Thursday 17th June 2021, 10:30am-12:30pm

Online

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As usual, the C3P seminars are designed to encourage C3P members to share materials around their current work so we can familiarise ourselves with each other’s research and facilitate discussion around the work. This seminar will contain discussion around works by Dr Su Ballard, Dr Chris Moore and Dr Michael Griffiths.

 

 

Associate Professor Su Ballard

Planetary Thinking

Respondents: Dr Joshua Lobb and Lucinda Strahan

Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics examines how contemporary artists have engaged with histories of nature, geology, and extinction within the context of the changing planet. Susan Ballard describes how artists challenge the categories of animal, mineral, and vegetable—turning to a multispecies order of relations that opens up a new vision of what it means to live within the Anthropocene. Considering the work of a broad range of artists including Francisco de Goya, J. M. W. Turner, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Yhonnie Scarce, Joyce Campbell, Lisa Reihana, Katie Paterson, Taryn Simon, Susan Norrie, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, Ken + Julia Yonetani, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, Angela Tiatia, and Hito Steyerl and with a particular focus on artists from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, this book reveals the emergence of a planetary aesthetics that challenges fixed concepts of nature in the Anthropocene.

 

Dr Christopher Moore

Laying Eggs: Ludonarrative Resonance and the Birds of Wingspan

View materials

Respondent: Associate Professor Graham Barwell

Wingspan is a board game that involves collecting food resources to play bird cards into appropriate habitats, where the animals can lay eggs and generate points for the player by meeting randomised goals. The game was designed by Elizabeth Hargraves and published in 2019 by Stonemaier Games with 170 pencil colour illustrations of North American birds by Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo, Natalia Rojas, and Beth Sobel. In the global niche industry of board games, Wingspan is a bestseller and award winner, achieving the best ‘connoisseur’ game of the year at the Kennerspiel des Jahres, the prestigious and influential annual industry awards in Germany. The game’s enormous success has grown to include the European and Oceania expansion sets that increased the number of birds to play with and changed its mechanical dynamics to match the different settings.

The popularity of the game is such that it has an ecosystem of upgrades and additions that enable players to personalise their physical copies, including wooden ‘meeples’ of the birds and food resources. The digital version of the board game was released for Windows and macOS via the digital distribution platform, Steam in 20\19 and a new book ‘Celebrating Birds: An Interactive Field Guide Featuring Art from Wingspan by Rojas and Martinez is due for publication in 2021. A few important factors contribute to the game’s success, including its high-quality production and its ‘euro’ style design that features a low degree of player competition but highly strategic gameplay. It is undeniable that the theme, art and attention to the birds and their environments captured the attention of board game fans worldwide, which introduced thousands of new players to the medium. Wingspan has helped revitalise attention to commonplace birds and introduce players to many species not previously encountered.

Hargraves says she was “sick of playing board games about castles and trains” (cited in Evans 2020) and wanted to make a game that featured something she cared about. The notion of care translated in the design to a correlation between the knowledge that humans have about birds and game mechanics that intrigue players to learn more. The Oceania expansion, which will be the focus of the analysis in this chapter, introduces players to the Australian ibis and its infamous reputation as a “bin chicken” that gives players the ability to select cards from the discard pile and the New Zealand pūkeko whose communally minded nest sharing gives the player ability to lay bird eggs on neighbouring birds. These mechanics suggest a way to analyse the ludic and thematic synthesis of birds’ representation in board games, through images and rules, in terms of what can be described as ludonarrative resonance.

The term ludonarrative dissonance was first used by Clint Hocking (2007) in a blog post that described the experience of detachment or emersion as the opposite of immersion that occurs in video games. Hocking’s concept has been used extensively in game studies to critique the gap between the ludic and narrative features. However, this chapter proposes to invert this concept to consider the affective resonance between representation and rules, and between theme and game mechanics, that works to invite players to invest interest and even care in avian species; if not on the birds’ terms and experiences, then through a system which causes the human player to enact a ‘frameshifting’. 

Frameshifting is a Brechtian theatre concept that Mizer (2016) uses to celebrate the way players of board games must cognitively move between the game world and reality, shifting attention between theme, narrative, and events, as well as game rules and requirements and ludic mechanics, and a range of social interactions. Frameshifting in Wingspan causes new types of attention to birds, not merely as objects, but as characters and materials in a complex algorithmic interaction across the porous boundaries of what constitutes play. Furthermore, there are two other useful concepts from recent contributions to board game analysis that triangulate an analytical framework for exploring the ludonarrative resonance of Wingspan. The first comes from Wilson’s (2016) use of the Foucauldian concept of the heterotopia to explain how ‘euro’ styles games operate as sites of “constituting ourselves by way of what we see (or do not see) in their virtual spaces.” (43). The second draws from Altice’s (2016) model for analysing board games as physical platforms, which understands play experiences as being designed in a process that is dictated by form. 

Wingspan’s heterotopic space is a distinctly utopian complex as the human [the player] is indirectly included in the representational game space into which birds are played. The human is inscribed in the representation of knowledge about birds through the Latin taxonomic names at the top of the cards and the bird trivia that includes folkloric and indigenous knowledges at the bottom of the cards. The human is framed as the knowledge that is connected but peripheral to the birds’ experience, which is occupied with food, habitat and their ‘bird powers’, that produce the strategic choices in the game. The human is present but decentred, as even the boards on which play occurs and represents diverse bird habitats have a portfolio print on their reverse. This works to frame what Begy (2017) calls the board games construction of cultural memory through materiality. By examining the five interleaved platform characteristics in Altice’s model – the planar, uniform, ordinal, spatial, and textural – we can better understand the representational elements of Wingspan and the heterotopic game space created by the relationship between the material, algorithmic and social experience of its play that requires the player – if only temporarily – to invest in the birds and their world. 

 

References

Altice, Nathan 2016 “The playing card platform” Analog Game Studies (Volume 1), Aaron Trammell, Evan Torner, Emma Leigh Waldron eds. Catnegie Mellon: ETC Press: Pittsburg, PA, Pp. 

Evans, Kate 2020 “The Board Game For Birds”. New Zealand Geographic. Issue 166 – Nov – Dec, https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/the-board-game-for-birders/ (accessed 25/02/2021).

Begy, Jason 2017. Board Games and the Construction of Cultural Memory, Games and Culture, Vol. 12(7-8), pp. 718 – 738.

Hocking, Clint 2007. “Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock: The problem of what game is about”. Click Nothing, TypePad. http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html (accessed 25/02/2021).

Mizer Nick 2016. “Fun in a Different Way”: Rhythms of Engagement and Non-Immersive Play Agendas, Aaron Trammell, Evan Torner, Emma Leigh Waldron eds. Catnegie Mellon: ETC Press: Pittsburg, PA, Pp. 9-14.

Wilson, Devin (2016) The Eurogame as Heterotopia, Analog Game Studies (Volume 2), Aaron Trammell, Evan Torner, Emma Leigh Waldron eds. Catnegie Mellon: ETC Press: Pittsburg, PA, Pp. 43-50.

 

Dr Michael Griffiths

Yaangarra: Building Digital Capacity for the Teaching of Indigenous Literature

Respondent: Dr Teodor Mitew

Yaangarra, the Dharawal word for paperbark, is the name of an interactive teaching tool for working with Indigenous Literatures from Australia. Our team is comprised of literary and Indigenous studies scholars Evelyn Araluen Corr (Bundjalung, Goorie/Koorie) and Luke Patterson (Kaamilaaraay); educator Jade Kennedy (Yuin); literary studies scholar Michael Griffiths; creative writer Chrissy Howe; reception studies scholar Ika Willis; and our partners in the SMART Infrastructure Facility, with the leadership of Pascal Perez and the expertise of IT Architect Mehrdad Amirghasemi. Yaangarra connects knowledge about Indigenous writers to literary genre, time and story.

 

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Susan Ballard is an Associate Professor of Art History Tāhuhu Kōrero Toi at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research spans the fields of art history, creative nonfiction, and the environmental humanities, and examines the histories of nature in contemporary art with a particular focus on artists from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. She often works in collaboration with many others. She has written essays for October, Artlink, Art and Australia, Art New Zealand, Eyeline, The Anthropocene Review, and Environmental Humanities. Her books include Alliances in the Anthropocene: Fire, Plants and People (with geographer Christine Eriksen, 2020), 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (with the multitudes of the MECO network, 2019) and A Transitional Imaginary: Space, Network and Memory in Christchurch (with the ADA network, 2015). Her latest book Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics was published by Routledge in March 2021.

 

Christopher Moore is a senior lecturer in Digital Communication and Media at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Chris is a researcher in internet studies, fans and celebrity, analogue and digital games and online persona. Chris is currently investigating the use of social media in the support of niche creative workers in the cultural industries. He is the co-author of the Persona Studies: An Introduction (Wiley, 2020) and a co-editor of the journal of Persona Studies.

 

Michael R. Griffiths is a literary scholar whose work focuses, for the most part, on settler colonialism and representation of and by Indigenous peoples. He joined the School of The Arts, English, and Media in 2014.  He received his PhD in English from Rice University in 2012, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society from 2012 to 2014.

Griffiths’ first monograph was released in 2018: The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture (UWAP) and details the genealogy, history and legacy of appropriation in representations of and by Aboriginal people in Australian literature. 

Griffiths has also intervened into debates about the precarities of free speech and hate speech. With Tanja Dreher, he co-edited a special issue of Continuum which offered an account of freedom of speech debates in the late liberal world. This special issue received sufficient hits and citations to be reprinted as a (forthcoming) book from Taylor and Francis.

He has also published articles on numerous other topics, including: poetics and intention in postcolonial literature following the work of Edouard Glissant, whiteness in the settler colonial public sphere, Daniel Defoe and critical animal studies, and the Bildungsroman in Africa. This work has appeared in such venues as Discourse, Postcolonial Studies, Postmodern Culture, Textual Practice and Humanimalia, as well as in a number of edited collections. He is an editorial board member of Antipodes and of Australian Literary Studies.

Griffiths is an active participant in Jindaola <https://www.uow.edu.au/about/learning-teaching/jindaola/> after having gone through the 2018–19 training.

He is Chair of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (SPACLALS). <https://southpacificaclals.wixsite.com/website>

 

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