Wednesday Investigations 2.0 [002]: Human action and the ending of things
On Everest Pipkin and the "World Ending Game"
One afternoon this week, I cried.
I know what you’re saying. “I’ve seen you cry a million times!”
Well, OK, fair. But I don’t think I’ve ever cried when reading the rulebook for a role-playing game. Until now!
The game is Everest Pipkin’s World Ending Game, which arrived in the mail this week. I want to tell you all about it. But, in the typical spirit of our investigations, we’re going to take the long way there.
I think you’ll find the rambling path worthwhile, because Everest Pipkin is a pretty interesting person. Their Twitter bio says they “make games and software in the desert;” this particular tweet says they are “spending [their] whole life trying to make art in the death convulsions of an already-failed disaster empire.” An interesting enough start, even though one might first respond with a shrug: a lot of people make games, a lot of people make software, who isn’t trying to make art under the yoke of capitalism these days? Pipkin, though, is very good at making interesting things under these conditions: some of you might be familiar with their “Image Scrubber,” a browser-based tool released during the 2020 George Floyd uprising, which safely anonymizes photos of protestors as well as removing potentially-incriminating exchangeable image file format (Exif) metadata.
Pipkin’s politics and activism is an important part of their overall project, but if the picture I’ve drawn so far is evoking images of a standard-issue “hacktivist,” then I’m probably leading you in the wrong direction. A corrective might be offered by their Wikipedia page, which notes says that Everest Pipkin “produces intimate work with large data sets.” It’s this tension—between the inhuman architecture of big data and the small gestures that make up human intimacy—that gives Pipkin’s work its peculiar force. And when you start to think about huge datasets, and the human traces within them, as the animating tension of Pipkin’s work, you are rewarded with a deeper understanding of Image Scrubber: you can understand it as a particular approach to that tension. In this case, the tension reaches a breaking point. The ethical choice in the case of these protests, Pipkin seems to be saying, is to sever the connection between human and the dataset, to block it, to do whatever we can to keep human faces outside of the grasp of a repressive system and the vast recognition tools with which it has armed itself.
But it’s not always so black and white. Pipkin’s work also engages with systems containing traces of the human to which there is no response of moral rightness, which instead plunge us into unfamiliar forms of moral ambiguity. Take, for instance, Pipkin’s earlier project “Lacework,” undertaken in 2019 and the pandemic spring of 2020, when they explored MIT’s “Moments in Time” dataset.
The “Moments in Time” dataset is intended to train AI systems to recognize 339 “doing” actions. As Pipkin describes it, “[i]t contains one million, 3-second videos scraped from websites like YouTube and Flickr, each tagged with a single verb like asking, resting, snowing or praying.” (They were tagged, not entirely incidentally, by low-paid workers sourced by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk work-sourcing system, which Pipkin has also spent time in as a worker.)
Pipkin was interested in making video art out of this database, and once they had gained access to it they moved through it haphazardly. In their essay “On Lacework,” they describe their initial process—“dipping into specific verbs, pulling up a few dozen random videos”—the same way you or I might do if we were poking around in there.
Then they decided to get a little more systematic. They describe how they “pulled roughly 20 folders from the archive by verb—cuddling, hugging, punching, reaching,” and decided to watch all 60,000 videos in those folders. (Fifty hours of video, but only about 6% of the dataset.)
Then, Pipkin writes,
I could have stopped there. But I kept thinking about the rest of the archive—all those other verbs, all this other life. I felt that the videos around touch were not enough of the story. They didn’t say enough about what the dataset was trying to do, what it contained.
I decided I needed to watch the rest of the dataset. This time I started at the top, alphabetically.
Aiming, applauding, arresting, ascending, asking.
“When I first started watching the dataset,” Pipkin writes, “I assumed that the team of researchers who had put it together at MIT had seen the bulk of it, but I’m now convinced that assumption was wrong. This is because so much of the archive is so, so hard to watch.”
The difficulty of watching is also partly to do with consent. Moments in Time severs the relationship between recorded action and original maker. The researchers did not ask for permission to use these videos, and all ownership of- and control over- the image is pulled away from the person who held the camera, and from what that camera depicts.
In the archive, there are moments of extreme emotion and personal vulnerability- tears, screaming, and pain. Moments of questionable consent, including pornography. Racist and fascist imagery. Animal cruelty and torture. And worse; I saw horrible images. I saw dead bodies. I saw human lives end.
“Around hour 250 of the dataset, sometime in late April, I started having The Dream,” Pipkin continues, and at this point I should just point you to the essay itself, which I would hold up as one of the most important pieces of 21st-century art criticism yet written. The video art Pipkin made at the end of their experience is very good; at the time I came across it, in 2020, I took screenshots of the project and worked them into some digital collages I made as one-half of the art collective Churchdoor Lounger. Recognizing, perhaps, that I was just skimming epiphenomenal froth off the surface of Pipkin’s deep and important project, I titled the pieces I made that way “superficial postcards.” Here’s one:
Suffice it to say, after this I was committed to keeping an eye on Pipkin and whatever they were going to get up to next. They’ve done some other interesting projects in the interim, but the one that really caught my eye was this role-playing game (RPG) book, World Ending Game.
I was excited to learn that Pipkin was releasing RPG materials, not least because I have been delving a little bit into RPG design myself these past few years. I got back into dabbling in Dungeons and Dragons in the summer of 2021 and began drawing isometric maps and paper miniatures and wilderness hex tiles and all that wonderful claptrap; now that we’re here in 2022 I’ve begun to actually draft a full-blown homegrown RPG, The Meanings, in which players take on the role of supernatural investigators and researchers on a demon-haunted island. Here’s a teaser graphic, with art from the wonderful Edith Rothwell:
If you’re interested in this project, there’s even a development diary you can peek at (one more place I’m writing now that the future of Twitter is uncertain). I’m also actively looking for playtesters, so just drop me a line if you want to make up a character or play through a sample scenario! The playtesters so far seem to be having fun.
So anyway. My appetite for reading other people’s role-playing game material is at something of an all-time high, and I am pleased to report that we are in what may be a true role-playing game Renaissance: there are more games that ever, from a more diverse crew of creators than ever, and as a consequence the “scene” right now is full of fresh approaches and interesting angles.
So what does an artist like Pipkin bring to the table? In “Lacework,” they are concerned with human activity and its ongoingness, its deepening complexity. They close their essay by writing “I see all these millions of lives, all of this infinite detail, this lacy intricacy that grows ever more granular the closer I get, then grows again, and again.” World Ending Game, by contrast, is concerned with what happens when ongoingness—the long ongoingness that campaign-based games like Dungeons and Dragons invite their players to partake in—comes to an end.
“Many existing game systems excel at climactic final battles or big-stakes adventures, but don't allow you to sit in the aftermath, thinking about all that has come before and imagining what could come after,” Pipkin writes. World Ending Game is a collection of 20 short games that are tools to let you “gather your things, say what you need to say, and walk away from the story you've been telling with confidence and pride.”
On the project page for the game, Pipkin writes:
Think about screenplays and films, or the final episode of a television show that you know will not be renewed. Think about saying goodbye to friends who are moving away. Think about the last day of summer vacation. Think about funerals. Think about the restaurant that closed all those years ago, and the noodles they used to serve. Think about the best birthday party you ever had. Think about putting off the last chapter of a book until tomorrow. Think about grief, and relief. Think about the end of a world. Think about the feeling of emerging from a movie theater into a dark parking lot, under the stars.
So the book—which is lovely—arrived this week, and I flipped through the pages, and I thought about these things, and I thought the endings that I’ve had in my life these past few years, which are many, and my sudden tears caught me by surprise, though they are, of course, nothing if not apt.
A PDF of World Ending Game is $15 over at itch.io; well worth your time if you care about games, narratives, or endings. It includes art from 20 great artists.
What else is new in the role-playing game world? Some of you may already be familiar with MÖRK BORG, a terrific black-metal inspired RPG that came out a few weeks ago, about unhappy people in a miserable Nordic fantasy world. A sequel is now here, adapting the MÖRK BORG rules for a cyberpunk milieu—it’s called CY_BORG, naturally, and it’s absolutely glorious. I’m a fan of the original, but I think the sequel may represent an across-the-board improvement. It looks absolutely glorious:
It didn’t make me cry, though.
Interesting question: where did role-playing games come from in the first place? Most people who know a little bit about the topic would tell you that the genre originates with Dungeons and Dragons. But historian Jon Peterson notes that the original D&D rules don’t use the term “role-playing,” and the game wasn’t marketed as a whole new genre—it was marketed as a fantasy wargame. Peterson’s book The Elusive Shift, which I’ve been trying to get my hands on, “traces the evolution of how role-playing was theorized,” digging up “key essays by D&D early adopters, rescuing from obscurity many first published in now-defunct fanzines.” A great topic; looking forward to reading this at some point.
More on endings: as I was readying this writing for publication, I learned of the death of poet Bernadette Mayer. Among many other accomplishments she is also the author of Memory, a titanic compilation of writing and photographs assembled over the course of July 1971. Essential reading for anyone who is… well, who is interested in intimate work and large data sets. If you’ve read this far in this week’s newsletter, you qualify. I have written about it before, in a past edition of this newsletter.
—JPB, writing from Dedham, MA and Somerville, MA, in the week ending Wednesday, November 23