The Cat Call game, yes, it all started way back on September 17th 2002 when all of the students in our live art on the internet class presented their proposals for their art projects. Two of the proposals, one involving street harassment and one involving an online dating game especially intrigued me. When it came time to decide which proposals we would take on as projects I was disappointed to find that the topics I had been interested in were not chosen. I then approached tiffany, a fellow classmate and originator of the street harassment aspect, and Amy, the dating game web guru, and we discussed how we could combine our ideas and talents to create a hybrid project called the Cat Call Game.
After we decided to create The Cat Call Game, we were then thrust into the stage of preproduction. During preproduction we set out to define our project, strategize how best to implement it, and distribute the different tasks among the group members. The original definition of the Cat Call Game included the journey of a character as it travels through a city and faces the challenges of being sexually harassed by Cat Callers. The character would then respond in a variety of different ways, each of which would evoke a different response from the cat caller. These responses would range from the Cat Caller smiling to the Cat Caller viciously raping, killing or hurting the character. The point of the game would be for the character to try to make it to class on time.
I remember going home that day and wondering what I thought of the project. I wanted to know what aspect I could give to a project that was predominantly female based in content and pertained to an everyday interaction between men and women that I had no experience with. One of my first ideas was to use my acting skills to overdub the voices of the cat callers as they spoke to the women. This sounded interesting to me but I wasn't sure if the project really needed voices or if it would be better as a written piece. I then realized that I could use my musical talents to create several sound files at main points during the game. I was very excited about this idea because I had never create video game sounds before and I felt that my Mario filled youth would give me a wealth of inspiration. The last aspect I felt I could give to the project was from more of a technical standpoint. I would read up on play and game theory in order to contextualize the project and understand the underpinnings of gaming.
My partners in the project had specific tasks assigned to them as well. Amy was going to be our HTMLer, meaning she would create the website, the flow-charts and handle most of the design aspects. Tiffany was going to be writing the script for the game, as well as deciding the character responses and consequences.
I derived most of my research on play and game theory from Richard Schechner's book, Performance Studies. Schechner opens his discussion with some of the same questions that I had about play. What are the differences between ritual and play? How do adults play differently than kids do? What is the definition of a game? Ritual and play are similar in the respect that they both transmit messages to society (Schechner 81). This sparked my interest in the quality of ritual in our game. What I found was that Cat Calling itself could be considered a ritual of modern day society. Throughout the ages there are accounts of woman being harassed by men, and our project is one of many modern day attempts to tackle this negative ritual of our society. Only within the past century have people begun to speak out against cat calling, and one might say that protest is a ritual as well.
American anthropologist Clifford Geertz answered some of my questions on adult forms of play. Geertz discusses a type of play known as Deep Play in which the risks involved outweigh the potential rewards. This type of dangerous play is usually carried out by players who allow themselves to believe that it is all in "good fun" in order to mask the peril involved. However, this is often not true and the game is usually as dangerous as it sounds. Dark play is play in which the players aren¡¯t even aware that they are playing. The risks in dark play are incredibly high; they involve fantasy, luck, deception and invention. Examples of dark play are unprotected sex, extreme skiing and Cat Calling. When a man whistles at a girl he has no idea what her reaction will be and visa versa. This is an important aspect of our game. In our game the woman can kill the man who whistles at her and the man can kill the woman who talks back to him. It is an experiment of dark play. We are enabling people to experience aspects of fantasy and desire without having the consequences of death, disease and punishment.
Games are defined in two groups, finite and infinite games. Finite games are played with the purpose of winning; there are definite rules and terms for the players involved. Infinite games are games that are played for the purpose of continued play; the rules change in order to prevent anyone from winning. The Cat Call Game is an example of a finite game in the sense that it is designed with the purpose of the player trying to win, however, the game is unique in the fact that there is no skill involved in winning. There are no rules that you can follow in order to win the game since it is completely random what the response of the Cat Caller would be. One quality that the game does reflect is the idea of flow. Flow is the state of being completely engaged in an activity outside of every day activity. In a flow state a person lives from moment to moment and follows one action through to the next until the game is over. The Cat Call Game is designed to involve the player so that they become engrossed in the activity (Schechner 88). We hope that the player will be completely involved in our game.
After all of my research and analysis I have composed my own list of attributes that define a game. Being that I am an amateur game theorist I do not consider this to be the ¡°be all end all¡± of game theory, however, this is how I contextualized the catcall game. The list is as follows: Structure, Context, Humanity, Sensory Imagery and purpose. Structure pertains to the rules of the game; how you get from one place to another. In our game one must choose one of three options and then they can move on to the next page. This is a constant structure that does not change and its rigidity allows the player to have the freedom to play. Context is how the game fits into our society. Does is apply to things in everyday life? Can people associate with it? Humanity branches off of context but incorporates the aspects of humanity. This means that the game must evoke emotion. The player must feel something, whether or not it is fear, rage, uncomfort, frustration or obsession it does not matter. Sensory imagery describes how the game appeals to your five senses. The game should appeal to several of these senses in order to increase interest and involvement. For example, we not only included written description and images but we also incorporated sound. The last of the qualities is simple, but quite possible the most important. A finite game must have purpose. How does the main character win and why does he want to? Without this quality a game is worthless.
As I mentioned before I decided early on to use my musical talents in order to create sound files for the game. About a month ago I enlisted the help of my fellow musician and roommate Jessie Laz-Hirsch. We sat down and wrote out all of the different possibilities and outcomes in the game and began to record sound files. There was a sound file for when the character got raped, shot her cat caller, married him and so forth. When I brought these files into class I came to two conclusions. One, people were not as responsive to the specific sounds as I had hoped. Some of them had comic value and did not mesh well with the serious content of the responses and outcomes. Some of the sounds simply did not resonate well with the class and almost no one liked any sounds that incorporated guitars. I then decided I would have to rethink my musical scoring for the game. Furthermore, I realized the incredible difficulty of having a different sound for every file. The sounds would not be able to be very long, thus inhibiting my creative freedom; I would have to create an extensive flow chart in order to sink up the sounds to the web and I would have to find a way to differentiate sounds like rape from death (which I just didn't want to get into). I decided to narrow down my composition and only create three pieces. One would be a theme song called The Cat call game, one would signify the success of a player after they made it to class and one would signify the loss of not making it to class. The theme song turned out to be a 30 second clip that began with a fast arpeggiation in G minor, modulated to A minor and then finished with a simple three chord progression that built with an exciting guitar solo by the infamous David Herman. It sounds to me like it could have been a very successful 80's rock song. The success piece is a classical melody in C major inspired by the recent work of Billy Joel and the loss piece it a cringing atonal piece in G sharp minor. Overall I am very happy with the way that the music came out and I think it is very fitting to the game.
The only other problem that I ran into was getting the files onto the website. I originally wanted the files to open as soon as each of the corresponding pages was reached (the opening page and the two final pages). However, we ran into the problem of being able to get such large files onto the site without having to have them be downloaded. After many last minute attempts to solve this dilemma, I came to the decision that the audio aspect of our game would be a prototype of what I would have wanted the audio to be. The files will come up, however they will take a couple seconds to download. Although, this is not what I originally wanted, I'm glad we were able to find a way to come to some middle ground between technology and ourselves.
Overall I have been very satisfied with the work I have done with this group. I have learned a good deal about composition, game theory, Internet production and teamwork. I have also found that I truly have an interest in Internet technology. I hope to take the things I have learned and expand upon then in my own work. I'm not afraid anymore and I think that's the most important part. I've always wanted to have my own personal website and now I know that I can. I even own the book! I'm also very happy about the contacts I have made through this class. I feel that people would help me if I called them a year or two down the line and asked how to upload a video file that¡¯s 20 minutes long. But hopefully I'll know how to do that by then.
