Week 10 · Lab

Construct 3 Against Construct 3

Main question

What happens when we refuse what
the software expects us to make?

Remember the reframe from Week 7

An event sheet doesn't know what a “game” is.
It only knows conditions, actions and states.

A game engine can make us believe we're supposed to build things that already resemble games. The event sheet doesn't care about genre. That's the whole opening this lab needs.

The task's own words

“What you are creating today cannot be a game or gamified in any way.”

• Violate the visual appearance of games software, this is named as the most important thing to break.
• Also violate the rules and goals typical of games.
• The legal forms: a simple interactive artwork, a poem, or a narrative story.

Start here

Open the Construct 3 homepage. What does it advertise?

• games
• levels
• characters
• action
• scores
• platformers
• commercial products
• polished entertainment

Write their observations down. Then: “Today we are going to use the same software incorrectly.”

Not this

Not: make a weird game.

Instead: identify one assumption in the software and refuse it.

Possible directions

• A piece with no winning, the visitor explores indefinitely
• A piece where collecting makes things worse, every object damages the environment
• A piece where nothing wants to be clicked, objects escape the cursor
• A piece where standing still is the mechanic, movement destroys something
• A digital poem, walking reveals fragments of text
• A memory, objects trigger fragments rather than points

Possible directions, continued

• A sound environment, movement changes audio rather than progression
• A protest poster you can walk through, no conventional gameplay
• A landscape that notices you, the environment responds to presence
• A piece that slowly removes itself, every action deletes part of the world
• A piece about refusal: the interface keeps asking you to play, and you can refuse

These demonstrate possibility without forcing a political topic.

This is not hypothetical

A shipped example of refusing Construct's defaults

• “It is not a game about defeating the mountain.”
• “A narrative you walk rather than read, with the mountain as co-author and the weather as an unreliable one.”

Trail Mix, framed via the Center for Digital Narrative's “extended digital narrative”: stories that leave the screen and happen in rooms, landscapes and bodies. From trail-mix-v2.html.

Same lens, aimed at your own refusal

The four questions from Week 7 · now on your own work

• What do your rules make possible? What do they make impossible?
• What must the visitor perform here, not just read?
• What story or feeling emerges that no one, not even you, wrote in advance?

This is what makes it a refusal rather than a theme: the world has to arise through action, not just be about something. Trail Mix's weather, pace, and who's present on the day are exactly that, ergodic literature; emergent narrative.

Fill this in before you build

Connect to the lecture, without forcing it

Does your work need endless accumulation?

Obligatory Task 7, submission

Write a brief explanation on paper of how your work goes against Construct 3's own homepage advertising, and hand it to Ingrid.