This week, our main focus was adversarial design, critical play, and reskinning games. I didn’t have a lot of trouble with the readings, but I did fail as the Werewolf moderator, which kept the game running a lot longer than it did. Turns out that the seer pointed at someone who was actually the werewolf, but I thought she was pointing at someone else, so the werewolf walked free. Oops! I felt embarrassed but it’s alright. The other thing I failed at majorly was reskinning Passage. First, I found out that my laptop can’t run Whiskey because Whiskey is only compatible with a certain kind of Apple computer chip that my Macbook does not have. I have an intel chip, which must be the peasant of computer chips, apparently. So instead of Whiskey I am beholden to using Apple’s own app for running Windows software. It was pre installed to my Mac but it is not intuitive at all, so I’d have to look up some tutorials on how to use it. Luckily, Jody let me look off her computer. We had trouble getting Passage to actually open. It kept downloading and adding itself to the file system but never actually opening. Eventually, it opened and then we took the files and opened them in Gimp. We tried to recolor the avatar’s hair pink but it never updated on the game. We made the game crash twice by accidentally deleting files we were duplicating. We never figured out why our changes didn’t show up in the game. I suspect we were editing the wrong file.

Another fail is I still haven’t thought of an idea for my second hack. I’m pretty sure I want to reskin a board game, but I need to figure out what I’m going to do. I’m thinking maybe the Game of Life as a commentary about immigration to the United States. However, I need to find a tasteful way to represent real people’s stories instead of tokenizing them in a board game. I’m thinking of referencing an ethnography I read for another class.