A colorful playground that grows with the imagination of individuals. Tangle is a welcoming space that proves what could be accomplished with a bundle of a thread. There are multiple poles on a stage stranded with colorful threads around, swarmed by their creators. People are having a good time with the company of music. The participants are mostly children who are observed by their worried parents for in case something goes wrong. Each child is given a bundle of a thread which they go around playing while tangling it around however they wish. The tangling usually starts by creating a knot on a random spot such as a pole, or another already existing thread. Then with the bundle of thread at hand, the navigation starts around the space. The thread travels twisting around the space on the direction the participant wishes. As a result, another thread takes its place next to many others enlarging the space a little bit more. Once the work with the thread is done, the participant starts playing around the space, socially interacting with the other participants. There is a constant movement in the space, a constant creation.  Such a mobility evolves the space into a more customized one by time. There are performers leading the flow of this growth. They are interacting with the participants to aid them to express themselves. Space is the fruit of expression, in this sense, it exhibits artistic value.

There is a deeper meaning behind the play. Space is not the result of only one individual’s ambition and decisions. The consequentiality in this regard cannot be credited to one person. It is the result of a group play, each individual participated. This, however, is different than multiple people painting together an art piece because the possible actions are much more random and the boundaries are much few. When a group is painting together it is much simpler for one to grasp what the other is doing, there is much less randomness involved. There is one dimension missing and it is much simpler to tell when the piece is complete which part of it was painted by whom. Another difference with the painting would be the aspect of interaction. The work of a child is constantly affected by one another. The way the thread will be incremented into the already existing art piece will be affected by the scattering of the children, the density of the already existing threads, the relative position of the children who like each other and who dislike each other. The social aspect of this play will greatly influence the art itself. A child who is going around with his thread will see his friend and change his direction, approaching towards him. On the contrary, he could get in a small argument with another child and move away from her. What makes Tangle an art piece is the fact that the space is molded by perpetual social interactions. When observed as a whole, Tangle is the art of a group but each step of this art is anonymously made.

The anonymity of the children could be challenged by a simple question. Once done with tangling the thread and lost track of it, could any of the children exactly tell which thread belonged to them? The answer to this question reveals an assertion. The value given to their own contribution is dominated by their willingness to be a part of the group. This assertion is helpful in explaining the anonymity. The condition of anonymity is the result of the attitude the children have towards the space. They are not there to create art, they are there to play and have fun. This makes them more unaware of their navigation through the space so their lack of artistic intent creates a more artistic space. That is because space grows more in the direction of social interactions the children are having rather than an artistic purpose. The performers have a vital role in such a shaping of the space because of their reserved social role as guides. The performers have direct control over what part of the space will be populated. The scattering of the children is greatly influenced by the actions of the performers. They can drag the attention to themselves with an interesting proposition such as let us pretend this thread is a sea. They can minorly affect the perceptions of the children of the space via inventing mini-games inside the already existing game. They can say that the floor is lava and the navigation of the children will be completely different. Children will try climbing to the thread not to step to the lava. The actions of the performers in this regard have an influence on the finalized art piece that is the space with colorful threads lying around.

In terms of the experience, Tangle provides an opportunity for trading ideas and creations. For a child, Tangle space is different than a basic playground because it was partially built by him. On the contrary, it optionally offers the exact opposite too! As a play, Tangle achieves to create a feeling of freedom to contribute without being judged. There is a form of relief to know that no one could ever tell which part of the space was crafted by you if you do not want to share that information. A participant could agree to move a thread in a planned fashion in company with another participant or he could do it alone in peace. In this way, the imagination of the participants, mostly children as mentioned before, are not limited with their social phobias or introvert characters. There is a room for play for everyone.

Tangle is successful in bringing out the creative and expressive sides of its participants. I can confirm this as a participant myself. The positive aspect of this expression is that it is unconscious and totally the result of the participants’ social interaction. Each incrementation is unique, there are no two threads that take the same path. Overall, I believe Tangle manages to create a successful play environment paved with social interaction, guidance, and a little bit imagination.

Dogukan Avci

For a few weeks, Polyglot have been holding a social event called “Tangle” in front of the palm trees in our campus, NYUAD. The exhibition consists of a few long poles on which the participant has to walk around and tie up (or tangle) long strings several times, thus creating a large web like structure, or a “tangle” of elastic over time. The structure becomes more complex and compact over time, allowing the participants to interact with it in different ways, for example climbing on it, sitting on it, pulling it, etc. It is also quite eye0catching because many different colours are used to create the structure. One thing that I did notice is that people seem to tangle more elastics around the central area, and seem to play and interact more in that spot as opposed to the outer corners of the exhibition. This could be because it could be interpreted as a “social spot” which attracts more people to tangle strings and interact with each other, thus making the tangle of elastics there thicker or more durable for play in a way.

The social nature of the play in tangle is quite interesting.  When I participated in the event, I could see many children and their parents playing with one another, and also playing with different children. In the area where there was more of a crowd, I saw some children climbing on the poles and the strings, while concerned parents stood by them in fear that they would fall and hurt themselves, but in the less tangles areas, there were less children and more adolescents and adults just walking underneath the structure and observing the children play. The actors were also taking part in the game by moving around and influencing the children’s creative ideas. An actor  even tangled me with two other adults in the exhibition to influence a playful environment, to show that the structure was not just necessarily for children, but to target and even larger audience.

What the exhibition does in a sense is give the children freedom to express themselves and their ideas through the space that is provided to them. The actors don’t influence them to act in anyway, and they are able to come up with their own way of playing through the materials they are provided with. This is not to say that each child has their own idea, but once a child sees another one behaving or playing in a way that looks interesting to them, they are inclined to imitate them in order to experience that form of play. I personally would have loved to climb on the structure, but was afraid I might have hurt the children there due to my weight and size, which also worried me that maybe the structure wouldn’t be able to hold me up the way it could support a child.

This form of play is different to our conventional games because there is no exact aim or outcome of the game within the given space. The children are just given materials  and are free to create their own kind of entertainment within the space. For example, the games that we played in class with the actors had an aim; keep the paper ball up in the air, or do not get caught by the dragon. this allows the children to be innovative and creative in terms of the type of game they are coming up with, there are no rules or specific number of players that need to participate in order for the game to be playable, therefore I believe that Polyglot have achieved this free environment for children to play and be creative, as well as interact with the other children in the exhibition through this form of expression.

In 2008, I bought for the first time in my life a video game with my own pocket money; LittleBigPlanet, an extraordinary game that permanently changed the way I perceive video games. Attending and observing the Tangle exhibition brought me back to the sense of wonder I first felt when I played LittleBigPlanet. This essay is not about LittleBigPlanet, but I will partly use it as well as text from Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal to analyze Tangle and the way it affected me and other players.

The Tangle experience starts before entering it; a bit more than a dozen of three or so meters long plastic poles stand on top of short platforms in the middle of the campus center, enclosed by a white fence. On top of the poles, hundreds of pieces of colorful string are interwoven, forming some sort of a chaotic beautiful roof. After getting my ticket scanned, I stood outside of the fence while four members of the Polyglot group wearing white t-shirts, suspenders, or yellow pants surveyed us like they would for test experiment subjects. Another member stands back behind a keyboard where he plays bubbly dream-like music, using other instruments such as a flute, his own voice, and percussions. Once we’re in, we’re handed balls of orange ribbon and one instruction; tie it around the poles. This eccentric introduction managed to convey a clear message that proved to be accurate during the rest of the exhibit; this play experience wasn’t going to be your average play experience. It was going to be quirky, weird and fun. All you had to do is anything you wanted to.

Playing with the ribbon was pleasing. It was elastic and really nice to touch. The material made it so that it was really encouraging to pull at it, fold it around your fingers, and tie it a little everywhere. And tying it was satisfying. In Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal explains how one of the reasons why play works is that it gives you work. When one plays in a well-designed environment, feedback is provided almost immediately to congratulate the player for the efforts they have accomplished and to give them that satisfying feeling one gets after tying their thread around 5 different poles, feeling the pull of the string in their hand, and getting visual feedback from the new colorful path they have created. And this feeling only grows stronger as one plays more and starts tracing the strings with their eyes as they elongate, overlap and cross each other. McGonigal argues in her book that one looks in games for this kind of work because it is rarely provided in real life. Whether it is in the workplace or in school, people often find their work confusing and or meaningless. Whenever I want to prepare for my Data Structures mid-term, I struggle because I don’t have any material to practice on and no one to guide me, and even if I re-read the lessons 5 times I still get a C on my test; there is no perceptible challenge. But in the world of Tangle, it is not only easy but also rewarding to create and shape the space around you, and that is more satisfaction than most of what we get everyday. And it’s also a lot more fun.

It’s entertaining to tie strings around poles and having to sneak oneself inside the tangle as it grows thicker to get from point A to point B, but Tangle is at its most fun when other people’s fun starts affecting yours. For example, I spent the first half of Tangle tying my string everywhere to create the most complicated structure, but my play experience changed completely once one of my friends joined in and started pulling down on the strings that were already on the poles before we started. We worked then to pull down the whole mass until it was on our level, using it – or failing to – as hammocks, going down under the mass and sprouting back up, trapping each other, etc. Each move from one would inspire someone’s else’s move and change the way they were playing. That was when I had a feeling that the possibilities were “endless”, similar to when I played LittleBigPlanet. While the first few hours of the game are spent on the adventure/platform story mode, the game changes completely and reaches new heights of fun once the main campaign is over and the online mode is unlocked. In LittleBigPlanet, players are able to create their own levels with the same if not more depth than the story mode levels and the community never fails to provide with quality, surprising, and fresh creations. While the poles, strings and our own bodies are our only tools of creation in Tangle, there is a similar concept of play-enhancing community. Like in LittleBigPlanet, there is a lot of room for creativity in Tangle. Players can pretty much do anything they want, and the Polyglot members encourage unconventional activities. They never stop you, but do restrain you physically with pieces of string. They also interact a lot with the children and follow them in their fantasies – that the strings are a spider web, a fishing net, or whatever may cross their mind. And again, like in LittleBigPlanet, the more people played and initiated or followed new forms of play, the more fun it was for everyone involved. When it comes to social play, there is little need to provide complicated gameplay tools like chess pieces or different FPS weapons. A few pieces of string suffice. There is also no need to provide a “story-mode” or complex guidelines or a goal to achieve. In social play, the players easily create their own context and meanings out of almost nothing and thrive off the group’s collective creativity. Even if we’re all strangers to each other.

McGonigal talks in Reality is Broken about the power of games to create and reinforce bonds even with strangers. While I hesitate to call Tangle a game, the factors that she describes about games’ social aspect apply to the play in Tangle. First, there’s the physical closeness. Touching other people releases oxytocin, a hormone that makes you likelier to trust somebody and form bonds with them. And there is a lot of touching in Tangle, whether it happens while trying to get through the tangle and brushing past four different people or trying to tie up someone while they’re themselves tying you up. Secondly, McGonigal claims that having to face the same constraints and collaborating towards the same goal gives a sort of group empathy rarely encountered in real life. There is no goal or true constraint in Tangle, but the shared experience of being tangled up and having to extricate oneself as well as feeling the effect of everyone’s work from the pull of the strings makes it easier to relate to everyone else that is part of the tangle, in a quick way that is hardly ever achieved by conventional social interactions.

In summary, playing in Tangle is satisfying because of the material used and the ability to create and immediately admire one’s work. The more people play, the more there is fuel for creativity and the more fun Tangle becomes. And finally, leaving Tangle left me feeling warm inside thanks to a successful albeit atypical social interaction.

As students coming from South America, Africa, and the Middle East, we have witnessed how women are constant subjects of social expectations in different societies. Throughout our childhoods, we heard “jokes” that indicated how “women belong to the kitchen” and we perceived social conventions that implied how “good wives should take good care of the house”. We are aware of the continued efforts of social groups throughout history to fight for more equitable scenarios. While not in every society, the prescribed roles for women have evolved. As such, we created “Up” as a third-person perspective and 2D digital world to reconstruct this evolution of social expectations for females in daily life. Although it was inspired by real changes in society, “Up” generates its own version of reality and offers a framework for immersing in a gameplay experience that allows the navigation from “women in the house” to “women doing whatever they want”.

For us, the evolution of social expectations for women is a way to advance in society, so we decided to build a space that could provide a vertical perspective and convey the feeling of moving “upwards”. Our aim was to create a space that could be subjective in the sense that would not convey a direct message to the audience. However, we wanted to have some clear primary signs of our topic so that the message could not be perceived right away but internally processed and created while and after navigating the space. Therefore, we decided to build four different environments related to “house”, “education”, “work”, and “leisure”, each having specific objects related to the environments. Each was created through the combination of clip art images and art pieces made with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. We used the variation of our backgrounds and objects to give the space an overall random aspect while keeping a logical organization. The environments represent how the perceived roles of women have evolved from housework to “more freedom” to get proper education and thus increasing the possibilities of getting the jobs they want and deciding how or where to spend their free time. Our space does not intend to represent a specific timeframe, but a progress of ideas towards women’s lives. The player represented by a women figure starts in the “house” and can move up, down, or to the sides. We decided not to provide a lot of freedom to move to the sides by narrowing the space so that the player would rather explore it by going up or down. By going down, the player notices that it cannot go outside of the prescribed frame, and by going up the player is exposed to different environments that contain a variety of objects.

“Up” allows the exploration of a space that changes while moving upward. While the behavior between the player and the objects is maintained throughout the experience, each environment changes the type and amount of objects presented as well as the attire of the character. The interaction player-object does not allow the player to either collect or go through them, but rather the player needs to go around them if necessary. This simulates how society usually expects us to perform specific actions. In the case of the evolution of social expectations for women, they changed from being cooking and cleaning to receiving a good education, having a job, and enjoying free time. Also, the evolution also involves the change from a strict to a more lenient set of expectations. This is represented by the number of objects presented in the “kitchen”, which decreases as the player moves from one environment to another.

Throughout the process of building the final working version of the digital world “Up”, we faced several obstacles and limitations related to our little experience with the program “Unity”. For instance, we first wanted to create a completely random game space with a pineapple as a character and no concrete meaning. Our aim was to create a 3D space that could enable a more game-like experience by having a first-person perspective and interaction with Unity assets. Instead, we decided to create a 2D space using our abilities in Adobe programs to create our backgrounds and design our character. However, we -luckily- changed our theme as the desgin process progressed. We started creating our own objects but decided to find them online due to time restrictions, and therefore faced the problem of not having a coherent aspect for our objects. Nevertheless, we tried to turn the restrictions in our favor by creating an overall random space built by different types of images. We used the playtest to make the final arrangements of the space. First, after realizing how the upward movement was not as intuitive as we thought, we restricted the movement of the character to the limits of our backgrounds. We also changed the number and position of objects in the “kitchen” environment to be more cluttered and congested in order to restrict the player’s movement. This shows how in the initial phase of the evolution, society’s expectations were more intense and strict. To accentuate the changes between the environments, we decided to change the character’s attire as well as the facial expressions according to each environment’s topic. Finally, we implemented a fade out in the last environment to display the end of the space or game experience. Overall, we were required to accommodate our expectations according to what we were capable of doing, yet we tried to use different available tools to implement our ideas.

“Up” narrates the evolution of social expectations towards the roles of women from a strict idea of housework to an increased freedom. The space first shows a woman in a white apron facing a window, which might leave the player confused of what comes next. Quickly after performing the first moves, the player realizes there is a world full of house objects related to cooking and cleaning. Can the women collect them? Can she interact with them? By going up and with the help of the camera movement, the player sees that there is more to discover. The player might be frustrated by how the arrangement and behavior of the objects restrict its movement. The appearance of new environments and new objects shows that the space is not uniform and it changes with time. The feelings of the player might also change as the experience progresses as the environments become easier to circulate. What am I supposed to do? The exploration continues until an environment with a beach-like background and few objects. Then, everything fades and the space seems to come to an end. For some, “Up” might make little or no sense, and would be just an interesting experience with no concrete meaning. For others, the space might be a representation of changes in women’s lives in society. As designers, we want to give space for imagination and representation through subjectivity, yet we intend to convey a general message that might have different interpretations. Through its own framework of reality, “Up” tries to show how cultural and social expectations for the roles of women have changed with time and -hopefully- continue to change for the better. “Up” is not a direct picture of the real world, but a fictional world that represents the progress we want to see in it. We hope that “Up” provides an experience that can make players feel how frustrating life for women was and still is, and how easier everything turns when society moves “forward”.

Link to the game: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1pum6HXvEpGdrLZ1CfO6BZFbCP-SdU2Of

Yeho, Rowda, And Claudia

Our game, Valley, is a 3D first person simulator. The player is in a mountainous valley and can freely walk around to explore the area. While walking around, the player can collect small red mushrooms growing in small patches in several areas of the valley. We wanted the overall experience of the game to be explorative so we created four different areas within the valley for the player to find while navigating through the valley- a Lily flower patch, a cemetery, a hill with huge mushrooms and a hill with a view of the whole valley. Because of the explorative nature of the space, there is no single objective that needs to be achieved to reach the end. The player can keep walking in the space and discover the mini-areas.

The players starts at the hill with the view. When we started the project,the player started at the other end of the terrain. But we decided to make this change in order to give the player a better idea of the environment that they have landed in. Since a part of the play experience is collecting the mushrooms growing in the valley, we created a small path where the player lands which goes down the hill. This path has a few mushrooms that the player will inevitably collide with. The click sound generated on walking over a mushroom helps the player understand that they can collect these mushrooms. Even though we have created a path through the valley to help guide the player to the various mini-spaces within the valley, we have also placed mushrooms outside this path to encourage the player to explore the space on their own instead of just following the path. So the player has both options- just following the path created and landing on the mini-spaces, and walking through the space without following the path and coming across the mini-spaces gradually.

The four mini-spaces were added after the play-testing session. During the play-test, we only had a mountainous terrain with the player starting at one end and walking through the terrain while collecting mushrooms. The player needed to reach the other end of the terrain to find the hill with huge mushrooms and a view of the game space. However the player was not aware of the hill at the end- it was supposed to be found out through exploration. According to the feedback received, the distance between the start and end points was a lot and walking from one end to the other while just collecting mushrooms with the same environment throughout would become boring after a point and might end up with the player ending the game without even finding the hill with the mushrooms. Therefore, we decided to create a more explorative environment by creating the four mini-spaces that are spread out throughout the valley.

I believe we were able to create an environment where the player would explore the valley and have a pleasant experience while doing so. Even though we did not have the mini-spaces during the play-test session, the player was able to figure out that they can collect the mushrooms and also ended up exploring the valley instead of just following the path which was the goal of our play space.

Valley conveys the narrative of exploring without a definite goal. Throughout the game, the player comes across various instances that could count as the objective but the game as a whole does not have a final goal to be achieved. The only goal is exploring the space. There is also an element of peace and calmness in the game space that is conveyed through sounds like the chirping of birds and a light breeze blowing. This creates a more natural and pleasant environment. There is also an element of mystery since the player has no idea about what to finally achieve or where to go to end the game since there is no end to the game. Seeing how each individual player reacts to the space is interesting.

Google Drive link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xIWQ7997REO8swUPN8KmjJ9a2NymHEfs?usp=sharing