into their own text through imaginative interpretation. ‘Playing’ with the text in this way is something that Barthes himself advocates for in his text S/Z , in which he distinguishes ‘writerly’ texts; texts that allow readers to collaborate and participate with the text through active interpretation and analysis. The limitations that Futuromania imposes on its players with its limited set of cards aims to encourage imaginative and creatives modes of engagement in which players must explore more deeply what death means to them in order to try and make sense from chaos. What Barthes is observed to do in Mourning Diary is sense-making; deciphering his grief in language in which the grief is separated from the body and so takes on, as Deleuze puts it, ‘expressive function’.
‘in the sentence “she’s no longer suffering” to what, to whom does “she” refer? what does that present tense mean?’
29 October 1977
Playing Futuromania
Futuromania adapts the text of Mourning Diary into expressive fragments to allow players to explore their own relationship with death. A single player receives 12 game-cards from the game facilitator (the only other participant) which contain words, phrases, or descriptive metaphors, quoted from or inspired by Mourning Diary. Another stack of cards contains common English words which the player may use at their discretion. Players are encouraged to experiment with the material, moving cards around the gameboard (they can use some or all of the cards) to test new or alternative modes of expression with the aim of creating their own short text on death. An example of the gameboard in figure 12 shows how a player may carry this out. Play typically lasts approximately 5-10 minutes. If players feel unable to use the cards they receive, they are permitted to swap up to three. The role of the game facilitator is to encourage the player’s thinking through gentle questioning and probing dialogue that may uncover further depth of insight. However, the design aims of Futuromania are orientated around what makes sense to the player. Once the player decides that play is complete, they are asked to de-construct their creation by clearing the board, meaning that their expressive creation undergoes a kind of metaphorical death at the hands of the player.
Making Death Make Sense
Futuromania introduces Deleuze’s philosophies of sense in which individuals participate in expressive social spheres by negotiating sentiments to express it in ways that “make sense” Such interpretive agency and comprehensive processes of meaning-making are central to Futuromania’s appeal to death awareness. Futuromania invites death awareness through procedural representational powers. Through designing Futuromania I seek to use gameplay processes of player-led meaning-making to inspire death-aware thinking. Engaging with death in this way sees that players can begin to make sense of their own relationship to death, using text and expression in the way that Deleuze describes. By pulling death into the realm of logical expression there is a risk of inviting further abstraction. However, such expression may also become the basis for further thinking and engagement. I assert that imaginative play with language fosters active thinking around death which procedures of alienation and abstraction continue to obscure.
‘don’t say Mourning it’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.’
30 November 1977
Making a Game About Death
The intended impact of gameplay is that players encounter and consider their relationship with death, using Barthes’ writing to formulate ideas and discover expressive possibilities. The limited card deck that players are given is intended to reflect the ways in Barthes himself was made to organise his phenomenological experience of grief in Mourning Diary around the expressive possibilities of language and the written word. However, as designer and creator of Futuromania, I was conscious of how the category of sense can be a limiting dogma that refuses difference. Taking this into account, I was influenced by Dadaist tactics to signal to players that they may approach their play objectives in alternative or unexpected ways. The gameboard features collage. An image of Barthes as a child being held by his mother at the centre of the board has been recreated with an assemblage of objects and images, referencing the relationship between Dadaism and collage. The game itself also takes from Dada poetry in its dissection of text. The references to Dadaism in Futuromania set a general precedent of inventive creativity and the destabilisation of rules and conventions for players. They invite the improvisation of alternative logics to seize upon the disruptive potential of play. Players are asked to play in a zone of tension between sense and non-sense to find a mode of expression that can be made knowable through order but may destabilise hegemonic death alienation through active, imaginative, and interpretive engagement with death-awareness.
CONNECT WITH HEATHER
E-mail: Heather Maycock
Instagram: @BlethyBee
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