Probationary is one of a number of artworks by Hwa Young Jung using a principle she calls “found formats”. Although Hwa Young has coined this term, it draws on a strain of art practices that frequently have social involvement. For example, in Jeremy Deller’s work The Battle of Orgreave (2001), he uses the “found format” of historical re-enactment, more commonly associated with more distant histories in order to re-stage an infamous moment of police brutality from the 1984 miner’s strike. Deller uses our cultural familiarity with historical re-enactments (for example from village fetes, or amateur dramatics displays at castles etc), in order to provide a framework by which an audience can look at – even be involved in – his chosen subject. As Deller observes, with this work he “went from being an artist who makes things, to being an artist who makes things happen.”
The found format has a particular relationship to activism, in that it opens the work up to participants and effects that go beyond those conventionally attributed to art objects, and allows for an interaction beyond the surface-level appreciation given to public realm works.
Hwa Young has used several “found formats” in her practice, including a Murder Mystery dinner, an Improv Night, a Sports Day, an Escape Room, and various game formats, Board Games, Card Games, table top RGP games; in each case putting the format’s cultural associations in tension with new content and contexts. Hwa Young’s use of the found format, similarly to Deller’s, has allowed her to bring audiences into art experiences without relying on their awareness or comfort with the ‘rules of engagement’ of art, galleries, theatres etc. In the case of games, there is a stronger culturally-encoded awareness of how and why to play them than there is around, for example, how and why to look at a painting, or read a poem. In the sense that it uses a familiar format in order to open itself to audience participation, such an approach also differs from other art practices that break down culturally encoded ways of thinking in order to engage.
In the 1970s, Augusto Boal developed The Theatre of the Oppressed a combination of tactics and forms that encouraged interchange between audiences and actors, offering a rehearsal of radical potential by subverting the power structure (and ‘rules’) of theatre. Conversely, the “found format” (although it often asks for participation, and in non-hierarchical settings), doubles down on existing structures, rules and accepted ways of behaving, in order to produce a situation in which participants are comfortable with the mode of engagement. The addition that “found format” artworks make then, is in the content and context in which the game is played. Like any “found” practice, such as found text, found object, the “found format” offers potentials for decontextualizing, recontextualising, defamiliarising the found thing – and exposing it to new people and conceptual paradigms. In the case of Deller’s work, the found format of historical re-enactment is put in tension with the material he is working with – most notably the juxtaposition of the working class men who were involved in the original “battle”, and the ongoing political issues around police and governmental brutality, with the nominally bourgeois and nostalgic pursuit of historical re-enactment.
Board games, from Monopoly to the Game of Life, contain within them the structures and values of the society they were produced in. Taking this as a starting point, Probationary reflects the structures and values of men who are subject to the criminal justice system. Six men on probation took part in workshops with Hwa Young in developing this game, their experiences rendered into playable characters and game mechanics. The result is that players of the game are given embodied insight into these experiences. Additionally because of specific factors about the game-play discussed below, the game requires players to reflect on the relationship between rules givers and rule takers, and the way that the agency of both is determined by the rules themselves.
The tendency to think of games as tools is deeply embedded in Western culture. As far back as Plato, games have been proposed as “a means of directing children’s tastes and inclinations to the role they will fulfil as adults.” Games can also be tools for research and a way of looking. In his influential 1970 book “Serious Games” Clark C. Abt says, “a game is a particular way of looking at something, anything". The history of serious gaming, has frequently used this ‘particular way’ to embody a particular political flavour to the learning experience. In Victorian England, this tendency was conjoined with the belief that education has a moral imperative, resulting in games such as The Mansion of Happiness (1843), “An instructive moral and entertaining amusement”. Another notorious example of this, is the predecessor to Monopoly, called The Landlord’s Game, which was invented in 1903 by Elizabeth Magie explicitly as a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences”.
This point is that the purpose of these conversations is to discover the “rules”. It’s like life - a game whose purpose is to discover the rules, which rules are always changing and undiscoverable.
Gregory Bateson
Gameplay
Like The Landlord’s Game, Probationary’s gameplay is such that it requires the player to engage in the often oppressive and difficult quality of systems of exchange and administration, and offers a particular way of looking at the regime of life on licence. An example of this: in Probationary, players are asked to pick up cards, that earn or lose them tokens representing their Emotional Wellbeing and Employable Skills each of which have different points-values. The implication is that the more Emotion and Skills tokens you have, the better you are doing in the game. Frequently however, a roll of the dice can result in you picking an “Emotional” card, which says ““You have broken the rules and feel happy. Lose all your e(motional) tokens”. This irascibility of the game, its unfairness, is one of the key factors that players learn about life on licence, which the participants in Hwa Young’s workshops wanted to communicate about their experiences.
However, Probationary is not particularly a communcation tool. It is art experience, through which Hwa Young Jung aims to transform the specific experiences of six men into social change.
The Magic Circle, and Rules as Method
Johan Huizinga devised the term “magic circle” to describe how games produce politically and emotionally live situations that are in essence indistinguishable from those of the “real world”. The real world, Huizinga suggests, is replete with zones which function like “play-grounds”, including those of the justice system:
Accordingly, when Probationary was played at events held by the MoJ and PPO, players found themselves faced with issues that were central to their professional life, and the decisions they discuss daily, but in a form that amplified the “play-ground like” quality of the rules that determined them. The game, played during work hours and at their places of work, developed a form of self-referentiality and enabled a meta-critique of the justice system in a way that was absent from the playing experience of people outside the profession.
The MoJ gameplay was presented as an ‘ice breaker’ team building exercise during an awayday, and the PPO game was held in the workplace. In both cases, the game disrupted their normal work patterns through a mise en abyme, in which the conditions of work were played back to participants from an unconventional perspective. In these instances, Hwa Young played the role of “The Eye”, responsible for dictating and carrying out the rules, whereas the employees of the probation system took the role of the men on licence. Clearly, the empathic potential of the game was reinforced by this set up, in ways that have been observed of more high tech, VR game situations, such as The New York Times’ project The Displaced (2015). But whereas the medium of VR empathy is bodily, the medium of board games such as Probationary, is explicitly rules and they way they’re adhered to and inform decisions: the minimalistic, stripped back approach of Probationary therefore offers a direct formal link to means that people responsible for executing (and sometimes designing) rules-based systems for civic infrastructure have to create change.
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