Produced through workshops with men ‘on licence’, Probationary: The Game of Life on Licence explores the lived experience of being on probation in the form of a board game. The game takes its players on a journey through the lives of four playable characters as they navigate the complexities of the probation system.
The artwork is experienced as ‘happenings’1 where the game is played. This essay looks at the effect of the situation of these happeneings – who is playing and why? – on the artwork. Here, we also use this artwork to consider potential social function of artworks of this nature.
This project was commissioned by Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) with support from the criminology department at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). The brief was to produce an artwork through a series of collaborative creative workshops with men living at an “Approved Premises” (a residential unit which houses ex-offenders) in Merseyside. The artist Hwa Young Jung ran the project through twice-weekly half-day workshops over 5 weeks, producing the board game with collaborators in 3D printing, resin casting, and testing game-play. The resulting game has been played by the men on licence and criminologists at LJMU, by service providers in probation, and by a wide range of players in art and design contexts. The game was played about 70 times, with around 340 players. It takes about 40 minutes to play, minimum 5 players recommended.
Strikingly, players from criminology and probation-professionals alike have tended to emphasise the shortcomings of the game as a staff training tool, whereas those in arts and design contexts have noted the incongruity of the game-play mechanism (which requires the presence of a trained individual – usually the artist – to monitor the turn based play, and distribute in-game rewards and punishments). This exposition of the project works at the intersection of these two observations, considering how they operate as points of tension by which the gameplay-as-artwork magnifies its non-utilitarian function. The game is not a training tool, nor a cultural industries ‘product’, but a privileged object with interactive properties and a social function.
In this exposition we also show how the question of who can and should play the game leads into fascinating critical trajectories unique to interactive arts of this nature: namely, if someone can interact with an artwork as an employee, how can the relation of art and work be recalibrated? What follows is a description of the theoretical basis for gameplay as a critical media artwork, and a tentative framing of the concept of “Art for Civil Servants” as a method for social ‘artivism’.
Criminologists understanding of the game influencing their practice is documented an article in the Probation Quarterly
"Playing for Change: Using artistic methods to explore experiences of probation"
(issue 9 Sept 2018).
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