A GAME MANUAL
sleep, exercise, screentime, mood, calories, smart home, location, finance, productivity, likes, dating, traffic, advertisement…
Data driven life embraces us all.
One aspect that is often neglected in such a daily routine is the awareness of one’s own experiences, which of course go hand in hand with the measurable data, but never fully represent what we ourselves subjectively experience.
This game should generate experiences and create awareness for them. For this purpose, quantification techniques are used.
A route is to be generated on a sheet of paper. Around this route a map shall be created. But the map will be filled only with experiences that you gain along the way.
A database of the experiences of all players will be created and made publicly visible to posterity. The output is comparable to a collection of various diary entries, but for most only fragmentarily decipherable.
This game is intended to stimulate a new perspective on how you perceive and locate yourself in your environment.
You move around your environment following the instructions on a map.
At the same time you document your experiences and thoughts on this map.
How you play this game and how far you cross social boundaries, norms and rules is up to you.
Like children who acquire social and cultural norms through play, this game can also question these aspects of the ordinary life too; or not.
Move freely within the rules, add your own rules, shape the meta, explore the boundaries and play the way you think it should be played.
For this, free yourself from the everyday surroundings. For example, turn off your cell phone and leave your gadgets at home.
This is about getting rid of health data tracking like steps and calorin or gps readings. You will still be able to track yourself, but only through the framework of the game.
Output from the game is a map created by you through the experiences along the way. As well as a route prepared by you for the next player.
Environments build up memories just like people do: they see, hear, and respond.
These memories are on which the focus of this map lies. The open world and the player’s decisions are ultimately broken down to a linear representation. A brief visual glimpse into a person’s subjective perspective, like the entry of a diary.
Experiences interlinked with places and a temporal line.
Based on the following rules not only your environment but also this manual shall be gamed. The previous player has generated a route for you to play and your task after playing will be to do the same for the next one and to pass on the manual.
The photos were taken together with Jan Ommen, many thanks for the help in the studio!