PERFORMANCE DEFINITION 1:
The action of entertaining other people by dancing, singing, acting or playing music
(OxfordLanguages, 2024)
PERFORMANCE DEFINITION 2:
How well a person or a machine does a piece of activity
/ how well a machine or a computer works
/ often measurable (OxfordLanguages, 2024)
On Social media: engagement, impressions and reach shares
(Forbes, 2023)
Social media is performative.
How can I use my games with face and body recognition, to criticise the performative behaviours and the toxicity of social media?
After the feedback from Matthew and the user engagement feedback from my classmates, I decided to continue coding and pursuing the idea of playable experiences – games. To do so, however, I needed to narrow down more what the games will be focusing on and what they will be exploring. one of his ideas was to focus on specific behaviours connected to specific social platforms, which was a direction I really liked and decided to explore further.
THEORETICIAL FRAMEWORK – PERFORMANCE AS A PART OF HUMAN’S NATURE
As I was already engaged in my previous work’s psychological and behavioural research, I decided to focus on behavioural studies concerning social spaces and interaction. A great book I found, connected to performative behaviours and psychology was a book from 1959. Back then, an American sociologist and psychologist introduced a perspective on human behaviour called the dramaturgical approach. This approach, a dramaturgy Theory concept views social interaction as a theatrical performance. The World as a stage, people as actors who play their roles to fit in, as we, from the nature, are creatures who need social contact, validation and belonging.
That book became one of my main references to work around in my work. So what happens if this theory is applied to Social media, where the idea of performance has been expanded for measurable performance in the forms of likes, comments, and shares. With the fact these performances can be done from behind the screen, social media space offer an extensive and modern stage to perform in. My project in a sense is a contemporary, gamified lense to Goffman’s theories.
The emerging idea for the recontextualised set of games, coming from my first set.
FOCUSING ON:
– Explore specific online behaviours on specific social media platform
– Each game has differences and it’s own message
– Creating three separate games, each will have a different place coming from, yet together they make one set
– Using and expanding my emerging visual language and language: quirky, icky, funky, colourful, bold
– Using still body and face recognition, each game to have different use corresponding with it’s motivations
– Each of the games creates a downloadable performance
I started with exploring the specific behaviours on specific social media I could introduce to my games. Matthew gave me the first idea: The moving gif outcome reminded him of TikTok, how people create videos, dance and entertain, creating a form of performance to gain social engagement. With that in mind, I focused on two more very typical forms of posting content: VIDEOS, PHOTOS, TEXTUAL POSTS.
CATCH CATCH
Inspiration: Tik Tok – VIDEOS
Behaviours: Making videos, dancing and performing in order to gain social rewards.
Mechanics: Body (hand) recognition, game progressing make the user to perform more and move faster.
Outcome: screengrabs turned into a gif -> creating kind of a dancing performance
(disrupting the controlled behaviour people have when producing online videos)
NOM NOM
Inspiration: Twitter (X), Threads – TEXTUAL POSTS
Behaviours: Consuming, and producing (written) information online.
Mechanics: Face (mouth) recognition to eat (consume) words on the screen. The words are divided into categories, at the beginning the player can choose, but loses control in the information overload.
Outcome: A set of written performances, and messages that are randomly created based on the players activity
THIRD GAME: NAME? WINK?
Inspiration: Instagram – PHOTOS
Behaviours: Producing still images capturing chosen moment, mimicking others and behaviours online
Mechanics: Face expression recognition, Mimicking the gestures on the screen in a given time, screengrabs throughout the game
Outcome: A set of gallery stills/ shots capturing those expressions
INFLUENTAL PROCTICE – THE RODINA
Projects of The Rodina have been on my reference list quite often in my past projects and they’ve been a gret inspiration both in developing my project and my position as a designer. Diving into their approach in adapting gamification, coding, and creative technologies, using colourful, playful, inviting visuals to immerse and engage the audience, while fostering space for reflection. Influential was their use of performative design, to address wider societal issues. One their influential project “Playbour: Role of Reality” had a substantial impact on my work, also opening possible ways to expand my project above my MAGCD studies. Using the tools of graphic communication as I do, the „Role of reality“ offers a space where the player can reimagine the world of work, reflected in my project, that invites the player to reimagine the way we create online performances. (Studio The Rodina, 2024: https://www.therodina.com)