Sixteen Tons

Atlanta, GA, United States

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Sixteen Tons

Atlanta, GA, United States

Type

Cultural › Sculpture

YEAR

2010

Sixteen Tons is a game for four players designed for a gallery setting, created by Nathalie Pozzi and game designer Eric Zimmerman.

On its surface, Sixteen Tons looks like a large-scale boardgame, in which players move very heavy pieces around a four-by-four grid, trying to maneuver their pieces into a winning position. This core gameplay is complicated by the fact that players can pay each other with real money.

At the start of the game, each player takes out three one-dollar bills and this money is used to pay other players to move your pieces for you. Playing the game becomes an experience that critically blurs work and play, as the real value of money is grafted onto the artificial meanings of the game, and player identity shifts fluidly back and forth from cooperation to competition. Winning the game requires both strategic thinking and social smarts and the rules are intentionally ambiguous about whether players keep each others’ money after a game.

Sixteen Tons is named after the folk song made famous in 1955 by Tennessee Ernie Ford about coal mining and debt bondage.