Apologies to everyone for this going up late, I’ve been in Georgia for a cousin’s wedding, and the internet there was worse than anticipated.
Critical Play is an attempt to more deeply understand games as artistic critiques of society, and to help bridge the gap between academic understandings of video games and academic studies of more traditional recreational activities. Each of the book’s chapters is really more of an essay on this theme, investigating a different type of play throughout history, showing how it was used to reinforce societal norms and subverted to attack them, and then linking them to modern gaming.
The first of these chapters regards playing house, and doll play. While initially, these forms of play parents to reinforce social expectations for their children by encouraging them to enact scenes in keeping with social norms, children were quick to subvert this by using them to act out more taboo scenes and confront new anxieties. Recreating murders and police investigations allowed children to engage with larger societal problems, while recreations of parental disputes allowed them to engage with more immediate ones. These themes have been carried forward into modern gaming by games such as The Sims. Modern gaming also require quality servers that lets you connect to the game, through out. For example, if you consider Minecraft, it is important to survive the entire game without any server issue. Hence, it is important to choose the best one from Minecraft Server List that can support your gameplay.
The next chapter investigates one of the oldest categories of game, the board game. From ancient games such as Mancala to more modern ones like Monopoly, these games have served as ways to reinforce dominant forms of resource distribution, but much like dolls, they could easily be re-contextualized to criticize just as easily as they could be used to support society, as shown by games like Anti-Monopoly. These games could also be used to disseminate controversial opinions, using the excuse that “they’re just games” to avoid scrutiny, and this has been done for both positive and negative reasons; the former can also be seen in Anti-Monopoly while the latter can be seen in various racist games. Flanagan also shows how the often violent focus of board games would later transfer to video games.
The next chapter investigates language games, and shows how word play can be considered a type of play, and used by artists to bring attention to the absurdities of society. Secret languages are also discussed, as a tool for the dis-empowered to achieve their own goals and protect themselves while doing so.
The next chapter is entitled “Performative Games and Objects” and is perhaps the book’s least straightforward; it seems a better title might be performative art. It begins by informing the reader that all games have performative components, and moves to the discussion of artistic creations which require some input from the art viewer, and take on a game-like aspect in that fashion.
The next chapter explores “Artists’ Locative Games” which are games played in public places not only for the benefit of the players, but also for the edification of their audience. This moves into a discussion of mixed reality games which have been made possible by modern technology, as well as a discussion of recent games commissioned by artistic groups.
The next chapter moves to focus specifically on video games, and the industry which makes them. Flanagan harshly criticizes the industry by comparison to the artists involved in the creation of older games, particularly in terms of a lack of diversity and the promulgation of harmful ideologies. The chapter ends by discussing a handful of activist games which are in keeping with the socially transformative games of the past.
The final chapter is focused on encouraging more of these activist games, and provides instructions for future developers to enable this.
Discussion:
Flanagan’s definition of “game” includes many things which one would not normally anticipate in a study of games. Is this definition convincing or would a narrower (or even broader) one have produced a better argument?
If you are a gamer, do you feel that you often see activist messages in the games you play? How do these messages differ from those in other forms of media? Are there differences between the messages of different genres of games?
Many of Flanagan’s sources come from an art history background. As historians, how does this impact your reading of her argument?
The thing I have come to love about the Assassin’s Creed franchise is that in the beginning it seemed to placate the liberty-loving American (the actual creed is that “nothing is true, everything is permitted”).
As the franchise has carried on, it has sort of shown the ambiguity in the values we hold so dearly. The order the Templars (the assassins’ ancient enemy) covet is less and less unreasonable after each kill, when the victim is given time to express their views as they speak their last words.
In turn the game seems to advocate less for a specific value, but aims instead to throw the issue into obscurity, and makes the player question what she/he initially believed. If the game continued along its initial road I may have considered it “activism” in the form of propaganda, which may be why most games do not try to tackle such loaded issues.
While I am no where near close to being considered a gamer, Critical Play helped me to understand Flanagan’s arguments about various types of “games” in terms I could understand. By giving an extensive historical background, I had an easier time making sense of the concepts through this approach. Flanagan utilizes longue durée which is an interesting tactic that I honestly wasn’t expecting to find in the readings this week. This contributes to Flanagan’s own blurring of the analog/digital line in games.
I often do see activist messages in games, although they often seem misinterpreted, in part I feel because they are predominantly presented in satirical manners. The most recent South Park game for example presents the difficulty of the game as race selection for your character. The darker your skin, the higher the game difficulty. Design decisions such as these force the player to make important gameplay decisions while considering broader social issues.
Ultimately activist messages in video games tend to differ from other media in that they are a bit more tongue in cheek. Understanding the target audience developers attempt to provoke discussion through over the top presentation. Although many games also benefit from a much more subtle approach, simply integrating representations of gender and race without comment or grandeur, influencing the way gamers perceive societal expectations.
I thought that it was interesting that Flanagan did not limit the concept of games to board games but expanded to include language games and playing with dolls, somthing that I never thought of as a formal game. It was interesting to see how the author analyzed the cultural norms and attitudes that play out within the various games and how they are used to instruct players.
I agree that framing games as a performative activity really opens up the scope of what can be covered in a useful and interesting way.
As a self-professed gamer (but not part of the “gaming community” as a whole… I can’t stand upwards of 90% of people I encounter while gaming online), I have to say that I think the video game industry, especially some of the lesser known modern video games, include plenty of subversive and even activist elements that pose difficult questions to the player and encourage critical thinking or even total re-evaluation of the subject at hand. As far as mainstream games go, the Fallout series, for instance, sprinkles bits and pieces of stories and lore that poke fun at and even turn upside down traditional takes on myriad social, political, moral, and philosophical issues, as do series like Dragon Age, Bioshock, and even games like Fable. While they might also fall prey to less politically correct tropes of the video game industry like sexualizing or sidelining female characters and reinforcing toxic stereotypes of masculinity, if one pays attention to the plot and, often more importantly, the bits and pieces of lore scattered throughout, one can readily find excoriation of corruption, politics, racism, and any number of outdated or harmful sociocultural norms. Thus one might find more “activist games” sitting under one’s nose should one expand the rather narrow definition of what exactly constitutes an “activist” game, and what excludes a game from such a title.
I absolutely think this is a necessary discourse. Sometimes an industry becomes a boy’s club, where the primary users of the industry are such that there is no economic punishment for bigotry and so bigotry is reinforced, which makes a hostile work environment out of the industry, which further drives away diverse voices. I’ve known diverse people who went into the gaming industry, and when I hear what they went through, it’s sickening. Even in the discourse when I talk about my game designer friends things get hairy—a man told me the only reason my friend who went to one of the best art colleges in the country, majored in game design, headed her year’s award-winning game, and went straight from there to lead artistic designer on an indie project, and from there landed a job at a major gaming company was in games was because she was a woman, after briefly hearing that she was an artist and a possessor of two x chromosomes in the industry. He based this on how “hard” the industry was to get into for non-women, which amazes me when you think of how many women are actually in the industry versus men—many more men get a chance in that industry than women by a wide margin.