New New Games (2015)

What is the relationship between game-play and the ideologies surrounding creativity and work?

New New Games is a participatory artwork by Robby Herbst exploring the democratic and generative New Games spirit and its legacy, sponsored by Southern Exposure, the Graue Foundation, and the Headlands Center For The Arts, It took the form of a publication, a series of public talks, and two distinct play events in the Bay Area. The New New Games website contains a complete archive of the project and pdf of the publication.

New Games Re:Play was a reunion and festival of the original New Games community, developed in collaboration foundational members of the New Games community. It took place on June 26, 2016 at the Headlands Center for the Arts, adjacent to the Gerbode Valley, the site of the original 1973 New Games Tournament.

Watch here.

Warehousing People, developed as a part of New New Games, 2016. Documentation by Ian Byers-Gamber.

In this game, there are two teams. The first are those set to be ware- housed; the second are those doing the warehousing.

If you are a warehouse worker, your job is to organize the warehouse. You will lift and safely stack people into stacking crates. Your job is to try and make the stacks of people as neat as possible.

If you are being warehoused, congratulations. You are surplus. You have two options. One situation will find you transformed into an inmate. You will be stored by the prison industrial complex in a correctional facility not of your choosing. The second situation finds you as an unemployed member of society. You will find your own means of storage, perhaps in a home, although you will find it increasingly difficult to maintain this shelter due to lack of funds.

In either case, your labor has been outsourced thanks to the creative work of engineers and technicians. You may thank your elders (par- ents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc.) for finding themselves in a wage–for–labor relationship, in which you now are not currently needed. There are several rational options for someone in your po- sition to consider. They include suicide, prostitution, madness, cre- ative expression, and entrepreneurialism. Ironically, entrepreneur may be the most socially acceptable term to describe your current condition, because if you got nothing, you best start figuring out how to make it something. Either way, as surplus you’ll spend a lot of time not doing much. For the warehoused, it may simply be your game to endure.

See also: Critical Practice, Drawings, Performance/Happenings