Critical Play: Radical Game Design (MIT Press)

Mary Flanagan

  • 出版商: MIT
  • 出版日期: 2013-02-08
  • 售價: $1,240
  • 貴賓價: 9.5$1,178
  • 語言: 英文
  • 頁數: 362
  • 裝訂: Paperback
  • ISBN: 0262518651
  • ISBN-13: 9780262518659
  • 相關分類: 遊戲設計 Game-design
  • 海外代購書籍(需單獨結帳)

商品描述

For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games -- games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry -- and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping everyday game culture.

Flanagan provides a lively historical context for critical play through twentieth-century art movements, connecting subversive game design to subversive art: her examples of "playing house" include Dadaist puppet shows and The Sims. She looks at artists' alternative computer-based games and explores games for change, considering the way activist concerns -- including worldwide poverty and AIDS -- can be incorporated into game design.

Arguing that this kind of conscious practice -- which now constitutes the avant-garde of the computer game medium -- can inspire new working methods for designers, Flanagan offers a model for designing that will encourage the subversion of popular gaming tropes through new styles of game making, and proposes a theory of alternate game design that focuses on the reworking of contemporary popular game practices.