Entry# 10: Designing for Critical Play [Mary Flanagan]
“Art, like games or popluar arts, and like media of communication, has the power to impose its own assumptions by setting the human community into new relationships and postures.”- Marshall McLuhan
Identifying and defining the context in which many games are now made helps to inform critical play.
Critical play can and should be included in the traditional game design process.
To the typical gamer, computer games are not obviously aligned with such concerns as ancient divination, psychoanalysis, utopian tax laws, environmentalism, or social protest.
There is a connection between artistic methods, activism, and game design
Game design matures and games become more ubiquitous and more meaningful to culture
Traditional Iterative Game Design Model:
o Develop rules (framework, tokens, and so on)
o Develop playable prototype (early stages of design, can be done on paper)
o Playtest (various players try the game and evaluate it, finding dead ends and boring sections, and exploring the types of difficulty)
Constant reflection on the humanistic themes, or values, during design.
This reflective practice encourages makers to step outside their processes to “see the big picture”
Donald Schön says it’s important that the experiments do not “confirm” an “answer” to a challenge, but affirm that challenge instead.
This helps to move beyond “normalcy” and preserve what has been accomplished in critical play and will in turn, help designers examine “what’s out there” in contemporary circles, providing a vocabulary for existent techniques that risk going unnoticed.
o Writing commands or instructions
o Using obnoxious language
o Making humans into puppets
o Making computer programs that write poems
o Making words tactile creating instruction paintings
o Shifting points of view
o Making text that is street intervention
theartofmadeline
yousharknotpass
amandla