Critical play : radical game design / Mary Flanagan.

By:

Flanagan, Mary, 1969-

Material type: Text

TextPublication details: Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 2013.Edition: First MIT Press paperback editionDescription: 353 pages : illustrations ; 23 cmISBN:

9780262518659
0262518651

Subject(s):

DDC classification:

794.815 FLA

Contents:

Introduction to critical play -- Playing house -- Board games -- Language games -- Performative games and objects -- Artists\' locative games -- Critical computer games -- Designing for critical play.

Summary: 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.--Back cover.

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Call number	Copy number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Standard Loan	Clonmel Library Main Collection	794.815 FLA (Browse shelf(Opens below))	1	Available		39002100621714

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

An examination of subversive games like The Sims -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.

Originally published: 2009.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 294-317) and index.

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.--Back cover.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

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).