----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Dear Empyreans, Thanks for the invite and look forward to jumping into what have been interesting discussions this month, which strangely enough (I havent been able to catch up till now) often quite directly intersect with what I have been discussing in parallel over this last month with my students at the National University of Singapore, who in my Playable Art class recently introduced me to Anna Anthropys transgendering game (while two other students chose to do their presentations on Molleindustriahi Paolo if you are still readinghavent seen you since Gijon Spain ..many of your games are very popular in Singapore, and except for Macdonalds game, for the right reasons:-)) . And in my other class, Critical Game Design, the students were surprisingly enthused to read and critique(surprisingly because in that class the students are a majority computer science students) Gonzalo Frascas visionary Videogames of the Oppressed on their blogs, where we are also experimenting with running the class inside Minecraftedu and thinking about the intersection and tensions between game design and learning theories..
Anyway, to put the teaching aside which is fun but overwhelming (semester almost over gasp) let me share a few thoughts on games and art. I am not sure whether to take a more personal, academic or somewhere in between approach to chiming in on the topic. In another recent parallel discussion, I was chatting with a feminist writer friend of mine on Skype who was writing an article about the exclusion of women gamemakers from the recent Paola Antonelli MOMA show in New York and we sort of went epoch by epoch over the last 30 years of the games industry from arcade games to modded PC games to more recent casual Indie art games, and speculated about why this continues to happen and also about those brief exceptions (I learned from Ms. Stratford that the old arcade classic Centipede was designed by a woman!)..and during our conversation I found I could not even remember the name of my most recent game I made last summer that was shown in an exhibit in Mexico (it was late at night for me)ie I am off my own radar as a game designer/artist lately. (it was called Colony Collapse Disorder and was a serious game about obstacles to bee pollination btwmy first ever game I made that kids likedteaching game design these last few years has had some resultsmaybe I should go back and redesign my old art games:-)) Recently I finished writing a long distance phd in a Cultural Analysis program in Amsterdam called Ludic Mutation: The Players Power to Change the Game where I tried to take a step back and look at the last fifteen years of art games and activist games, including my own practice, from a more critical perspective and to develop a better understanding of both of some of the tactics available so far for changing the game, as well as a better recognition of the power of the game, whether it is literally a computer game or something larger, over its players. Phenomenologist philosopher Hans Georg Gadamers quip, that he actually intended as a metaphor for the aesthetic union of an art viewer with an artwork, describes the problematic that seems to be evident in especially many activist games where critical distance is lost, when he says that the game plays the player rather the player the game. Also he says something like we lose ourselves in play. This tendency for the games procedurality and hold (also through gamification schemes of marketing and customer loyalty) to take over, makes its hard to get that Brechtian critical distance and alienation Gonzalo identified as necessary in his initial proposal for Games of the Oppressed, although I do think there are ways to do this and to break the games spell over the player. (BTW Boals Rainbow of Desire workshops for the affluent world where people have psychological problems, not economic ones, to oversimplify his logic, reminded me a lot of Brody Condons Nordic L.A.R.P game performances and self-indulgent seventies style new age workshop parodies some funny game art potential there too) To sum up the results of my phd writing project which went on for far too many summers and weekends, (but I did learn a lot largely due to my patient , flexibly minded and brilliant supervisor, Mireille Rosello) I basically arrived at two different sorts of resistant playone that steps outside the system and plays a different game, (here I tried with limited success to see if political philosopher Hannah Arendt's proposal for a Space of Appearance where political action and unfolding aesthetic performances converge, could be stretched to include games.. but also similar to Hakim Beys TAZs and Italian radical exodus..). An example is Web 1 games like KiSS free digital dolls where players were free to become other genders, animals etc because no family or boss on facebook (or demanding guild in the World of Warcraft) was watching them online like nowadays in the more social sticky realm of Web 2. And play tactic number two that surfaced repeatedly was playful resistance from within, within what could be a system at a variety of scales, from patriarchal military games to a city or a state. When I ran into Joseph Delappe in NY a few years ago for the Returning Fire launch I think I shared with him a chapter I was writing contrasting military approaches to playing the city in militainment games, which since 911 became about asymmetrical warfare and biocontrol of populations centers (cities) vs. a more culture jamming artistic approach to occupying/hacking the city following in the footsteps of the Parisian Situationists to North American hacktivism to game performances both on and offline ( I wrote about my collaborative project Velvet-strike in that chapter too--a bit of a shift to analyse my own work). The last part of that writing was a lot about cities as the setting for resistant playand here I found it helpful to align myself with a biopolitical stance that refuses what I see as a false choice between either a. a leftist critique of capital and neoliberalism or b. a rightist critique of the state. So in the last chapter I brought varied formulations of biopolitical theory (Foucault, Agamben, Arendt) to bear on the analysis of population control vs. paidic play in to Mitsuo Isos Japanimation series, Dennoi Coil, where mixed reality glasses very similar to Googles AR glasses are given away freely to all the cities children. These children play mixed reality games non-stop around the city--some that resistand others that step outside the data cloud and the mixed reality tagged municipal grid into more old fashioned but liberating obsolete space (makes me nostalgic for Web 1I am showing my age), so both play tactics #1 and #2 in those futureware mixed reality games. Anyway, now I am trying to find publishers, a bit in negotiation and uncertainhard to see if I can do enough revisions to make them happy for a non phd thesis reader, so in the meantime I started another book proposal called Remixing the Game in the Global South based on a sixth chapter that never made into the original about ludic artists like Rene Hayashi who I have met in Latin America (especially Mexico when I lived there) and also about Games for Change by (not charities for) people living in the South ie outside the first world in economically challenged regions faced with postcolonial inequities and sprawling megacities, and also related to the open design movement that is in full swing in Indonesias smaller cities, a country which is right next to where I live in Singapore and has sort of become my and my husband (game artist Luis Hernandez) second Southeast Asian home these last 5 years while in exile from the States, (which is another more personal story related to games and artbtw I think we can both finally visit back there soon). Maybe if there is a lull I will post my rough new book proposal that is finally coming together this weekend. I look forward to hearing your thoughts, and by mentioning the people I know already in this excessively overlong first post I do not mean exclude the interesting comments so far coming from those I dont! Cheers, Anne-Marie Schleiner Ps. On a side note, we had the opportunity to witness the launch of Tale of Tales recent Margerite Duras inspired game Bientot LEte in Gent, Belgium this winterthey gave us an amazing tour in the Gent Cathedral about spatial inspiration for game design and Auriea Harvey is another one of those rare women game designers, though at the time I didnt think to say anything of it. -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web.com - Microsoft® Exchange solutions from a leading provider - http://link.mail2web.com/Business/Exchange _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
