live SPORE gameplay and artist dialogue moderating with audience interaction segments
How do we bridge the gap between biological intelligence and synthetic simulation?
Don’t Hate the Player brings together contemporary artist Brandon Tay, and educator, researcher, and artist Jenn Leung, for an artists conversation conducted through a live gameplay of SPORE, the 2008 life-simulation game in which players design and evolve an organism from single cell to spacefaring species. Structured as a real-time encounter with a prebuilt game system of creation, adaptation, and expansion, the program asks what it means to think through a game whose central premise is the production of life as image, behaviour and code.
In this format, gameplay is not merely a supplement to discussion, but its generative ground itself. As creatures are assembled, modified, and guided through shifting environments, the artists reflect on worldbuilding as both aesthetic and systematic practice: how forms emerge through constraint, how agency is distributed across interfaces and rulesets, and how speculative worlds encode assumptions about evolution, intelligence, collectivity and progress.
Treating the game as a live conversational apparatus, Don’t Hate the Player, moves towards a more unstable and process-based exchange. The game becomes a shared field for thinking about contemporary image culture, digital embodiment, “artificial” life and politics of simulation. What emerges is not only a dialogue, but a public experiment in thinking through play.
presented by TONEWENTITIES (SG) and Institution of Niche
Twenty Alpha, Hong Kong
