Material game jam
I made a game!
Yeast mother
Materials: Agar-agar, Apple juice, Yeast, Dish, Brush
How to Play:
1. Recall the ancient flower petal fortune-telling game
2. Take agar-agar and apple juice, heat to melt, cool to solidify into small dishes to become agar
3. Dissolve yeast onto the agar (you can spit saliva to mix in your bacteria, or draw out the structure of your question)
4. Let it sit for N days in your home, observing the yeast growth and agar drying
5. You can also try bullying it, watering or feeding it, and see how it reacts
6. When you feel the time is ripe, let the combined growth pattern of the yeast and agar be your fortune-telling
7. If your question is about making a choice, murmur (yes, no) into each branch until the last fork makes the final decision
8. If your question is about ordering or implication, then ponder the structure and interpret it yourself. It can't really be called fortune-telling, just helping you make up your mind.
Process Notes
二十面体 (Icosahedron) is a group in China that makes monthly themed mail packages. In March, they hosted their first game jam. For seven days, people can come and make a game, but it has to use physical materials instead of just being digital, since that was a trend in previous game fairs. They partnered with a wood workshop, a weaving studio and their own printing space in Canton. Although I am participating online, over the week I can see the energy offline in the chat. Messages like “can someone open the gate?” at 10PM, and “we left fruits on first floor for anyone to take!” On the last day, about 50 people squeezed into the small print space and demo’ed their games. From the videos, the energy of the crowd is pure fun. There was an intense ping pong battle where the paddles had big holes in the middle. The next day they took the paddles to the park and battled with the master grandpas. There was another person who made up many games as they played through the city.
I was inspired by the pragmatic and improvised approach that these makers took, because I joined the game jam to explore ways in which I can convert the exciting but abstract papers I’m reading into fun things that I can hold and give to other people. I’ll recap my own process in this jam.
I. Curious
What games can be played with 'living' materials in the world?
I'm currently working in a cell biology lab, watching how fruit fly embryos bend and fold every day. Zooming in, the cells that make up the embryo skin jostle to switch positions and deform. Zooming further, the proteins that make up the cells can sense signals and tension, rapidly aggregating and dissipating. Can you believe that 60% of embryos die? Birth requires all of these scales to occur delicately and simultaneously in a fluctuating environment. "Life in this world is really material, but also extremely intelligent," I feel when my eyes go blurry from watching.
I want to continue observing and understanding the wondrous material properties of living systems (such as softness, bending, development, exploration, self-organization, robustness, multi-scale feedback). The experimental and theoretical modeling methods in biophysics research can yield interesting photos and patterns. When I saw the game jam introduction, I thought of a fun challenge: to turn research findings from biophysics of life into games, so that I and others (whether or not they understand evolutionary theory and statistical physics) can develop a sense of wonder and association with the miraculous material properties of ourselves and other living things.
II. Game
If the playmates are non-human life, is it possible to play without harming them?
Can they assist you in creative decision-making?
Can you guide them to grow in strange places and forms?
When I started thinking about games from the lofty concept of "biomaterials," I suddenly realized I couldn't remember what games I loved playing when I was little (maybe I wasn't very brave). So I went and asked my relatives and friends: "Have you played any games with living things before?"
Trang: Mocking the neighbor's dog, stealing fish from the neighbor's pond to sell, catching crickets/chickens/dogs and making them fight, buffalo fighting on New Year (the losing and winning buffalos both die), making the cat think you're speaking cat language
Ellie: Riding two goats running side by side, catching tadpoles and frogs, (throwing stones) directing flocks of birds
Ujeza: Fighting with dogs, playing hide-and-seek with chickens; if the human wins there are eggs to eat, if the chicken wins there are chicks, chickens learn to hide their eggs
Gaurish: Accidentally putting a bat in the pocket thinking it’s a wallet
Yutaro: Shaping mud into shiny round balls and hiding them from kids who search and destroy them. Mud is full of life!
Leo: Building stone dams in small streams (never succeeded but that's where the fun lies), building sandcastles
Grandma: When we were little we made small animals by weaving dog-tail grass, played the "pull root" competition with birch leaves, used flower petals to "fortune tell" endlessly. With those common flowers with more than seven petals 🌸, we'd pluck one petal at a time while muttering (yes, no, good, bad, want, don't want, go, don't go...) until the last petal made the final decision.
Listening to them I feel alive, and interestingly we identified a few patterns: participating in or promoting fights, doing construction and weaving, communicating or consulting. And we started wondering about some questions too. Like Trang said "Are there non-animal cruelty ways to play?" Ellie and I wondered "These are all quick games, can we play with longer growth processes?" Grandma's petal fortune-telling made Nana and I think about our creative decision-making difficulties, "Is there any structure in nature that can assist us in making decisions about creative questions?"
III. Research Questions
When does matter become alive?
When does a living thing become a material, fluid, solid?
What benefits does disorder bring to life?
What is the optimal level of disorder for each life form? For each question?
How do living things and who play games?
The petal fortune-telling game Grandma played is what fascinates me most. She said "It can't really be called fortune-telling, just helping you make up your mind." This made me think of the process of making this game, as well as doing conceptual modeling in the lab. I often go "Oh, there are so many material options which one should I choose?" or "I have many thoughts after observing but how do I order them?" or "There's not enough information to confirm which option is better, which one should I pick?" Making decisions with incomplete information is a necessary part of research. Even systems with definite rules can be deduced to appear completely random and hard to predict. Not to mention life and projects influenced by many biological and social factors. Moreover, due to the observer effect and viewpoint bias, obtaining complete information is also impossible.1
In the analytical methods course in college, I was exposed to the idea of "treating research as a stochastic decision process."2
I find this definition quite apt, because research is like other creative endeavors - a project with multiple parts and uncertainties. So how do you make decisions in the random process of creative work or research with incomplete information? This paper felt that the most naive method is to simply order the parts from simple to difficult and complete them one by one. But the problem with this is that the most difficult part may make you realize you need to completely change the other parts and start over, wasting a lot of time and effort. It felt a smarter method, within the limits of available information, is to order by "how much information will be gained by completing this part." This way, although you may have to do the hardest task first, it will reduce the tragedy of getting to the end only to find you have to start over. This method emphasizes efficiency and is suitable for quickly grasping the key and making improvements when encountering trouble in the lab. I feel that fortune-telling and using analogies to make interpretations and decisions based on external structures rather than reasoning is also a way to deal with randomness and unknowns. Analogy projects the similar structure of a problem onto something else that has already been solved, and then adjusts to derive possible solutions to the original problem. In this process, you need to find targets to project meaning onto, you need to explore, but exploration also needs to be balanced with verification.
I thought of a recent theoretical question I read: "How do organisms modify their microscopic environments to buffer against harmful environmental fluctuations while still allowing exchange of energy, matter and information with the macroscopic world? Examples include maintaining intact protein assemblies under different external mechanical and chemical stimuli, insects navigating using variable celestial cues, and colonies changing shape to withstand mechanical stress and regulate overall temperature. These are all complex systems where individual building blocks (proteins, cells, plants, insects, etc.) can sense their microscopic environments and react in life-preserving ways; typically, this response alters the macroscopic environment of the individual, thereby creating persistent coupling between individuals, collectives and environments. In active bio-physical systems, disorder may confer an advantage: ordered systems are stable and predictable but have limited exploratory capacity — a critically important trait for life in fluctuating environments. So what is the optimal degree of disorder for each system?"3
I chose the yeast system because in our lab we use agar plated with yeast to feed fruit flies. I privately kept some discarded agar plates, and found that when the agar dried out too much it would crack, while the yeast would grow in strange patterns on the surface. (Though actually in my pictures the patterns are just dehydration patterns in the agar, not yeast growth!) Yeast growth and the food and environmental information it can explore at its tips form a feedback loop. Yeast is a multi-cellular colony integrated from single cells, with cooperative behaviors like flocculation and sharing digested sugars.4
I feel its patterns resemble a graph, branching out from the center or multiple intersecting points. Drying is a physical process, but the elastic agar has randomness in where it cracks. Human creative problems (with unknown ordering or trade-offs) could perhaps be projected onto a graph, achieving an suitable degree of chaos/order/rhythm in the non-logical regions based on time and quantity constraints. The types of problems suited to this structure are limited, likely not reasoning or efficacy problems, but rather problems needing new metaphorical carriers and rhythm control. What kinds of questions do or don't fit this shape?
Next Steps
The more I explore this topic, the bigger it gets, with many open directions waiting to be tried. I hope to have the opportunity to focus on compiling more fun research projects to share with everyone skilled at expression and play. This game jam forced me to quickly come up with a game mechanism, and I took the opportunity to organize notes on related literature, which was very rewarding. Watching everyone's games also taught me a lot: the crowd energy at the live demos was so strong. Kerrui went straight out onto the street and played out a game as he went, eliminating the gap between mental planning and actual testing. This made me feel that first principles and hands-on work can happen in many ways.
Footnotes
Simple walkthrough in this lecture video.
This question is from Orit Peleg. In her lab in the computer science and complex systems department at the University of Colorado Boulder, she mainly studies how noisy living systems perceive locally. They recently used multi-angle cameras to film the synchronous flashing of fireflies during mating season, and then used coupled oscillators and other mathematical models to explain these patterns. I really like her toolbox and her attitude towards empiricism and theory: "You need to pick models suitable for your biological question, rather than just randomly applying one model." You can see her talks and papers on her lab website.
The 2013 paper by Van Dyken et al. is titled "Spatial population expansion promotes the evolution of cooperation in an experimental Prisoner's Dilemma". The baker's yeast you can buy at the supermarket is also a favorite of microbiology labs - this yeast has two traits: metabolic cooperation and inter-species flocculation. Metabolic cooperation means that some mutant strains in the yeast population hold the invertase enzyme, expending their own energy to process sugars in the environment into a form other yeast cells can directly digest. Inter-species flocculation refers to how single-celled yeasts will "flocculate" (clump together) when reaching a certain density, forming a multi-cellular structure that floats to the surface of liquids.