Pay-to-Play it Forward

 pp200805 Pay to Play Emeralda: Pay it forward, you Gates Prize Winners!  

 In a flash of inspiration, he comes closer to solving the biggest riddle of his teaching artist career: how to finance the development of the game he calls, “Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life.” The solution is “Pay to Play,” as people buy artistscrip.

Years of playing with no wins

I’ve been working it seems all my life on life’s game, one writer called “The Game of Life.” Her name is Florence Scovill Shinn and her book, “How to Play the Game of Life” was introduced to me by a videographer I hired to document the Wapato High School Class Reunion in 1995. It was by chance she was a fan of Shinn. I located the book, read it, and I read it again.

It’s another long story how I built my library of good reads that constitute my game, Emeralda. Subtitled, Games for the gifts of life, I’ve been playing this game for decades, and the one puzzle I’ve never solved is how to play it forward. That is, I’ve never figured out how to explain it so other people could play it.

I gave up trying years ago, but I never gave up trying to win my game. It’s like someone playing Solitaire – knowing all the rules and making all the right moves but never once getting the payoff. On a computer screen, it’s that cascading flow of cards that one gets when winning.

Yet, every morning for the past twenty or thirty years, I play and play. Anyone watching over my shoulder (Emeralda is mostly a computer game) would not think it to be much fun any more than someone watching a chess player yet who knows nothing about chess.

 To be an artist takes OCD

Lately I have been considering the degree of my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, OCD, society’s name for sticking to a task until it is done. In our shutdown for the virus, for example, my wife Lynda and I assembled puzzles to help pass the time. If we were chess players, we might have been playing chess. Games are ways to pass the time in solitary, which can be a good thing in times like this and at our age – 78 years.

OCD may be a disorder when it is an inconvenience to ordinary living, but for many tasks in life it’s not a disorder but a handy thing to have. Emeralda may require OCD. For example, I have a compulsion to share my game with other people. One might say I am obsessed with sharing this game. So much so that I think about it all day.

Whatever I am doing, and usually it is something I do with the aid of computer software, I am conscious of Emeralda play. Play might be the wrong word because play implies wasting time or doing frivolous, trivial things when there is work to be done. Society, and this is true of hard-working people especially, have no respect for someone who is playing when they could be helping with important tasks.

For example, I was helping Tom Kughler making, marketing and selling Mini Halfwood Presses for years. Our friendly UPS delivery woman, meeting my wife one day on her rounds, asked my wife, “Is Bill still farting around with his presses?” That said a lot about workers. I wasn’t offended – not at all – when Lynda told me this anecdote. It’s an in-joke.

My point is that things are not what they appear, and as I tap away on my keyboard writing yet another essay to add to thousands I have already logged on these devices, I am conscious there is work to be done – serious work – and especially in American education.

A teaching artist, today, might learn Emeralda. It is not only for teaching artist that I am designing Emeralda. It is for anyone who is interested in education and also in art – specifically printmaking.

To all the people who have touched my life is over my 50-year career, I want to offer my game by sharing all my art. [Interesting typo here because this part of the essay was dictated online, and “art” came out “heart” - which is also true!]

To achieve this, I invented a pay-to-play method. Pay-to-play is well known in the video game business. You pay a dollar or two to download and play a video game. It works with casual games.

Emeralda, however, it's not a casual game. Not the way I design it.

Pay-to-play, in the way I tell it, means pay to play it forward. It means pay for shares and the money goes to develop Emeralda. In that way I bring Emeralda into a playable state to be played by other people, not just me.

The shares people buy are called artiscrip. Buy my artiscrip and one owns my art collectively with other investors. It is like owning shares in a game company but without all the typical IPO brouhaha and legalese.

I feel it's necessary in these times to come forward with a radical, new approach to develop online education in the arts, focused on printmaking.

The time is right. Printmaking teachers all over America are shut out to their studio classrooms. They need a class their students can experience online. Online is no substitute for real studios, but it promises to help students learning about the printmaking world.

In this mode of learning, one will not find old wine in a new bottle. This is not a printmaking class like those I took as a student nor like the classes I taught. Only in one regard is my idea similar, and that is the way my students learned teamwork.

When I taught printmaking at the University Of Washington, I discovered the key value of learning printmaking was in sharing the studios, the etching press, or the lithograph press. Some of the tools, like expensive large rollers, were shared. The list is long.

In fact, everything in the studio was shared. Naturally, in such a complicated setting, management was key to success. In the end it was more than I could handle, and I turned over management to the students and, to my surprise, I had added another dimension to my course.

Summing up, Emeralda is the manifestation of everything I learned and taught in college. Now, partly because of the emergency printmaking teachers face, I offer part of the solution. I ask all those who supported my work for the past 50 years to come forward and buy artiscrip so I can play it forward.