Board Game Redesign

Project #1: Board Game Redesign

This is an art project that my partner, Payden Thompson, and I collaborated on. Our assignment was to recreate or design a board game that people were familiar with into one that touched upon social aspects or stigmas. During the initial brainstorm, we wanted to people to learn about social ignorance or pretense of people not acknowledging what is happening in the American Country. We had both decided upon the touching subject of racism. Unfortunately racism still happens in this day and age.   

Once we chose our desired topic, we brainstormed about which game we would like to attempt and redesigned. Individually we wanted to do either The Game of Life or Guess Who. We had also decided on making our broad topic specific and in that time the Global Awards were the most talked about. We came to the conclusion that we should hit upon the subject of racism in the nomination and bring to the attention of all the male white dominated awards. After that, all we had to do was decide upon which game was best suited in portraying the subject effectively. That was when we decided to recreate guess who in a way that represented the discrimination that so infamously was being conducted in the Global Awards. 

We had dedicated many hours into researching how many African American and ethnic Actors/Actresses were nominated for awards and had won them. The research in itself was quite overwhelming just in uncovering how dominated it was by the white male community. After our research phase, we started construction on our table top game. Payden was in charge of recreateing the cards and painting whilst I was researching upon our nominees, retouching the rules, and creating a simple cheat sheet. It was quite the task but the most trouble we came up with was finding the plastic piece in order to recreate the game fully. 

In Conclusion, after beautifully recreating the game, our classmates had given the game a go and found out much more information on racism in the Global Awards than they were aware of. They believed that the recreated game was well thought of and was executed quite well. I thought that this project was a fun way to add art, social constructs, and games all in one. In the picture below is one of the games I found really interesting and fun to play. It's a game that touches upon life after prison. It definitely set my eyes open and liked playing the game mainly because of the difficulty of getting out or prison permanently.