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read the requirments and write three prompts, pls be thoughtful and carefully read the instruction flanagan_critical_play_and_responsible_design_2018__1_.pdf chess_feminism_how_to_play_video_games.pdf jenkins_fan_2017.pdf ellcessor_accessing_fan_cultures_2017.pdf wk_9.docx Unformatted Attachment Preview 17 CRITICAL PLAY AND RESPONSIBLE DESIGN Mary Flanagan In the landscape of media studies and digital humanities, games have become a popular subject of study for both their creative forms and the social practices they instigate. Because they create cognitive and epistemological environments that position the player-participant with a given collection of game elements, representations, and rules (Flanagan 2009: 10), and because they offer choices and a sense of agency that is empowering—and potentially psychologically manipulative—digital games are influential, exciting media forms worthy of critical attention. Described in this chapter, Critical Play is both a discursive method and a practical, instrumental approach toward the development of games that enrich communication, encourage in-depth reflection, and generate new conversations among game players and game designers. Key to this discussion is an understanding of the role of media, design, and criticality in social change and overall societal improvement, as well as the notion of social responsibility. Alongside their positive elements, games have faced harsh critique; key challenges in the conversation about games arise about who makes games to begin with and for whom they are created. In pop culture, videogames are still largely described as a domain for men, even though adult women constitute half of all digital game players (ESA 2014). Hispanic players currently outnumber non-Hispanic players in the U.S. as well (Mintel 2014). Yet, while player demographics appear more inclusive than ever across the player base, equity in terms of gender in the creation of games is still slow to come. While the percentage of women working in the U.S. game industry has doubled, it remains at around 22 percent, and people of color are marginalized in the current American game industry climate (IGDA 2014). A lack of diversity in game creation spheres helps create a vicious cycle of reinforcing biased, stereotypical depictions of characters, cultures, and world rules in games and larger gaming cultures. Limited, simplistic conceptions of games proliferate from mainstream media. Unfortunately, they miss the complexity of games’ messages and, moreover, their potential for personal and social benefit. Games are a part of (and some would say they are at the heart of) a massive set of societal debates about media consumption, social ills, and equity. But things are changing. Unlike film and linear media, games sway more toward being a systemic art form, and such an understanding sets the stage for us to engage with the complexity games offer. For example, while studies link violent and subversive behavior to videogames 183 MARY FLANAGAN (Hull et al. 2014), they simultaneously are seen to have potential for massive, prosocial impact on culture (McGonigal 2011). These contradictory claims reveal how very little we know about the complex ways that games engage our beliefs, feelings of agency, and desires for rewards. As researchers learn more every day, games increase their influence as an artform. There is great interest in how games promote prosocial values, due to the impact other media forms have had toward a more progressive society. For example, much has been discussed about television’s role in improving gay equity in the United States; in terms of increased representation over the last 20 years, the depiction of gay couples and “out” television celebrities is associated with more positive societal attitudes (Ayoub & Garretson 2015; Craig et al. 2015). Anecdotally, the former Vice President of the U.S., Joe Biden, noted in 2012, “I think ‘Will and Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far” (Little 2012). This is not to say that the representations avoid stereotypes, or that they are always positive and multidimensional. However, media ecology provides at least some opportunity for escapism, strength, proactive action, and finding community (Craig et al. 2015). For those interested in the social impact of media, the challenge remains to push for ways toward responsible media culture that intentionally shapes culture for good. Similarly, the norms depicted in digital games significantly influence culture. To give a sense of the scope of this influence, consider the fact that an estimated 33,000 people per day were downloading and playing the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood game a year after its release, and that it made nearly 100K USD per day (Think Gaming 2015). In 2014, there were more people playing Candy Crush Saga at any given moment than there were people living in Australia, Germany, or France (93 million daily active users), and the year following, it still attracted over three million active users per day (King 2014). With record sales, record numbers of players, and some games’ ambitious development costs (e.g., the development of Grand Theft Auto V reportedly cost 266 million USD; McLaughlin 2013), games are a significant financial player in the media landscape, bringing in revenues to rival or surpass film and music industries on a global scale. Games are a key cultural force and twenty-first-century art form— their high sales figures, dominance in pop culture discourse, and sheer popularity point to their impact. In light of the financial and cultural sway of games, designing and playing critically is an indispensable approach in the domain of applied media studies research and for engaging the social and cultural dimensions of digital games. Key here is the notion that media makers and game designers can do something about how they might alternate depictions, rewards, and so on from mere thought experiment to design studio. In an age of theory meeting practice, and a push toward experiential learning and “making,” design itself operates as a mode of inquiry that can intentionally encompass a philosophical and social focus. Designing critically embodies such an intentional practice; it means being mindful of the potentially positive and negative effects of games as well as the positive and negative influences of one’s own design and play processes or experiences. Critical Play takes a historical look at how games and play can be analytical and experiential systems reflective of, but also entangled among, social and cultural norms. It incorporates past radical moves by arts and activist communities to understand games as components or counterpoints in critical theory. This is why Critical Play is an important and fundamentally unique approach: the experiential aspect of play—for all games must be playtested by actual players—moves the critique beyond a speculative conversation and creates an enactment of the imagined world. In exploring the historical foundations of games as their own form of creative expression distinct from story, image, or performance, I have argued that “critical 184 CRITICAL PLAY AND RESPONSIBLE DESIGN play means to create or occupy play environments and activities that represent one or more questions about aspects of human life” (2009: 6). In past writing, I outlined approaches such as “unplaying,” where players enact forbidden or secret scenes or play out unexpected scenarios (2009: 33). A Critical Play approach is one in which games are not mere thought experiments but rather actual embodied experiences that not only have the potential for social impact; they are also likely to change us—our perspectives, our knowledge, our biases. Contextualizing Critical Play Across theory and practice, what might people consider as they develop games, study them, play them, and discuss them in relationship to notions of social engagement and responsible design? Further, why is this important work for the humanities? Significant trends emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to advance the social responsibility of designers. In the 1990s, my longtime collaborator, Helen Nissenbaum, began publishing with Batya Friedman about values in the design of software systems (Friedman & Nissenbaum 1996). The idea here is that any software system reflects the people and culture from which it is made. As Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt famously reminded us in 1972, “New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers” (47). Critical production therefore must rely on new methods to ensure critical making is happening. For example, it is quite easy to replicate the biases inherent in popular media forms. With other collaborators, Nissenbaum and I picked up the torch to bring values and critical introspection to digital games in 2005, while I was Figure 17.1 Chart of possible sources of values in games, a list intended to inspire possibilities rather than be constricting in nature. Source: From Values at Play in Digital Games (Flanagan and Nissenbaum 2014), used with permission. 185 MARY FLANAGAN developing the book Critical Play (2009). In Values at Play in Digital Games (2014; see Figure 17.1), we urge critics to consider how games produce values as often as they reflect values, and we demonstrate that values emerge across many game elements. Intentional interventions in games can focus on these elements, and the impact of using them can be measured empirically, if one so desires. In effect, our approach takes a values-centric methodology to instrumentalizing the tenets of Critical Play. Verifying the impact of this approach will likely lead designers and humanists alike to social science methods for empirical validation of the lofty ideals to which they aspire. Dunne and Raby meanwhile brought the idea of responsible design to the fore from the practical discipline of architecture (2001). Sengers et al. (2005), Agre (1997), Bardzell and Bardzell (2013), Bardzell et al. (2012), and others continue the discourse on criticality and reflection in human-computer interaction to move beyond the functionality of software to its social roles and responsibilities. The idea behind these critical-technical perspectives is that, by getting beyond the perceived “apolitical” and obvious needs of design (such as usability, reliability, and so on), we might create challenging, reflective systems instead. Designers could, for example, “force a decision onto the user, revealing how limited choices are usually hard-wired into products for us” (Dunne & Raby 2001: 45–6). Design-centric critical projects might take the form of hypothetical, high-tech innovations or even interactive fictional science laboratories that ultimately raise questions about data collection, for example. Or they might craft imaginary objects that provoke critique. These types of projects, by artists such as Natalie Jeremijenko or Critical Art Ensemble, are called “DesignArt” (Leither et al. 2013; see also Associated Press 2008). While these hybrid design-art objects are valuable, they only go so far, and as provocations often stay within the confines of the gallery. For instance, most do not make their way to the mass-produced world for which industrial design, product design, and engineering fields pave the way, and thus they may stay bound within communities where the conversations provoked already exist. They do, however, elevate the conversation about the role of design and perhaps spark systemic change at the level of industrial design. This holds less true thus far for experiments in games, especially digital games, which reach more people but have been less likely to deeply trouble the industry against which they operate, even if they raise theoretical and critical implications for the medium. Ultimately, notions of scale relate to notions of impact, and criticality and empiricism are both essential and underutilized aspects of the creation process, with empirical verification as an ideal to which it is important to aspire. By their nature, games are ripe for criticality, but it remains up to one’s strategies as a designer and player to actualize their critical potential. Recent Examples of Critical Play While there are many useful examples of critical games, I would like to focus here on three that showcase diverse aspects of Critical Play. Such play can utilize the mechanics in a game to convey its message or critique. The questions can be abstract, such as rethinking cooperation, winning, or losing; or they can be more concrete, involved with particular content issues (Flanagan 2009: 10). They could also focus on reshaping societal biases through game mechanics. I chose the three games for this chapter to span a range of media, which may confound traditional media studies as a discipline. The first, a card game, uses a dynamic social mechanic to counteract biases. The second game is a large collaborative event and online public art space using community participation and voice to form a relational aesthetic and prompt change through expression, representation, voice, and authorship. The final game is 186 CRITICAL PLAY AND RESPONSIBLE DESIGN Figure 17.2 Unexpected combinations appear while playing Buffalo: The Name Dropping Game. These combinations disrupt the thinking that perpetuates stereotypes. Source: Courtesy of Resonym.com. a computer game: a single-player experience that investigates border crossing, immigration, and the various systems that govern behavior and the body. Each has its own strategy in approaching issues critically. Buffalo: The Name Dropping Game (2012; see Figure 17.2) is a fun, party card game where players work quickly against other players to be the first to name someone who matches the cards on the table. Sometimes the game offers wildly diverse combinations of adjective and noun, such as “tattooed grandmother” or “kind bully.” The first player to name an accurate match keeps the cards as points and moves on to the next fast-paced round. Developed at the game research laboratory I lead, Tiltfactor, Buffalo serves as a great icebreaker or party game for groups small and large. It uses a randomizing mechanic to create unusual combinations of criteria, which, from a psychological perspective, expand a player’s social categories and undermine stereotypes on conscious and unconscious levels (Kaufman & Flanagan 2015). The game positions players to overcome their own biases and prejudices as they encounter and “break up” easy mental pathways created by stereotypes. This approach corresponds with empirical work done at Harvard via Implicit Association Tests, which measure unconscious biases we might hold about race, proper jobs, language, and so on. As it turns out, countering unconscious biases is quite challenging; teaching people about the injustice of discrimination or asking them to be empathetic toward others is often ineffective. Mahzarin Banaji notes that what works, at least temporarily, is providing “counterstereotypical” images or messages (Banaji & Greenwald 2013: 151). Games are systems of rules leading to experiences that help shape the way we think and rhetorically and psychologically persuade us; games like Buffalo: The Name Dropping Game are in effect micro-solutions that address the psychological factors of social inequity and the microaggressions that permeate culture. Whose criticality is the focus here? The player’s? The designer’s? The observer’s? The scholar’s? The answer is all of the above, but the designer plays a key role in framing a game and setting the stage for both conscious reflection (e.g., engaging in reflection and discussion during play) and a less conscious mindset common during design or play experiences. 187 MARY FLANAGAN Criticality in play can be fostered to bring a game’s content into focus or to highlight or uncover an aspect of the content. Thus a critical attention to both playing and making provides an essential viewpoint or an analytical framework for responsible design. Through many avenues, games can represent anything from concrete incidents to abstract ideas (such as equity and cooperation), and they can do so in a wide variety of forms. Those using Critical Play as an approach might create a platform of rules by which to examine a specific issue—rules that would somehow reflect core elements of the issue itself. As an example, Play Your Place (see Figure 17.3) is a series of ongoing game artworks that use drawing and play to catalyze and translate local, imaginative visions of place into games that not only exemplify community values but also contribute to real world urban planning. Crucially, every element in the game—setting, characters, and challenges—is entirely created by community members. People create their own game level by drawing a place in the town. Then they think about how their “place” could be changed for the better. They devise their own rules, drawing obstacles and rewards and building and sharing game level after level for an epic play session. The game makers also incorporate fantasy elements into their vision of everyday life. The games take the familiar format of Little Big Planet or Donkey Kong; they can be played online, on mobile phones, in schools and homes, as well as at public venues. Players take on challenges, such as obstacles, leaps, drops, prizes, and enemies, as they would in a typical 2-D platform game. Figure 17.3 Play Your Place game engine and event series 2012–14, by Ruth Catlow and Mary Flanagan (LOCALLY). Here, players “Play Southend” (in Essex UK). Source: Courtesy of the artists. 188 CRITICAL PLAY AND RESPONSIBLE DESIGN I created the platform with U.K. artist Ruth Catlow, as LOCALPLAY, to bridge the gap between urban planners and the public. The urban planners we met with at the start of the project noted that the most interesting challenge of public consultation and deliberation about a place’s future is encouraging people to imagine beyond their own wants and needs toward a common good. Play Your Place helps people develop collective visions of place that can then be entered and played by people all over the world. Players create over time, in game instances specific to their location, and the world grows through the addition of endless drawings. Community members have created entirely fictional calamities, but often these calamities correspond with existing social and environmental challenges, such as climate change, regeneration, transit issues, and more. For example, one original game featured monsters emerging from the waters of the Thames Estuary, reflecting the dangers of rising sea levels on coastal towns. The maker used a Critical Play approach to match the social issue to the rules and various game elements they create, including available actions, points of view, player choices, and rewards. Note that, without a somewhat structured practice, making alone will not necessarily bring about criticality, at least not immediately. People have played a lot of games and have a sense of common game tropes. Criticality can be fostered by thinking through the systemic issues the maker faces with the structure of a game, and thinking about what values the rewards and choices represent for the player. Some indie game developers have developed and distributed highly stylized fictional worlds for critical expression. Papers, Please (2013; see Figure 17.4) begins as a rather simple-looking, 8-bit style game. As an officer at an immigration booth, players admit people across the border of the nation of Arstotzka, a fictional former communist state that is intentionally reminiscent of former Soviet bloc nations such as Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan. This “former Soviet” feel is set up not only in the game FAQ but also through the game soundtrack, the national logo and art style, and the grimness of the bureaucracy in which players must work. In the game, pl ... Purchase answer to see full attachment