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When I told Katherine Rowe about this course, she recommended Mary Flanagan’s book on Critical Play: Radical Game Design (MIT Press, 2009). Kathy also suggested that we might want to bring Flanagan to campus this fall, perhaps in juxtaposition with some of our colleagues in the Cities Program…

I’ve just browsed through the on-line edition of Critical Play, and think that this just! might! be! our key theoretical text. Flanagan opens w/ a quote from Foucault—“By the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself.” Then she goes on to ask, “What if some games, and the more general concept of ‘play,’ not only provide outlets for entertainment but also function as a means for creative expression, as instruments for conceptual thinking, or as tools to help examine or work through social issues?”

Her book investigates “games designed for artistic, political, and social critique or intervention, in order to propose ways of understanding larger cultural issues as well as the games themselves.” The introduction includes nice overviews/definitions of “play,” “games” (“activist games” in particular), and “disruption” that I certainly think we can play with (for instance, she draws on Costikyan’s work contrasting the “inherently linear” design of stories, in which characters always make the same decisions, no matter how many times we re-read the tales, with games, which are “inherently non-linear. They depend on decision-making…real, plausible alternatives….” (What I really like here is the emphasis on agency, “the player’s ability to make choices that mean something to him or her”).

The book @ a whole looks at a whole range of “complex play environments”; the chapters most useful to us, I think, include Chapter 4, on “Language Games” (don’t know if we’d assign this, but it gave me some ideas for writing games we might use to open each class, and we might draw on it more generally to invite students to be more inventive in their writing, more open to the impulses of the unconscious, and to multiple meanings and interpretations). Also on-target are Chapter 5, on “Performative Games and Objects” (with its great question, “Who gets to play?”), and Chapter 6, on “Artists’ Locative Games” (with the claim that “play is never innocent,” and some good questions about the problematic assumptions re: space and the city built into location-placed play environments: how “colonialist” are they? how class-based their assumptions about unrestricted movement?). Also very useful might be the final chapter, “Designing for Critical Play,” which includes a number of over-arching ideas.

Bingo! And now I think I'll go rest up a while....