Just Don’t Smile
Peter Sheehan (2019)Just Don’t Smile was an arcade of interactive games and animations by CMU School of Art undergraduate, Peter Sheehan. Transforming beloved gaming icons into fascist dictators, twisting freemium model games into their exploitative culminations, and depicting queer love between two alien groundhogs, Just Don’t Smile sought to entangle the wires which rigidly order gaming culture. The exhibition presented games that challenged players to think about the relationships present between violence, capital, and play, and the dissociation and dissonance between one’s ethical standards and the real-life high stakes games we constantly find ourselves in. Works in the exhibition included:
- Kitchen Sink (an online (?) multiplayer (?) game)
- Orbitorbi (a thoughtful outer space revenge love story)
- I, Pencil: An Adaptation of Leonard Read’s Fairy Tale (an in-browser pencil clicker)
- 1000 Places to See in the Dark (a dark travelogue made in Bitsy)
- You, Me, Virus (a dating sim where you play as Influenza)
- Realty (a short text adventure about the housing market and death, in an unfair gothic universe)
- Wario World War III (an animation depicting a disturbing world of fascism and greed)
Just Don’t Smile was made possible with the support of Microgrant #2019-043 from the Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art @ the Frontier. Additional images are available in this archive.
