It was almost four o’clock in the afternoon and I was walking towards the palm trees in front of the Campus Center to participate in Tangle. In the distance, I could already hear some tunes playing and many children laughing. I only had a very basic idea of what was waiting for me when I reached the space. We had seen a video in class a week before about the show we were supposed to take part in. It showed many kids running around and tangling colorful string. As I watched the video, I smiled. They seemed to be having lots of fun. At that moment, I started to look forward to the day of the event.

I reached the exhibit. It was an area right next to the palm trees was surrounded by a white fence. Inside it, there were stages with tall poles where some colorful strings already could be seen tangled at the very top. I could also see a group of men and women were dressed up in a funny-looking outfit. And around thirty children accompanied by their parents were bursting with excitement ready to enter the space. Suddenly, a soundtrack music started playing and the performers began their act as the audience waited outside. They playfully ran around the space, interacted with each other, and at one point, they pretended wind was blowing them away. Once they were finished, they opened the gates for people of all ages to enter the space. One by one, as participants walked through the gate, they were handed one colorful ball of elastic string. And even without any type of verbal instruction, everyone was left to their own imagination and creativity.

Tangle was an interactive experience where participants were able to their own experience and that of others by creating a space together by tying elastic strings around poles, fences, and each other. I was able to observe four types of participants in the experience: children, parents, Polyglot performers, and observers. Each one of them had a particular role that influenced the performance in some way.

The children were at the center of the performance. It was them that brought to life the space, the imagination, and the creativity. There were children running around tangling around poles and other strings, and others using the strings as objects for play (i.e. using them as hammocks or swings). The parents could be seen interacting with the children happily without interfering too much in their play. They were clearly letting the young ones appropriate the space and make it their own. It was very beautiful to see such an intimate interaction where the parents were letting their children take the lead. The performers were simply pushing for more interaction between participants. Their main job was tangling people with each other, showing different ways of tangling the string, and talking playfully to children. The observers, on the other hand, were standing closer to the fence than to the poles or the strings. They were outsiders, hesitant to join in the experience as easily as the other three. And I was one of them. In some way I felt out of place in terms of age and activity. I wasn’t a child, I wasn’t a parent with her child, and I wasn’t a performer. I was just there to appreciate others’ beautiful interactions.

Every participant with his or her unique role contributed to the experience. It was a way of building an environment to learn or to learn from. I believe this is something that each of the Polyglot Theater performances seeks to achieve: having diverse groups come together in a safe space where they can gain knowledge from unexpected people.

Besides the social interaction between the people, one of Tangle’s performance most unique characteristics was the space that was created. Some claim that the exhibit could represent a piece of art. And I agree with them. According to the Oxford Dictionary, art is defined as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in visual form such as a painting of sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” Everyone participating in that place was adding a bit of their own creativity and letting it come out in a visual form. No one was instructing anyone anything and all participants were able to make their own decisions and let their imagination flow. After every performance the exhibit changed and outsiders could observe and make any interpretation of it.

I had initially thought that the objective of Tangle was to play by tangling, however, that initial objective transformed as I spent more time inside the space by participating and by viewing. At the end of the performance, I finally understood that Polyglot’s objective was to create a space where people could come together to play. A playground where play created a space to play. And that is what is most significant to me. Because, speaking in Polyglot’s metaphorical sense, the journey is as important as the destination. In life, what matters is how you get to a state but also what you do once you are in that state. What do you do with what you have created? Are you happy with your path? Is it good? Are you satisfied? Can something be added? Could anything be improved? Those are the questions one asks him or herself at the end of the performance or at the end of a journey. And that is what I believe is really valuable from the Tangle performance. A very simple task transforms itself into something with a a lot meaning unique to all in the space.

The game I chose to play is Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2012 Edition). It’s a car-racing game where you, the player has to make your way up to the top. As the player, you are allowed to drive around the city of Fairhaven and participate in races. Winning races unlocks car mods and gives you Speed Points (something similar to street cred). The underground street racers maintain a blacklist of the most dangerous and deadly drivers (and their cars). Gaining enough Speed Points allows you to challenge them and move up the blacklist!

A peculiar aspect of the game that I find worth mentioning early on is that there are no characters in the game that resemble humans. While you do see cars being driven and hear cops on the radio – there are no 3D human figures that you can actually see. However, the absence of humans is never felt – primarily because the game emphasizes focus on the cars, the drivers aren’t that important. Even the names on the blacklist are actually just the names of the cars. The are no pedestrians in the city of Fairhaven either.

An hour of gameplay is roughly a day (24 hours) in game. This has no special contribution apart from the fact that the player gets to experience driving around in fairhaven at different times of day, which would mean if different lighting, and of  course, a slightly different feel (I always enjoyed driving at night more that the day). The game itself may take a while to finish. Each race typically lasts for about 3-4 minutes.

The elements of a car dashboard, all present on the screen – a map, an odometer. The number of Speed Points is also displayed on top.

In terms of conventional terms, the game space for NFSMW is more of a free-roam environment, where players can not only roam around the space without any particular object, but also interact with the space to unlock and participate in objectives. Fairhaven would seem like any other metropolitan city that you’d typically experience. There are buildings, roads, a pier, a huge park, etc. Apart from the absence of any human life, the city is quite ordinary. It obviously draws from a real city to give the player a sense of actually being able to race in an environment that is relatable to them, as opposed to driving in hyperspace or any other crazy fantasy racetracks. The splendid graphics add to the feel of the game which make it seem more real. The cars in the game themselves are also taken from the real world, and these are hands-down some of the best cars one could drive. There are definitely certain things that might seem odd in comparison to the real world. The most striking example would be the repairs from a crash. When you do crash your car, regardless of how bad the crash may seem, the car still functions as well as it did prior to the crash. The only difference is that it looks slightly beat up. A quick stop at any gas station, and your car will look like it is brand new. A stop at the gas station also changes the paint-job on the car.

Another aspect of an alternate reality in the game is the way in which changing cars functions. Each car has 5 races of its own – winning all of them will unlock all the mods for the car. Once you are done with those 5 races of the car, the logical step forward would be to move to a different car, since there is no other way to gain speed points beside winning unfinished races and evading the cops. The cars themselves are situated at different spots around the city. Some are obviously much better than the others. The player can jump to a different car once discovered, or if the car has been already discovered, they can use an ingame menu to jump into that, at the location of its discovery. This means that there are jack spots all around the city, and a fun thing to do is to find all of them and unlock all cars. To race the blacklist cars, the player may use any car and still get the Speed Points. While being different from reality in how you change cars, this feature obviously helps provide a better gameplay since its easier to change cars once you know where they are.  

The ingame menu for choosing races (left), and the current mods applied to the car (right) [in this picture, none applied yet[

Overall, the game is a typical racing game. Most people drive cars, but are confined to the rules of the roads. The game provides a space for the player to do what they can’t do in their own cars. Since the damages are confined to the game space, there are no real-world consequences of speeding. The game also allows players to drive around the city of Fairhaven in supercars. It’s also a fantasy popularized by movies like Fast and the Furious, which paint a picture of how ‘cool’ it would be to actually race. This makes the experience all the more enjoyable.

In Hot Dog Bush, the player transports into a world of hot dogs and street food vendors as they become former US President George Bush who is kicked out of the White House and is now operating a hot dog cart in New York City. In this point and click game, the player remains stationary within the space, preparing and serving customers in a fixed field of view. One can play in two modes: career mode in which the player tries to advance from selling in the Bronx to Wall Street and speed mode in which the player tries to earn as much as possible in a designated period of time. Though much of my analysis of the game world will be common to both game modes, I will focus primarily on career mode as its narrative architecture creates a particularly immersive world for play. In this mode, though players technically do not move through the space, Hot Dog Bush creates strong emotional depth through drawing from “actual” world elements in its treatment of space and time.

Though the player cannot walk or complete other movements within the space, the game creates much emotional depth from how realistic the game feels, further emphasized by the first-person point of view. For instance, if a customer tries to leave without paying, the player can only stop them within the given viewpoint just as a street food vendor might not be necessarily able to leave their cart.  Hot Dog Bush mimics the “actual” world process of progression where one begins at a basic level and works up through practice and hard work. Thus, the space reflects that through the emptiness of the cart initially. On day one, the player can only sell hot dogs with the option for ketchup. As the player’s skill increases, the space adapts to show more objects until the player fills the cart to capacity with numerous offerings like hot dogs, burgers, French fries, root beer, soda, and three different garnishes. Offering more items naturally equates with customers ordering a greater variety of items, increasing both the difficulty of the game and the degree of movement for play as the player must strategize the order to serve customers in, what to grill, etc. The space is also designed to facilitate such strategy. For instance, the space is designed so that the player’s cart is in the foreground, emphasizing player movement in the given space. The top half of the screen shows the background of the current venue that the player is serving and changes as the player advances. The top half also houses the NPC characters. Just as in the “actual” world where a large line often discourages customers, the player only has a maximum of five customers in view at a time, encouraging the player to serve them quickly and to pick up their money at the end, so that new customers can come into view.  The sense of urgency is heightened around the lunch hour where the cart will be quite packed and the player must quicken their pace to meet the demand.

This sense of urgency is critical to the game as it creates a strong sense of emotional investment for the player. The game also fosters this sense of urgency through its treatment of time. First, time serves as a marker for achieving objectives. A day is much faster than the actual world of course, but serves as a natural timeframe to achieve their daily target. After meeting the daily target, the player advances to the next day and after each successful week, the player advances to the next venue in NYC. To create this sense of urgency, the game designers placed a clock to keep the player updated on how long they have until the cart closes and how much left they need to make to meet the daily target. Another way the game uses time to create a sense of urgency is through the customers faces. As they wait for their orders, their faces become visible more crestfallen and later, angry. In case the player is too focused on preparing the orders, when it’s the last straw for a customer, they will begin shaking as if moving impatiently as a warning that they will leave if the player does not serve them at least part of their order. Time is also emphasized through the grilling of the menu items. They will become a golden color and flash when they are at a perfect temperature, creating a sense of urgency to the player to not burn them.

Hot Dog Bush creates meaning through a space that is heavily influenced by the real world and its use of time creating a sense of urgency and heightening a player’s investment in the game. In the Routledge Companion, the Perspective chapter describes that “any modelling of a system” will represent an opinion on what is being modelled (Sharp, 8). In this regard, Hot Dog Bush conveys the importance of hard work and that there are no shortcuts in being a hot dog vendor, not even for George Bush. Also, Bush ends up being abducted by aliens to be their hot dog vendor and gets kicked off Earth.