December 9, 2002
I. The Beginning
My first idea that I submitted in my initial proposal had to do with a sort of street performance addressing the issue of street harassment of women. It was based on idea that I developed with some friends last year but never put into motion. The inspiration came from an article I read in a sociology class detailing a study on who men who harass women on the street are, how it happens, and why they do it. The author discussed the feeling of helplessness this kind of harassment makes many women feel. It?s an exercise in power, and many women feel there is really nothing they can do about it! . If they ignore it, they?re rankled, if they respond, it often eggs the harasser on. As a little footnote, the author added that while conducting the study, she found that stopping and pulling out a questionnaire was an effective strategy of countering these men. Many of them were baffled and completely thrown off course in a way that other responses did not accomplish.
My initial idea was to send groups of women out into the streets conducting a mock study. This would be the performance. Small groups of women would go out and conduct the mock study in an effort to achieve that kind of disarming of their harassers. However, the performance was never developed beyond the idea stage.
When we were asked to submit and initial proposal, I came back to the idea of this street performance. I then had to figure out how to make it an internet performance. In my initial proposal, I broadened the performance to include other possible coping strategies, all aimed at disarming the men who harassed, throwing them off track, disrupting, or attempting to disrupt the power dynamic. I thought of somehow documenting this performance and putting it up on the web via video and sound clips of the street performance. Viewers to the site could watch the performance and respond to it on a me! ssage board. The audience would also be able to offer suggestions of other strategies to attempt on the street. The site would also provide the audience with the tools to recreate the performance, and possibly spread the initial street performance out into other cites, constantly being changed and modified by new participants. The board would also provide a forum for response to the initial performance and the performances to follow. It would also create a space for women to discuss their experience, their techniques, and their effectiveness.
When we formed groups, I was intrigued by the project that became Rolling Dim Sum, and so joined Xiao Li?s group. While we were talking, I was approached by Jay and Amy, who were interested in my initial proposal. We talked, and came up with the idea of creating a game based on dealing with catcalls. We then formed a group. At this point, I was in two groups, and had to decide which would be my primary group. After mulling it over, I decided that my focus would be the Catcall Game group, and that I would do all of my graded work with that projec! t, and stay on Rolling Dim Sum as a performer. We decided early on that Amy was the HTMLer and that my responsibility, as the actual proposal assignment rolled around, would be to be the artistic ?idea? person. Jay expressed an interest in designing the music for the game. At this point, we still had not decided what final form the game would take.
II. The Catcall Game
A. The Actual Proposal
Work then began on the actual proposal for The Catcall Game. Our basic structure was a game in which the player plays the role of a young female college student in New York City walking to class. The object of the game was to get to class safely and on time. On her way, our young heroine would be accosted by various catcallers, and would be presented with various methods of responding to the catcalls, each having different outcomes. If the student made it to class on time, the player would win; if she did not for whatever reason, the player lost.!
At this stage of development, we were hoping the game would do a number of things. First, we wanted to draw awareness to the prevalence of this kind of harassment. Many players would be able to experience the difficulties of a social role that they do not play in real life, and many of the coping strategies offered would be those employed by real women in real life. Male players would have an opportunity to walk a mile, so to speak, in a young woman?s shoes. We hoped to highlight what a different experience simply walking down the street can be for many women than it is for many men.!
At this stage, we also hoped that the game would be equally valuable to players who do experience this kind of harassment in their everyday lives. While this is a serious issue, we also wanted to make fun of the practice of street harassment even as we raise awareness about it. Some of the coping strategies offered would reach into the greatly socially inappropriate or absurd. A player could just as easily have the student castrate a harasser or show him her breasts as he or she could have the student confront him verbally or simply walk away. This could give some female players a sense of! empowerment they do not feel on the street as well as allowing them to respond in ways that they would not dare to in real life. At the same time, we wanted to highlight the diversity of experiences on the street, so in the game incidents would range from annoying, to comic or absurd, to frightening, just as they are on the actual street, so some of the outcomes could be terribly violent, creating the same kind of uncertainty that exists on the street.
I had been reading Schechner, and tried to incorporate some of his ideas into the project. We wanted our audience to be both audience and performers. Because the project had taken the form of a game, the players would have a very active role in the performance. Rather than an online documentation of a performance, the performance would actually be live on the internet as the player played. Each time the game was played, it would be different, because the player would be a different person, making different choices.
B. Development
Early in the process, we were still working out ideas for the form of the game. We had the idea to go out on the street, which was an idea drawn from the initial proposal, and conduct the kind of street performance I talked about. Then we discussed simply sending out women, including myself, followed wearing mikes and possibly followed by someone with a video camera. This would be for the purpose of collecting video and sound to augment the game. As we discussed the practicality of this, we realized that we may not have the time and resources to gather the kind of visual and audio material we would want for our game. For a while we entertained the idea o! f just using sound, and then it occurred to us that we would still be spending a great deal of time walking around the city hoping to get some good catcalls to put on the site. Eventually, we decided that it would be better for our purposes to work with pure fiction. We settled on a text-based game in a multiple choice format. Amy felt this format would be well suited to HTML, and it was agreed that I would write the actual text of the game.
Jay did a good deal of research on game theory, which was immensely helpful. We had a meeting in which he shared the information he had gathered, and we used it to help us decide which direction the game would take. We were also able to use some of the ideas he brought in to check ourselves. For example, did our game have a clear object, beginning, and end? We also discussed the format in more detail and brainstormed some scenarios and outcomes. Although I was doing the actual writing, I wanted to incorporate Jay and Amy?s ideas as much as possi! ble and make sure they had a voice in what the text of the game would actually be.
The discussion of game theory with Jay also made us ask ourselves an important question ? Did we have a specific point to make, and what was it? We concluded that overall, we wanted to say that the world was an unpredictable place and we wanted the game to express that unpredictability. In terms of the various options and their underlying outcomes, we shied away from having answers that were ?correct? for a certain reason. We opted to keep things random. We later opted to have the appearance of randomness rather than having the outcomes actually be random. This was mostly an issue of how connected the narrative from situation to outco! me was. So the appearance of randomness came from my whims. As it suited me as a writer, in one place, for example, I?d have an aggressive choice from the player result in losing, and in another situation something as aggressive as shooting the harasser results in the player getting off scot-free.
After this point, we didn?t have to meet in person much. If we needed to discuss things, we usually did it in class or over the phone. Jay was able to work on the sound on his own. He and I talked on the phone about what I was writing so that he would have an idea of the mood and could figure out what he wanted to do with it. As I wrote the text, I emailed it to Amy and she was able to put it on the site. At one point, the flow chart that Amy had developed and the script that I was writing did not match up ? I would have the player continue in a place where Amy had planned a dead end, so we met to go over the chart and I reworked my s! cript accordingly.
C. Midterm ? Privacy
For my midterm, I researched the Fourth Amendment and privacy. At first, I had a difficult time relating it directly to The Catcall Game. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that it had relevance to one of the earlier conceptions of the game. Had we chosen to go out and collect audio and video for our site, privacy would be a very relevant issue. I read Lessig?s article The Architecture of Privacy. In it, Lessig writes about the monitored and the searched. The monitored is the part of everyday life that can be seen or noticed, and the searched consists of records that are left b! ehind and can be viewed after the fact. Technology is important because it facilitates the creation of records and makes it easier for the searchable to be searched. It decreases what Lessig calls the ?cost? to the searcher and to the searched person, meaning the searcher has to expend less time and money conducting the search, and the person being searched can be subjected to the search with less imposition placed upon them.
If we had chosen to go out on the street and gather images and sound recordings, we would be invading the privacy of the unwitting catcallers we recorded. Granted, we are not agents of the state, so it is not as large a legal matter. Suppose we were just able to make audio recordings. If I walked around wearing a wireless mike hidden on my body, I could make records of everything said to me with no ?cost? to the catcallers, because they would be completely unaware that they were being recorded. Take the low tech approach and the cost to both me and the catcaller increase. If the mike ! is more obvious, the catcaller is aware of being recorded, or if I simply write everything down, he is aware and it is much more difficult to create an accurate record. We then would have taken everything and put it online, thus making it much easier to search. It would be a lot easier to listen to our recordings on the web site than to go rummaging around in Jay?s dorm room to find them. Now, we would not have identified the catcallers by name, but had we put their images on the site, it could have been possible for someone to identify them by appearance. It may even be possible to identify them by voice, but that would be very difficult to do. So while the information would be easily searchable, the cost of positively attaching a name to the catcaller ! would be high.
D. The Final Result
By the time of the final draft presentation, we had a no frills version of our game. It didn?t have any music on the site and its design was simple text on a page. Afterwards, we met to go over design aesthetics and select images to go on some of the pages. Some pages have no graphics. For example, it was an aesthetic choice to keep the rape page stark and without decoration. We feel it is more powerful this way. At this writing, we still do not have sound on the pages, although Jay has composed some wonderful music for the site.
As I look back, I feel that we have stayed close to many of the ideas that we had when the project began to develop into its present conception. Earlier in class I stated that I wanted to have some parts of the game absurd, some parts funny, and some amusing. I do feel that much of that ground has been covered. As we planned, the options presented range from realistic to fantastic or absurd. Obviously, the idea has changed a lot from the initial proposal, but in terms of the principles behind it, we?ve stayed pretty loyal to the ideas presented in our actual proposal. I think that the final appearance and shape of the actu! al game is very different from what we originally conceived, but that it is a form that works well for what our aims were.
III. Aftermath
Given more time and resources, I?d like to take the project much further. I?d like a longer game, with more situations. As I said before, at the time this was written, we were having technical difficulties getting music on to the site, so obviously, if it?s not up yet, I would like to have the music Jay created play on the site. At any rate, we were working with a simplified version of the game overall, including the music, and a future version would have more music and a greater variety of it.
It would have been very useful to have a message board, which we did try to add but Amy wasn?t able to get it up. A future version of the game would have a message board that allowed us to receive feedback from our audience and would allow us to modify, or choose not to modify, the game accordingly. I think it could have been instrumental in shaping the game even up to its present form, working just from the feedback of our classmates. We did add a guestbook, which provides some space for feedback. Of course, it would have been helpful to have had it sooner.
I learned a number of things working on this project. For one, I learned how difficult it is to write a game like this. I had a very hard time keeping things interesting when it came to the catcalls, and it would be a real challenge to extend the game further without the situations getting incredibly redundant. I also discovered all of the little technical hitches that can occur in taking a project from the idea stage to an actual form. We encountered problems with things I never thought about. Amy was wonderful throughout the whole process. It was also a learning experience to find out how a project can change through the process of collaboration.
