It’s ‘happening’ on campus

Students in associate professor Celia Pearce’s Experimental Game Design class on Friday staged a “happening” in the Ryder Hall atrium, which featured a real-life game in which “players” on the second and third floors tried to toss different colored bandanas into cardboard boxes on top of students who moved around on the ground floor. The exercise, based on the first “happenings” pioneered by performance artist Allan Kaprow in the 1960s and 1970s, was intended to show how artists have used games and game design theories in their work. According to Kaprow, a happening was “a game, an adventure, a number of activities engaged in by participants for the sake of playing.”

Photo by Brooks Canaday/Northeastern University.