"Political, unpredictable and replete with ass puns, Asses.Masses is, on the one hand, a fairly rudimentary-looking video game made by Canadian artists Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim with a small team of collaborators. But the setting in a theatre, surrounded by others, everybody shouting advice and opinions and working together on puzzles transforms it into a piece of collective performance art."
"The game opens with a series of questions, mostly about donkeys, some in different languages, and quickly it becomes obvious that you have to work together to get them right. Someone in our crowd spoke Spanish; another knew the answer to an engineering question; I knew, somehow, that a female donkey is called a jennet. This is what makes the game a collective experience."
More than eight hours were spent in a theatre playing a video game about donkeys, reincarnation and organised labour with around 70 people. The game is a simple-looking creation by Canadian artists Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim and collaborators; the theatrical setting and collective shouting and collaboration transform play into shared performance. A single controller on a plinth makes whoever takes it the crowd's avatar. The game begins with multilingual quizzes that require cooperative knowledge, prompting participants to combine skills. Players guide a cast of donkeys through ten chapters to reclaim jobs from farm machines, reflecting on industrialisation, collective action and labour politics, with humour and explicit content warnings.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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