Art Arena Games

Extract from the Times Educational Supplement 27/10/78
Don Pavey describes how ideas from game theory may be used in art and craft.

Examples of completed Art Arena Games (click to enlarge).

A Painted Field of Play

The Art Arena game-model that our team uses was the outcome of a search for a way of giving many children at a time something of the richness of experience that might be had in the little workshops called the Junior Arts and Science Centres (JASC).
The search was sparked off when Kingston Polytechnic offered to house a JASC on condition that it took big numbers and none of the expensive kinetics and electronic gear. Eventually, experiments in the design workshop of the liberal studies department at Kingston led to the idea of using art based gaming. An analysis of the childrens' experience at a workshop suggested that four learning skills might be explored in four gaming processes.
1. The scenario scan which involves the assimilation of data from an imaginative scene.
2. Strategy - logical thinking through the manipulation of colour, shape, etc.
3. Teamwork - group-judgment in the sense of aesthetic and moral discrimination.
4. Tactics as physical sensibility in the handling of paint, and manoeuvring generally on the painted field of play.

The outcome of a game is usually an enormous painting, but we have also had spring festival dragons, ceramic murals, designs for tapestry, and playground movement-groups with hordes of children - in which case the result is a colourful spectacle suitable for film or video.

Over a hundred of the painting games take their scenarios from school subjects such as arithmetic and geometry as well as sci-fi and fantasy invented by the children themselves.

A game's target is to achieve, as a group of teams an enlargement and fusion of all the teams' plans so that the resulting artwork is a unity. Any conflict which may come about in the process is usually resolved through one of many combinatory techniques that art has to offer, such as the mixing of colours, the superimposition of shapes, or counterchange, and so on. Here the advice of a teacher of art or craft may well trigger off a chain of ideas.

Instructions for inventing and playing
Summarised by Beverley:

1. The scenario.
First think of a topic and storyline involving 'direction' e.g. it might be about things growing (plants, crystals), changing (modifying land use, customising a car, weather), discovering (an exploration, space journey).

2. Teams.
Are there contrasting ideas in your scenario, different forces, moods or poles? Name these as teams.

3. Strategies.
Now recommend appropriate shapes, colours and effects or particular patterns and symbols for each team.

4. Tactics.
Recommend the appropriate techniques (brushwork, sponging, collage) for each team, and suggest what rules a team might make to deal with overlaps, e.g. should certain colours be painted over or mixed with others?

5. Target.
Try to visualise the final synthesis when all the teams have been fully represented. For example, four different life forms may produce symbiosis, a living together. Different parts of a machine may attain equilibrium or homeostasis; crystals may fuse; human attitudes may produce a group mind.

6. The brief.
Now prepare a brief for each team, detailing scenario, team names, and possible strategies (colour, shapes), recommend tactics (techniques of painting), and describe the game target or 'supergoal'.

7. The plan example.
This is a specimen design on a plan blank for the whole mural surface for one team. Players rarely actually copy it. Now you are ready to play. For painting games you will need:
a. From 2 to 16 players with ages from 8 to 80.
b. Time - from 2 ½ to 3 hours.
c. A wall or floor about 8' x 10' covered with paper and ruled in four inch squares labelled 1,2,3,etc along the top and base, and A,B,C etc. down the sides.
d. Plan blanks (A4 copies of the wall grid), and paper for scribbling on.
e. Coloured chalks, paints, mixing bowls (e.g. plastic margarine tubs), brushes (two inches across the bristles), pins, string, ruler, scissors and an adhesive.

How to play
1. A player reads out the scenario. Teams are named and players are allocated to sit in team groups.

2. Each team reads out what it may do under strategy, and how to do it, under tactics.

3. Each player makes a design for a whole wall on the plan blank. (These stages take about 15 minutes)

4. Conference within teams: Choose the bits you think are best from each of the designs by the members of your team.

5. Cut these out. Then, arrange and stick them (or redraw) onto another plan blank. Now, this is your strategy, that is, the masterplan which you team will try to put in its entirety onto the mural surface.

6. When all the teams have drawn a masterplan, players chalk up the outlines of their team's design into the mural surface using a team colour. Each team is helped by one team member who calls the coordinate, e.g. 'B2 to E2 red' or 'G5 to k* a green monkey'. In this way the small masterplans are transferred and enlarged onto the mural - whole square by whole square. With circles and more naturalistic drawing, the squares are plotted first and the sames are drawn in with a large sweep of the arm.

7. The conference between teams. All players stand back from the mural and discuss how to combine the overlapping motifs. Players are reminded that the object of the games is the proper representation of teams' interests in a balance and unity appropriate to the scenario; and ways of achieving this are discussed. You might mix the colours of the shapes overlapping, or interweave and fuse the shapes themselves. For example, a final design such as illustrated here might derive from masterplans and individual players' plans as follows:

Final Design
Green team masterplan	Red team masterplan
Blue team masterplan	Yellow team masterplan

Remember, the game belongs to the players. They make any rules, and change them for better ones by majority vote at any stage. (allow about 10 minutes - longer if the players want to act out in mime, movement or drama the values they place on the patterns)

8. Painting begins: All players take part in painting the teams' designs, and gradually think more and more in terms of the whole rather than parts. It usually takes about two hours - longer with adults. At the end, success is decided by vote.

9. Voting:
Players vote (a) on how well they think the target balance and unity has been achieved, and (b) how much fun the game has been. Each player gives a score out of 10. If the target and fun together have a mean of four out of 10, the game has been won. It helps in devising new games to have votes also for (1) the appropriateness to scenario of the final painting. (2) the strategies (the effectiveness of the master plan), (3) the teamwork - how well players worked together within and between teams, and (4) the group's estimate of its skill and sensibility in the tactics.

In striving for the target, no one wins if anyone loses, and time and space prove more formidable opponents than humans.
The games are played regularly by various groups of children, from maladjusted and ESN to gifted, and by students of different disciplines from art and design to electronics.
As research, the 'Use of Games in Education through Art' project has been based on the discipline of art itself, rather than on the psychology of, or anything else of, art; and a special study has been made of self-assessment in art and the evaluation of originality.

A book on art-based games has been published by Methuen Ltd (PAVEY, D (1979) Art-Based Games. London: Methuen) describes what they promise for the future. Chapter 30 of the recent work, 'Colour & Humanism' also offers some insight into the theory behind art arena games. (PAVEY, D (2003) Colour and Humanism. Florida: Universal.)

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