This movement that I have called ludoztli (making games) exhorts the artist to stop making non interactive art, and break the wall between the art object and the passive viewer.

Learn about the three board games I created based on the political frontier between México and the United States. With them, I attempt to promote discourse and interest among players about the reality of the border.

Check material by other artists and designers that make use of games to promote their social concerns and perspectives

My name is Francisco Ortega-Grimaldo, a Doctor in Critical Studies and Artistic Practices. I work as an Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University’s School of Art.

Observance:
(the contents is taken from pages 56 to 67 of my August 2008 dissertation)

The Game at a Glance : click over the images to view them in higher resolution (1000 x 750 px)

I came up with the idea of creating the game of Observance in response to the July 28, 2007 rejection of the U.S. Senate to revise the Immigration Reform Bill. I called the game observance because that is what people do when they are faced with the process of illegal migration: The immigrants observe the territory to see if they are being watched or followed; The border patrol observes the area in search of these immigrants and tries to stop them.

The game then presents the drama of illegal immigration in some isolated area of the border between México and the U.S. Observance takes after the mechanics of the game Battleship® in two aspects: First, this is a 2 player game, where each player takes the role of one particular regime: the Border Patrol agents (BP) or the Illegal Aliens (IA) (Figures 3.10 and 3.11). Secondly, Observance uses 2 sets of coordinates, one for each player; the set runs from 1 to 9 horizontally and from A to G vertically.

Each player has six game pieces, or characters (see figures 3.10. and 3.11). All characters have names and background stories that are included in the rules. The reason for this is to give a humanistic perspective to the abstracted product. A game piece is not just an object since it represents a person who has a reason for being there and acting in a particular way. For example, character one for the BP set is Mark (Figure 3.13), a 30 year-old African American man who wanted to enroll in the U.S. Air Force but was not accepted. He suspects the reasons for this failure are racist and, instead of wasting more time, he decides to serve his country in the Border Patrol Agency since they promised him pilot training after serving for a few years.

In contrast, in the IA set includes Paco, a 12-year-old kid from Veracruz who expects to find his parents in Nevada (Figure 3.14). I hesitated to keep this character in the game because, very recently, a movie came out called La Misma Luna (Title translated in the U.S. as Under the Same Moon, 2007) that is based on a similar topic. In the end, I figured that the topic is very generic and there is nothing wrong with telling similar stories.

Right before finishing the design of the game, I decided to add two particular characters on the U.S. side: Mr. and Ms. Minuteman (Figure 3.15). In the times of the American Revolution, the Minuteman were a special militia force always prepared for any type of attack, and “their constant state of readiness at ‘a minute’s notice’ earned them the title, Minuteman” (The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, 2004, para. 1). Today, the name has been taken by civilians who act like a militia in an effort to find a solution to the “uncontrollable” immigration crisis. In the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps web site, their mission statement reads:

It is the mission of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps to see the borders and coastal boundaries of the United States secured against the unlawful and unauthorized entry of all individuals, contraband, and foreign military. We will employ all means of civil protest, demonstration, and political lobbying to accomplish this goal. (aboutus.php)

Under the words defense and freedom, many acts of racism and violence against immigrants by the minuteman have taken place throughout the border (El Diario, 2008). There have been direct associations between some chapters of the minuteman with extremist groups like the neo-Nazis and the KKK (El Diario, 2007). In 2005, Chris Simcox, the leader of the minuteman stated, and I paraphrase, that their only concern was to bring back the attention of the nation to a government that has failed in defending the border (El Diario, 2006). But since then, they have served as immigrant capturers and terrorists. Personally, I have seen pictures of minuteman groups preparing for their routine searches as if they where preparing for a picnic: the whole family joins in. They carry guns and other types of weapons as if they were out for hunting.

The function of Mr. and Ms. Minuteman in Observance is not yet well determined. Originally, I added them to make a distinction between capturing immigrants and killing immigrants. But saying that the minuteman kill immigrants, although it has not been proven or disproven, it is a very strong statement based on rumors and secondhand tales. To this point, I have not read anything that I can use to indict members of the minuteman with murder in relation to their anti-immigration campaigns. Still, I believe that their presence in the evolution of the border is something worth telling, and it is important to make a distinction between the capture of immigrants by official forces and those made by civilian ones.

For any audience that knows the game of Battleship®, the first impression they get is that Observance is a rip-off or just a theme variation, but Observance does differ in many other ways: to begin, each player has a different goal to reach. The player acting as the Border Patrol (BP) must capture all Illegal Aliens (IA). On the other hand, the IA player has to search and find a green card that the BP player has hidden between coordinates A-2 and A-8 in the stage of preparation for the game (Figure 3.16). The BP player also hides 2 churches in any coordinate of line D that if found by the IA player, can be used as sanctuary for political asylum and the BP player cannot harm or capture those aliens while they remain in the church (Figure 3.17). When the IA player finally finds the green card coordinate, he or she needs to move all of the remaining aliens to it as quickly as possible before the BP catches them.

The reason I included churches in the game is because on August 19, 2007, a woman by the name of Elvira Arellano was deported after living under sanctuary for 12 months in a church in Chicago (El Diario, 2007b). This attracted my attention for two reasons: (1) there are still places in the U.S. that protect the cause of any immigrant, and (2) that the U.S. government respected the church’s status as political asylum for so long. I had to add this in some way, and I think the abstraction of the church element in the game perfectly reflects this anecdote.

In contrast to Battleship®, where the naval ships need to be set before the game begins, the characters in Observance do not begin in the coordinate set; instead, they step into it using a pair of dice. The dice also help specify the amount of steps that each character can take in each turn (Figure 3.18). The IA player enters his or her characters through any coordinate of line G (Figure 3.19), which is still a section of the Rio Grand or Río Bravo for Mexicans, and the goal is to move the characters up to line D to look for a church or directly to line A to look for the green card.

The BP player enters characters either through coordinate A-1 or A-9; these are the Border Patrol Headquarters (Figure 3.20). As soon as the BP characters get into the game board, they can start looking for immigrants by using advanced technology that can help them search in four different coordinates at the same time; in the game, these are called search formats (Figure 3.21). The emphasis on the difference between the resources that immigrants have and the resources the border patrol agency has had access to for decades was inspired by the words of Timothy J. Dunn’s book (1996) about the practice of military tactics and equipment and other types of military experimentation on the border.

In 2005, the U.S. Congress gave unconditional power to the Department of Homeland Security to begin the construction of a wall along the México-U.S. border (El Diario, 2008b). This wall has become subject of uncountable critiques on many levels: social, cultural, political, and environmental. Still, the U.S. Congress is determined to continue with this project regardless of any opinions. Since this is an important phenomenon on the border, I implemented the wall element into the game. As the game of Observance evolves, the BP player will be blocking the border just where the Rio Grand starts (line E) by constructing a black wall. This wall will not entirely close the border, but can redirect the entrance of any alien to a very specific place where the BP could be patently waiting for their capture (Figure 3.22).

A complete game of Observance consists of two sets, where player 1 plays the part of the BP and player 2 plays as the IA, and then they switch positions. This detail in the mechanics of the game is important because it presents the opportunity of being “the other” to the players, and lets them think about the consequences of their actions in relation to their current or future position in the game. If we consider that a player’s motivation to play is to win, in Observance, it does not matter if you are protecting a country’s borders or violating them: the important thing is to reach your goal. In this case, it becomes an issue of necessity and not an issue of ethics, which is a point that I think important to consider when looking at the real-life actions of both the border defense and immigrants. A set is over when all aliens are no longer on the game board because some have been captured by the patrol and others have found their way to the green card. After the second set, the player who was able to lead more aliens to the green card, wins the game.