Stasis


By Nivetha Kannan and Swetha Kannan
Implemented by Swetha Kannan

Stasis is a game which explores the walking home controversy which has swept the internet in recent months. The game illustrates another perspective, walking home in the dark, that raises similar issues of gender, catcalling, and most importantly safety. The game allows you to play the role of a woman while having to fend off unwanted advances. There is often times no telling what level of interaction can either stop the behavior or encourage more harassment or even violence so the woman remains a silent protagonist throughout the game from beginning until the end when she arrives home. It is up to you, as the gamer and subsequent godly entity, to ensure that she gets home safe and is hit with the minimum about of harassment as possible.

Download Mac

Walking Home Simulator

Share personal experience by using games (Mainichi) :

http://femfreq.tumblr.com/post/53306704524/human-angle-queer-games-the-secret-avant-garde –  Interview with Mainichi game developer

http://indiegames.com/2012/11/freeware_game_pick_mainichi_ma.html – Mainichi Game – sharing personal experience with games

“How do you do it” game and it’s use of gaming to share a very personalized story

Street Harrassment:

http://www.stopstreetharassment.org/resources/statistics/ – statistics on street harassment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XGPvbWn0A – 10 hour walking in NY

Summary:

Our Proposal is basically to make a ‘walking home simulator.’ It’s a game where you play as a woman walking home from work very late at night. You can make different turns, take different routes, interact with people on the street, but the object of the game is to get home safe. Of course, this goal is easy to accomplish as only about 4% of rapists are strangers to the victim. However, seeing as how 1 in every 5 women in US are victims of rape, there is a real need to be careful. The main content of the game is the amount of street harassment the player with experience. About 90% of women in US admit to being street harassed (A percentage, I feel, is low compared to the actual figures). Most of the street harassment portrayed in the game will be harassment we or our friends have endured (getting followed, sexist remarks, catcalls, the good old “pretty girls should smile!”, and the subsequent “You should be happy! I’m complimenting you!” argument). Our main goal for the game is to share personal experience through games.

 

 

 

Cowboys & Outlaws – Swetha

Here are some hypothetical screenshots from my game.

The is separated into two screens in which two players attempt to find each other by following the sun, this mechanic may change to allow for a more 3-D like map but for now, you can just move right and left:

Also, I think the game would mostly be exploring the world so the daytime changes slowly to night where you follow the moon. There may be certain obstacles that the characters must break through with their guns. Other objects may only break when both characters strike certain objects at the same time:

Finally, the game leads to a (anit-climatic) fuel between the two characters. I feel like I need to frame the game some more to make this reasonable but for now, that’s where it stands.

Swetha Kannan – Learning to Love you More Assignments

Assignment #53
Give advice to yourself in the past.

In this Assignment, I was basically asked to make a list of advice I have for my past self. This is what I cam up with:

“Advice for Swetha at age 12,

Ok, so your like maybe 12 years old now so I know a lot of this is going to go over your head.
That’s why I wrote this for you.
Read it over and over again and take any advice you can.

First. When you make a friend in 3rd grade do not waste a single tear on her. I know she’s mean and rude and there’s so much drama around her but in middle school she’ll finally stop hanging out with you.

Second, don’t worry about getting along with your sister because when you parents drag you to India, you two will be the only English speakers around. She literally has no choice but to love you.

Third, When You get your first Honors English teacher don’t get so scared of her. Please do not listen to a word she says. She’ll tell you about how much harder life will be from then on but let me assure you nothing can be as pointlessly difficult as her class. You do not need to know how much gallons of water are in the Mississippi river just because your reading Huckleberry Finn. That was just her BSing.

Fourth, Don’t stick around the Anime club too much. Most of them are weird, and it gets even weirder when it moves to the library and its not just limited to high schoolers.

However, do go to anime conventions. Go to tons of them because you’ll make tons of friends. Take your own friends to them. It’ll be a blast.

Sixth, Your college is going to be Carnegie Mellon. Don’t bother applying to like 10 colleges. Do yourself a favor and score above 2000 on your SAT or else your parents will be holding it over your head your whole life. Also, In high school everyone tells you AP exams don’t really help in college. Lies! They help a ton so take as much of those things as you can!

Finally, Take moments to love your dog TONS because you will miss him every day in college. Oh yeah, you convince your parents to get a dog in 8th great, good job!

Luckily you don’t mess up a ton in your life to remember that in high school when you feel like a screw up. Also, don’t do anything your not comfortable with, honestly none of it even matters when your older. No one will ever care how many guys you dated or how great your wardrobe was.
That’s it for now, keep up all your grades, remember to have fun, and love your family.

Good Luck!

With Affection,
Your Much Older Self”

The fun part was trying to figure out how to deliver this letter. I was originally thinking about mailing the letter to my address when I was twelve but that would just reach my parents :/ How do I reach my specific younger self? Then I remembered that I was an avid player on neopets when I was younger until I got locked out of my account. I have a new account now that I play on occasionally so I decided to send this list to my old neopets account since the only person to have ever used it was my younger self.

My old user profile:

Sending the Message:

Swetha Kannan, Nivetha Kannan, Christin Bongiorni – Risque

Risque

Risque is a multi-player spin off game of The well known board game Risk. Our iteration of the game has gotten rid of the many small concepts included in the game Risk such as the soldiers, the dice, the turns, and so on, which we felt were somewhat boring, elongated the game, and had no unique purpose when compared to other games. Instead, we kept the most basic element of the game: territory. By transferring the board onto the human body, body parts were able to become territories that other players may ‘conquer’. In this way, players are forced to interact with each other through touch; touching territories/body parts to conquer. Typically, the game would be played naked underneath th This does not mean it has to be awkward; Although it is bound to have some of that, the game goes through the movements quickly and with an upbeat song that causes players to quickly immerse themselves in the game and lose sight of their hesitations or inhibitions. In this way, we found that the game did a good job of introducing a ‘risque’ element while also keeping it fun enough that not any one player feels shamed, victimized, etc.

Instructions:

Here is a video of what a typical CD included with the game would include:

Credit for the Song: “Colors” by Tobu

Documentation:

http://vimeo.com/107627800

 

Swetha – Best Game Fest

Mont Trottoir:
Mont Trottoir was a game that was essentially trying to make us climb a horizontal mountain. It was a race between two teams of two; the intention was to get to the peak and along the way there were a variety of cards, robes, and techniques we could use along the way. One of the things that I felt was disadvantageous about the game were all the small components that make up the game; mostly it was the organizer who was talking us through each turn; it was also required to have a bystander monitoring the game since many of the cards required assistance of some sort (i.e some having to count two seconds, play a monster, etc). The game play itself was fun when we became acquainted with the rules; at the beginning we were very unsure and cautious in our turns however as we came closer to the peak, limbs were stretched, bodies were grounded, and it began resembling a game of twister with how convoluted our positions became.
The card aspect of the game was equally as interesting and although the cards definitely helped be out of a few situations, I am not sure if I actually liked holding them and having to take care of them as I attempted to stretch my body(certain others like dave remedied this by keeping the cards in pockets. Sadly girls’ pockets aren’t that large). The cards, once again, required the presence of a bystander player in order to collect the cards and put them into affect.

Step Ball:
Step ball was a game much like soccer or football. We could only take one step when the referee yelled ‘step’ and could then only throw the ball to each other (no running, jumping, etc). Although these rules also called for a ‘bystander’ player, I felt that he was acting more as a referee rather than just some awkward character looking in on a game of ‘twister’. The game mechanics were also easy to understand and also familiar enough that we did not constantly need to be directed. I especially loved how only being able to take one step made the playing field significantly smaller. I am bad at running and endurance so this gave me the chance the contribute to many goals.
An obvious advantage was the height of players; players who were tall good both receive and block easily and those with long legs could also make more use of their ‘steps’. In this aspect it is very much like basketball.

Subversive Play: tic tac to!

This is the documentation of my reinterpretation of the game ‘tic tac toe’ . In this game, the objective is to make the other person score tic tac toe instead of yourself. If you watch the games that we played you can see that it is actually much easier to win using these rules. Usually, the game comes to a stalemate without anyone winning. In this interpretation however, the game rarely closes in a draw and I find that this kept both players motivated to keep playing. It is also easier to come up with strategies for this game; for example, I found that if one was able to posses the side four spaces on the board that were not corners, it was easy to gain victory.

 

As we played the game more and more, we became faster at it (just like in normal tic tac to The thing that made it interested was that their seemed to be much more ways to avoid tic tac toe than to get it; instead of trying to win, the object of the game  became about trying to corner the other player into losing. It became a bit more aggressive and to me, used the two-player aspect of the game better than the original game.

 

Overall, I enjoyed making this small change and it makes me wonder what other games we can enjoy by playing it with a different rule set.