ReadingNotes

Critical Play

Critical Play - Radical Game Design by Mary Flanagan - ISBN 0262062682 - The MIT Press 2009

Motivation

Mentioned at ~min40 during Q&A of Cyborg Anthropology: A Short Introduction and discussed about games, simulation and reality for brains in development physiologically and cognitively with Claude the day before.

Pre-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain before having read the book.

Reading

1 Introduction to Critical Play
- "Games ultimately create cognitive and epistemological environments that position the player or participant with the experiences previously described in meaningful ways." (p6)
- mention of Clayton Christensen (p12)
- activitist games, cf Serious Games: Videogames for Changing the World and Lifelong Learning by Christopher Harz during HplusSummitHarvard
2 Playing House
- (p26) The Doll's House of Petronella Oortman, circa 1686-1705, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam - Museum for Art and History
- mention of The Sims, to put in parallel with my own experience with it during high school (p48)
  - 6AM in game cleaning then starring at my bedroom trash, filled.
- Human creativity: its cognitive basis, its evolution, and its connections with childhood pretence by Peter Carruthers
3 Board Games
- Wikipedia:The Landlord's Game
- Anti-Monopoly by Ralph Anspach
- Rethinking Wargames by Ruth Catlow (p114)
- How Life Imitates Chess
4 Language Games
- The “F” Word- Magnetic Poetry Kit
- Languages MyAphorisms
5 Performative Games and Objects
- mention of Ghost in the Shell film series and Paprika (p169)
- Anne-Marie Schleiner
- mention Michel de Certeau (p182), suggested read by Martin
6 Artists' Locative Games
- other mention of Michel de Certeau (p190)
- Situationist International (SI)
- http://noderunner.omnistep.com/
- Can You See Me Now? by Blast
- "capitalist spaces, to Lefebvre, are systems of property relations, surveillance, and consumption." (p199)
- Wikipedia:Henri Lefebvre#The_.28social.29_production_of_space
- You Are Not Here A Dislocative Tourism Agency
- Wikipedia:Temporary Autonomous Zone
  - Wikipedia:Pirate utopia
- see also Little Brother (no notes yet) game in San-Francisco (during the first chapters)
7 Critical Computer Games
- mention of Wittgenstein (cf Logicomix) and Kuhn (p235)
- Oil God, Persuasive Games
- "Games are frameworks that designers can use to model the complexity of the problems that face the world and make them easier for the players to comprehend." (p249)
8 Designing for Critical Play
- mention of Jacques Ranciere (p260)
- "Above all, a game is an opportunity, an easy- to-understand instrument by which context is defamiliarized just enough to allow what Huizinga famously refers to as his <<a magic circle>> of play to occur." (p262)
  - last sentence

Overall remarks and questions

based on the example mentioned in Cyborg Anthropology: A Short Introduction I was expecting a conceptual framework, a mapping between games and physiological or social basis yet I did not find it in the book.
- content was more oriented toward what games could be good for and a bit about the role of few during history

Synthesis

So in the end, it was about X and was based on Y.

Critics

Point A, B and C are debatable because of e, f and j.

Vocabulary

(:new_vocabulary_start:) new_word (:new_vocabulary_end:)

Post-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain after having read the book. Link it to the pre-reading model and align the two to help easy comparison.

Fabien Benetou's PIM