The One Night Project: Alice in Candy Land edition

University of California, San Diego, 11 May 2007

Staged by, J. Tanner Cusick

 

 

 

Thesis:

 

It is a crime that a school with world class resources, faculty, and funding should feel like a community college. Though it certainly does not appear so on its glossy, expensive surface, day in, day out, UCSD has that mercenary vibe of a commuter school: people drive in, pray for costly parking, attend to their business, and then leave as soon as they can—preferably before rush hour. And no new building or top-down social programming will change this. It sounds like a vicious chicken and egg scenario, but the fact remains that a close-knit community—which the administrators and campus planners all really do say they want—cannot exist until it feels like a close-knit community.

    A good community is a bubble of sorts, fragile and transparent, but still somehow set off from and floating above the rest of the scary world outside. Which is not to say that it never touches down in that world, nor is it to say that it shouldn’t engage with it. It is merely to stress that any great college, as UCSD so obviously strives to be considered, must be a haven for interesting, creative, inspired, motivated people. A place for innovation and the inevitable mistakes along the way.

    In a word, it must feel safe. All the consequences of the real world should not fully apply here. In as much as possible, the repercussions should be suspended, if only temporarily and within this small sphere that we call a place of learning. It may all be a business, but it should feel like a refuge—a refuge filled with trampolines, a vast springboard into the realm of the as-yet-un-thought-of (where it would nevertheless be lovely to find a few nets strung about in anticipation of our miscues).

 

 

Mission:

 

Try asking. See who says yes.

    Can I soundtrack the Talking Trees for the weekend?

    Yes.

    Can I throw a party underneath the library, with music and chalk drawings?

    Yes.

    Oh. Really?

    Yes.

    Wow. Fine then, thank you.

 

 

So, the Alice in Candy Land event. Everyone comes in costume, as a character. 

 

 

Three-Dimensional Human Candy Land With Free Will Modifications

 

The Rules:

 

A player draws one card. She then has 2 options.

 

1. She may play it on herself, moving forward to the color on the card.

 

or

 

2. If there are any players on the board ahead of her, she may play the card on one of them instead.

 

When a card is played on someone other than oneself, the two involved players must duel.

    They remain on their squares and, in the manner of Rock, Paper, Scissors, they call out “Once! Twice! Thrice! Shoot!” On “shoot” the players must state their weapon of choice, which can be ANYTHING EXCEPT rock, paper, or scissors.

    The panel of Hallucinatory Arbiters will then declare a winner. (Should there be an even number of arbiters, and should a split decision result, the arbiters must then duel in the same manner, and an impromptu “temporary panel” must be formed to then decide the outcome of the arbiter duel.) The winner (of the initial two-player duel) moves forward to the next square that matches the color of the drawn card. The loser moves back to the last square of the same color.*

        *In the event that a picture card is drawn and played on another, a duel is still necessary. However, in this special instance, it is only the loser who moves, going to the picture square in question.

 

 

For example, an account from Red, aka King Kandy, aka Lord Trash:

 

As hallucinatory arbiters, we tried to be as fair as possible by deriving as much as possible from the proposed situation in order to determine the winning outcome. Therefore, when a "golden robotic monkey" came out against a "delicious melon jungle", we had to assume that the monkey, however robotic, would not resist over-indulging in the sweet fruit. After asking for clarification that the delicious melons were, in fact, ripe and juicy, we justly determined that the golden monkey's electronics would be permanently damaged by the melons, however many he might have crushed under his golden feet in the meantime. In this manner, we arbitrated every manner of proposed conflict, from “pirates riding/wearing unicorns” (depending on which judge you asked) to “Jesus' Mammary Glands”. The first game was won, barely, by two pretty girls who threw out "Satan's 666 penises bitch-slapping your face" against a Brit-spoken "the corporeal manifestation of a psychedelic grocery store customer". That was a tough call, I'll admit.

 

 

This is all absurd of course, but that’s a large part of the point. Taking inspiration from the New Games Movement—inventors of such summer camp classics as “The Human Knot”, “The Trust Fall”, and everyone’s favorite, “There Ain’t No Flies On Us Guys”—I wanted to make a similar gesture. I wanted to provide not a competition, but an excuse. I wanted to show people that things can happen here, with only a minimal amount of effort, planning, and red tape. I wanted people to come out and see how many other people there are around this place, just like them, just looking for a reason to play, just looking for something to be interested in.

 

 

In addition to the Human Candy Land game, we buried pirate and ninja supplies all over campus—but there were only a few maps. So people formed treasure-hunting teams. We traversed the campus, constantly running into friends and charming new strangers throughout the night, the groups expanding, contracting, merging, and disappearing accordingly.

 

 

The only goal was sunrise, the only purpose was silliness for the sake of itself.  Perhaps we shouldn’t need excuses to engage in such silliness, but we do.

    And what a lovely, elaborate excuse the night turned out to be. And too, finally, it wasn’t that hard. No one got hurt, and no one got arrested. But then, why should they? I feel the gauntlet has been gently tossed down—my only hope now is that interesting others will feel compelled to pick it up and carry it to ever more imaginative ends.