Life as Game: The Boys of Summer and Its Mirroring World 

All images in this article are screenshots of The Boys of Summer, a web-based game created by the artist Mitchell F. Chan

It is the summer of 2003, and I just made my high school’s varsity baseball team. This is the beginning of Mitchell F Chan’s The Boys of Summer (2023), a web-based choose-your-own-adventure game. I have never played baseball, nor have I watched a single game. I am invited to set up my player profile, allocating points across my different abilities on the field: hitting, power, running, throwing, and fielding. I have no idea what I am doing, so I decide to spread these points across the five abilities and pray it turns out well. These starting numbers determine the position that I play on the team and are then reflected onto a set of fundamental statistics on my performance, such as AB (at bat), RBI (runs batted in), BB (balls on balls) and AVG. I accept its calculations and click onwards to progress further in the game. I make it year on year, and soon find myself at a crossroads: do I pursue tertiary education and enroll in university, end my schooling and find work immediately, or chase my dreams and try my luck with getting drafted to become a pro player?  

Chan’s The Boys of Summer places us in the position of a young aspiring athlete. Unlike what one might expect from a sports-based game, we do not step up to the plate and swing our bats at any point. Instead, we progress through his life by making a series of numerical-based decisions: the number of hours he spends studying daily, the amount of debt he accumulates on his credit card, the number of love interests he pursues. The game is designed to involve us in every major decision of the character’s life, such as his first job, having kids, becoming a social media influencer, and so on. The narrative unfolds over our dashboard, bookmarked by the introduction of new tables and charts, presenting updated statistics after each move on our part. In contrast to a game full of action and speed, The Boys of Summer is visually and structurally dominated by statistics. At the end of the game, the result of our gameplay is also summarized in a series of numbers. 

I first came across Chan through his 2017 work, Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, which is widely recognised as one of the earliest artworks minted as a non-fungible token (NFT). The project is named after and builds upon Yves Klein’s 1959 work. It imagines the ways in which NFTs could advance the conceptualist project of separating an artwork’s experience form from its commodity form. Recently, it was also featured in Christoph Büchel’s exhibition “Monte de Pietà” at the Fondazione Prada in Venice, which constructed an articulated network of economic, cultural and spatial references to interrogate the notion of debt as the root of our current societies. Chan’s own interest in economic structures and markets have underscored much of his diverse practice. He often takes the market’s own tools and turns them back onto itself, while raising the important question of what role art plays in it all. 

The Boys of Summer is premised on the game of baseball and its use of statistics, with the player’s athletic performance as a motivator and determinant of game outcomes. Fittingly, baseball is often seen as one of the main areas in which we first began to use statistics to record and evaluate an event and/or person. Alan Schwarz, author of The Numbers Game, states that baseball’s inevitable relationship with statistics dates all the way back to the creation of the game in 1845, with the appearance of the baseball box score, which tallied batters’ runs and outs. [1] In 1964, the researcher Earnshaw Cook publishes Percentage Baseball, the first formal analysis of the sport. Bill James, who is now considered a pioneer that revolutionized the sport, coined “sabermetrics” in 1980 as the statistical study of baseball. This was further popularized by the 2011 movie Moneyball, which starred the likes of Brad Pitt and Chris Pratt, and was based on the 2003 book of the same name by Michael Lewis. Sabermetrics is designed to record the game through statistics and empirical evidence, which is seen to be more objective. It measures a player’s performance in all aspects of the game, especially batting, pitching and fielding, and can be used to predict future games and factor into player management. Chan came into direct contact with sabermetrics when he worked as a research assistant for Bill James one summer and attended Ottawa Lynx minor league games to record data.  [2] While he has left that summer job behind, the sport’s obsession with statistics has stayed with Chan, and is a key inspiration behind the game’s design. 

The baseball field is hardly the only arena in which individuals are recorded, evaluated and managed through numbers. The same can be said in nearly all areas of our lives today. Take matchmaking, for instance. If you are to create a profile on the arranged marriage website, WedMate, you would fill out a marriage biodata. This includes information such as your age, height, educational degree(s) and occupation, effectively summarizing you into a dozen statistical points. At a much broader level, technology companies capture our information, preferences and activities and turn them into data in any and every way possible, often without our explicit consent. They collect vast amounts of personal data from our online activities, which is then fed into algorithms designed to analyze our behavior and predict our future actions. We—or certain aspects of us—exist as data points floating among many others, isolated from the rest of who we are. The pervasive datafication extends into critical aspects of our lives, such as our job prospects and credit scores, down to the most mundane decisions like which Youtube cooking personality should I tune into for my meal prep next week. As a result, our lives are increasingly shaped by invisible forces that quantify them, in ways we are only just beginning to comprehend. 

The aggressive datafication we experience is reflected in The Boys of Summer as our game dashboard fills up with statistics and charts as the program progresses. At the start of the game, we see an image of our character getting ready to swing in the background, with some tables on the side reflecting his basic statistics. Gradually, our dashboard becomes so full that we lose sight of him completely as he is covered by numbers. In my first play, I quickly accepted how my screen filled up with tables after tables. After all, that seems to be a perfect mirror to our realities. 

You start out by feeling as though you get to choose how this plays out. You choose how many hours you spend in a batting cage each day. You choose how to divide your time between working, resting and dating in your adult life. You choose your own path at every turn. Yet this illusion begins to crack after a few tries. In one game, my character, Eduardo does not get drafted by any professional teams or make it to college, so he decides to start working immediately after high school as a shift worker at an Amazon warehouse. I select 8 hours of work a day, at times, even increasing it to 10, in hopes of clearing Eduardo’s credit card debt and increasing his savings. Yet as he continues working away in that warehouse, his debt only seems to be increasing, and it seems like the math isn’t making sense. Similarly, across most of my games, I adopt a similar strategy in Eduardo’s high school years where I allocate 1—1.5 hours to studying each day. However, I end up with different results at graduation each time—sometimes I am offered admissions from Harvard, sometimes I go with Arizona State University for its baseball programme, sometimes I get drafted right away, and other times I head to the Amazon warehouse. 

Despite the similar inputs in each round, I experience drastically different outcomes. This raises an alarming implication, as the math no longer seems to be straightforward or rational. We often hold the assumption that numbers are more reliable and objective, and that if we follow the numbers, we will arrive at where we need to be. The Boys of Summer shows us, however, that this is often untrue, as real life tends to be much messier than a simple equation. Oftentimes, we do not even know what all factors of the equation look like. The game hints at this with the inclusion of a “23andme” test result, providing insights into a number of variables—athletic potential, discipline, and luck, which are predetermined based on genetics, and are outside of our direct control but also an area of influence on our game outcomes. Beyond these numbers, we also do not have access to other information such as Eduardo’s family background, his socioeconomic class, specific cultural context, and more, factors that have structural and lasting implications on our lives, and may also influence his performance. While Eduardo appears to start his dashboard clean and fresh in the abstract and contained environment of the game, these invisible forces seep through. 

What makes The Boys of Summer unique is also Chan’s deep attunement and commitment to the digital medium and the internet. This commitment is palpable in his exploration of code-based projects, his witty social media persona, and most recently, in his weekly Stream and Youtube channel, “Art and Video Games.” The channel is co-hosted with fellow artist Travess Smalley, game developer Matto, and artist and developer Billy Rennenkamp. Each week, they dive into a different game while discussing anything from the aesthetics of games, indie game marketing, to recent exhibitions and notable artworks. True to its title, the channel brings art and video games together seamlessly, reflecting on the interconnections and blurring of the two categories. Institutions have similarly picked up on the evolving dynamics between video game and contemporary art in recent shows, such as in “Game Society” at MMCA and “Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age” at Julia Stoschek Foundation. While these exhibitions bring video games into the gallery space—at times, even building out a fully functional arcade such as in the artist LuYang’s case, Chan’s explorations originate from and prioritize the internet and its native format. This also informs the access and distribution model of The Boys of Summer

While the game is free to play for anyone on the web, its release was also accompanied by a NFT project with 999 avatars that grant you personalized access to the game. These NFTs represent ownership of individual game characters and avatars and can record your game performance. Your in-game results, such as employment income and social followers, can be recorded on the NFT’s metadata. These traits are searchable on the market and can come to play a factor in the sales price of the character NFT. Wade Waldron, for example, is one of the 999 characters. I can see on OpenSea, an NFT marketplace, that he achieved an SAT score of 1,600 (well done) and played the center field position. The center field position appears to be a rare trait, with only 1.6% of NFTs in the project sharing this trait and giving it a market value of 0.06 ether. If I were to purchase a character in the game, I may put up an offer for Wade because of his perfect SAT scores and rare performance traits, or I may be able to select another character who has characteristics I am more favorable towards. The listings hosted on Chan’s own website even lists the top performing players across top home runs, top stolen bases, and top rate. This additional layer of market interaction—the buying and trading of in-game characters—seems to mimic the real-world market of buying and trading professional athletes or exchanging baseball cards. The NFT sales also provide an alternative revenue stream for the artist, while keeping the game free and open for all to play. The characters resale market seems to be stale, however, with current floor price at 0.09, lower than its original sales price at 0.12. There are only 3% of the 999 tokens listed for sale, suggesting that the majority of collectors prefer to hold onto their players and own a small fraction of the game’s universe rather than to flip the token for financial speculation.  

Chan’s introduction of avatar NFTs is also connected to the popular use of Profile Pictures (PFPs) in crypto culture. Notable NFT projects, such as CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club, have gained mainstream attention for representing new ways of identifying and expressing one’s individuality on the internet. Their buyers see these PFPs not only as collectible items, but they are also status symbols, access into “gated” communities. The majority of trading activity and financial speculation in NFTs have largely focused on PFP projects, with many willing to pay a premium of avatars with rarer traits or iconic characteristics to the community. Without compromising the integrity of the game itself, Chan’s avatar NFTs tie the project to his long-time interest in blockchain infrastructure and appeal to his followers in web3. 

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen suggests that agency is a game’s medium. The game designer creates a set of rules and goals, crafting out the skeleton of the game world as well as who we can be within this world. As players, we temporarily adopt these conditions, in order to fully step into the position of a game agent and immerse ourselves in the experience of the game. He sees games as a “social technology,” where “they are a method for scribing forms of agency into artifactual vessels: for recording them, preserving them, and passing them around”. [3] Games such as The Boys of Summer are especially interesting as they leave space for us to bring in our outside agency into our in-game goals. In the game, whenever I am presented with the option of tertiary education or work immediately after high school, I choose to pursue university everytime, because this aligns with the choices I made in my own life and how I believe our labor markets are structured. I have a low-risk appetite with my own finances, and so in each round of the game, I leave my investments to a moderate amount while trying to pay off my debts and loans as soon as possible. The game does not instruct me to do so, but my expectations for how the world works and my own preferences seep through, and it becomes blurry who I am playing as—is this really what Eduardo would want, or is this just me? In introducing in-game characters as PFPs and social network avatars, Chan further extends our in-game agency into the real world of social media and online interactions. He invites us, not only to slip in and out of our game agency as we play, but also to hold this alternative agency alongside our own as we combine our in-game character with our online persona. 

The Boys of Summer is such a successful game because it lures you in with its pop colors and whimsical soundtrack, and then gradually, maybe without you even noticing it the first few times, outlines the structures and forces that govern our lives. It opens up a space for us to question how our lives will play out, and what our choices will really mean, while allowing us the satisfaction of finding out in the matter of a few clicks. I find myself going back to the summer of 2003 often, when Eduardo has just made the school’s varsity team. We start afresh with a new dashboard, and I think about the life that Eduardo and I are about to step into—one filled with numbers, charts, and odds stacked against us, peppered with the game’s bright colors and humorous wit. 

Notes

 [1] Alan Schwarz, “Introduction,” in The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics (Macmillan, 2005), 8.  

[2] Andrew Cohen, “Moneyball Meets Crypto in ‘The Boys of Summer’ Experimental NFT Game,” Decrypt. 2023 August 2.

[3] C. Thi Nguyen, “Agency as Art”. In Games: Agency as Art (Oxford University Press, New York, 2020), 1. 

Clara Che Wei Peh is a curator and arts writer from Singapore. Her work examines the intersections of art, money, and technology.