Multiplicities and Mutualities…in a Game

About the Project

Practices: Cooperative Game Play

(Un)do: My conversation with Matt Leacock, creator of the game, Pandemic, helped me to understand game designers as authors. They write stories we as players can tell and re-tell together with infinite variations. Pandemic is a cooperative game meaning that everyone wins or loses together. I engaged in the practice of cooperative game play with my daughter and other family this year, by playing Pandemic. I thought about the real-world difficulty of scaling cooperation on an international level, but also the notion that everything starts at home, and we are responsible for the spheres of influence we can affect. I thought about how globally we keep telling and re-telling the story of being on the brink of disaster and wondering how many more versions of this story the planet can sustain. The Dadaists responded to disaster in part by using chance to determine composition. Here, I use cooperation to determine composition by translating the end states of six rounds of Pandemic into my more familiar medium of embroidery – stitching/mapping out the “story” of each round of global threat in my own way on a small world stage. Then I pulled those stitches out and started over, stitching the next iteration of game play, noticing how in life it is often easier to do than undo.

Heather Ariyeh

(Un)do

2021

19:42

photos, video, thread, cotton, embroidery hoop, found audio

The trace is to the route as rebellion to the command, jubilation to the garrotte.

– Édouard Glissant

Pandemic Rounds Documentation

Images of family game play throughout the month of November 2020.

Interview with Matt Leacock, Creator of “Pandemic”

Lately, I’ve been researching game playing as an art practice. I’ve mostly played competitive board games, but I started wondering about what cooperative games might exist. A Google search later I realized that there is a whole world of cooperative board games, and an international community of folks invested in the practice of their play.

I learned that many cooperative games are based on the narrative of the characters involved, and that this allows for the telling and re-telling versions of stories in which players work together. It was also through this research undertaken during quarantine that I learned about a particularly popular cooperative board game, ironically entitled Pandemic. Pandemic was created years before COVID-19 but is being re-examined in light of it. The game’s creator, Matt Leacock, describes the game like this, “In the game, all players work together in an attempt to save humanity from four deadly diseases. Everyone takes turns moving around the world, treating infected populations to address short-term threats, in an effort to buy enough time to complete your ultimate long-term objective: the discovery of the needed cures.” (more…)