Mary Flanagan

An examination of subversive games—games designed for political, aesthetic, and social critique. For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games—games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry—and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping everyday game culture. Flanagan provides a lively historical context for critical play through twentieth-century art movements, connecting subversive game design to subversive art: her examples of “playing house” include Dadaist puppet shows and The Sims. She looks at artists' alternative computer-based games and explores games for change, considering the way activist concerns—including worldwide poverty and AIDS—can be incorporated into game design. Arguing that this kind of conscious practice—which now constitutes the avant-garde of the computer game medium—can inspire new working methods for designers, Flanagan offers a model for designing that will encourage the subversion of popular gaming tropes through new styles of game making, and proposes a theory of alternate game design that focuses on the reworking of contemporary popular game practices.

Radical Game Design

Critical Play

Values at play in digital games

A. T. Mann

Donald Lehmkuhl

The Astrology of Time and Space

The Round Art

Bad Girls

radical game design

Critical play

Mikael Jakobsson

A striking analysis of popular board games’ roots in imperialist reasoning—and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it. Board games conjure up images of innocuously enriching entertainment: family game nights, childhood pastimes, cooperative board games centered around resource management and strategic play. Yet in Playing Oppression, Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson apply the incisive frameworks of postcolonial theory to a broad historical survey of board games to show how these seemingly benign entertainments reinforce the logic of imperialism. Through this lens, the commercialized version of Snakes and Ladders takes shape as the British Empire’s distortion of Gyan Chaupar (an Indian game of spiritual knowledge), and early twentieth-century “trading games” that fêted French colonialism are exposed for how they conveniently sanitized its brutality while also relying on crudely racist imagery. These games’ most explicitly abhorrent features may no longer be visible, but their legacy still lingers in the contemporary Eurogame tendency to exalt (and incentivize) cycles of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. An essential addition to any player’s bookshelf, Playing Oppression deftly analyzes this insidious violence and proposes a path forward with board games that challenge colonialist thinking and embrace a much broader cultural imagination.

The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games

Playing Oppression

Adele Louisante, as Sylvester named the exquisite creature he rescued from slaughter in a Pyrenean village, was a paradox of fetid smells and delicate perfections. To protect and tend her, Sylvester summons to Paris his sister, though what begins as scientific enquiry degenerates into obsession.

Adele

Helen Nissenbaum

A theoretical and practical guide to integrating human values into the conception and design of digital games. All games express and embody human values, providing a compelling arena in which we play out beliefs and ideas. “Big ideas” such as justice, equity, honesty, and cooperation—as well as other kinds of ideas, including violence, exploitation, and greed—may emerge in games whether designers intend them or not. In this book, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum present Values at Play, a theoretical and practical framework for identifying socially recognized moral and political values in digital games. Values at Play can also serve as a guide to designers who seek to implement values in the conception and design of their games. After developing a theoretical foundation for their proposal, Flanagan and Nissenbaum provide detailed examinations of selected games, demonstrating the many ways in which values are embedded in them. They introduce the Values at Play heuristic, a systematic approach for incorporating values into the game design process. Interspersed among the book's chapters are texts by designers who have put Values at Play into practice by accepting values as a design constraint like any other, offering a real-world perspective on the design challenges involved.

Values at Play in Digital Games

Austin Booth

Skin as boundary and surface, metaphorically and physically: creative and critical perspectives on skin and bodily transformation as it intersects with digital technologies. In re:skin, scholars, essayists and short story writers offer their perspectives on skin--as boundary and surface, as metaphor and physical reality. The twenty-first century and its attendant technology call for a new investigation of the intersection of body, skin, and technology. These cutting-edge writings address themes of skin and bodily transformation in an era in which we are able not only to modify our own skins--by plastic surgery, tattooing, skin graft art, and other methods--but to cross skins, merging with other bodies or colonizing multiple bodies.The book's agile crossings of disciplinary and genre boundaries enact the very transformations they discuss. A short story imagines a manufactured maternal interface that allows a man to become pregnant, and a scholar describes the evolution of "body criticism"; a writer uses "faux science" to explore animal prints on faux fur, and fictional lovers experience one another's sexual sensations through the slipping on and off of skin-like bodysuits. Ubiquitous computational interfaces are considered as the "skin" of technology, and questions of race and color are shown to play out in digital art practice. The essays and narratives gathered in re:skin claim that the new technologically mutable body is neither purely liberating nor simply limiting; instead, these pieces show us models, ways of living in a technological culture. Contributors Austin Booth, Rebecca Cannon, Model T and Sara D(iamond), L. Timmel Duchamp, Mary Flanagan, Jewelle Gomez, Jennifer Gonzalez, Nalo Hopkinson, Alice Imperiale, Shelley Jackson, Christina Lammer, David J. Leonard, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Melinda Rackham, Vivian Sobchack, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Bernadette Wegenstein

Re: Skin

A romance following the entanglements of four people: Eleanor, an American living in Britain; Jason, a megalomaniacal painter and Eleanor's lover; Clover, Jason's daughter; and Charles, a lawyer helplessly infatuated with Eleanor

Trust

"All games express and embody human values, providing a compelling arena in which we play out beliefs and ideas. In this book, authors present Values at Play, a theoretical and practical framework for identifying socially recognized moral and political values in digital games ... provide detailed examinations of selected games, demonstrating the many ways in which values are embedded in them. They introduce the Values at Play heuristic, a systematic approach for incorporating values into the game design process. Interspersed among the book's chapters are texts by designers who have put Values at Play into practice by accepting values as a design constraint like any other, offering a real-world perspective on the design challenges involved."--Provided by publishser.

An anthology of feminist cyberfiction and theoretical and critical writings on gender and technoculture.

Mary Flanagan

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