Radical Game Design
An examination of subversive games like The Simsgames 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 gamesgames that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industryand 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 concernsincluding worldwide poverty and AIDScan be incorporated into game design.Arguing that this kind of conscious practicewhich now constitutes the avant-garde of the computer game mediumcan 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.
About Artists & Writers:
Mary Flanagan is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, Director of the Tiltfactor game research laboratory, and Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Critical Play: Radical Game Design (MIT Press).