Critical Play {ReadingNotes}

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

See also

• Seedea:Research/Drive
• Seedea:Research/StrategicalEpistemology
• Art
• own projects
  • Seedea:Oimp/Dynalab
  • StrategyLessons#AdvancedRTS proposed after having listened to Gary Kasparov's How Life Imitates Chess
• Cognition#GoalFocusAttention
• Wikipedia:Brian Sutton-Smith
• 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted by David Wong, Cracked.com March 2010
• Critical Play by Mary Flanagan, TEDxDartmouth April 2010
• Strong National Museum of Play
• The American Journal of Play University of Illinois Press
• The Association for the Study of Play (TASP) dedicated to interdisciplinary research and theory construction concerning play throughout the world.
• add ref#99 to my aphorism on philosophy as an action verb
• Omnsh.org : l'Observatoire des Mondes Numériques en Sciences Humaines with plenty of links on games
• SCVNGR "Go places. Do challenges. Earn points and unlock rewards!"
• Jane McGonigal: Gaming Can Make a Better World by Jo-Anne Green, Networked_Performance April 2010
• Games for social change by Mary Flanagan, SXSWi 2008
• tiltfactor lab by Mary Flanagan
  • mission is to research and develop software, events, experiences, and artifacts that create rewarding, compelling interactions.
• MaryFlanagan.com
• Values at Play (VAP)
  • research project assists and encourages designers to create computer games that identify and promote human values.
• Wikipedia:Gamification
  • Wikipedia:Gambling problem
• Fun is the Future: Mastering Gamification by Gabe Zichermann, Google Tech Talk October 2010
• Meaningful Play: Getting Gamification Right by Sebastian Deterding, Google Tech Talk January 2011
• Wikipedia:Game studies
• Wikipedia:History of games

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.

Categories

• UncategorizedBook

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