Mary Flanagan — critical games practice

2003

Artists: Mary Flanagan · Year: 2003 · Medium: Critical game design — games engaging social, political, and ethical content; accompanying scholarly writing · Substrate: Game-design projects across multiple genres; Tiltfactor Lab research projects; scholarly books including Critical Play (MIT Press, 2009) · Place: Hanover, New Hampshire, USA · Institution: Tiltfactor Lab (Dartmouth College) Mary Flanagan's [giantJoystick] (2006, though the practice begins in 2003) is a ten-foot arcade-style joystick, built by Flanagan as a deliberately oversized physical recreation of the 1970s Atari joystick. The joystick is mounted in a gallery floor; visitors lift and push the lever, which requires them to work together — typically three or four people — to play the classic Atari VCS games that Flanagan's accompanying arcade cabinet runs. The games are Pong, Asteroids, Breakout, Missile Command. They are unwinnable from any single-player perspective because the joystick physically requires a team. Flanagan's larger practice, which she began formally articulating around 2003, is framed as "critical play" — a category that she has developed in a series of books (Critical Play: Radical Game Design, MIT Press 2009) and in the game-design studio Tiltfactor at Dartmouth College, which she founded in 2005 after joining the Dartmouth faculty. The argument is that games have always been political and cultural artifacts, that commercial entertainment-game design has obscured this, and that artists who work with game mechanics are in a position to recover what games are doing that other media cannot. [giantJoystick] is the clearest single demonstration of the argument. The physical scale of the joystick forces the player to drop the stereotypically solitary posture of the 1970s arcade; the Atari games were originally single-player, but on this joystick they are irreducibly collective. The work has been installed at the Victoria and Albert Museum's Gameshow exhibition, at Ars Electronica, at the Smithsonian, and at multiple academic institutions as a teaching object. Flanagan has continued at Dartmouth, has published extensively on game design and feminism, and has co-designed several commercial educational games through Tiltfactor. She is a professor of film and media studies and of computer science, cross-appointed at Dartmouth. Lore Flanagan built the first [giantJoystick] by hand with help from Dartmouth's engineering facilities; the original lever is welded steel about ten feet tall, balanced so a light push from any of three people can tip it in the intended direction. The gallery installation shows Atari VCS games on a mounted CRT television. Flanagan has said in interviews that the hardest part of the project was not the joystick's construction but its calibration — getting the throw-weight just right so that one person could not easily play alone but two or three could reliably play together. Several institutions have purchased editions of the piece for their permanent collections. Flanagan's design method at Tiltfactor — iterative playtesting, explicit identification of what the game's mechanics teach beyond its overt subject — has been adopted widely in academic game-studies pedagogy. Sources • Flanagan, Mary — Critical Play: Radical Game Design (MIT Press, 2009). • Tiltfactor — Dartmouth College game-design lab (tiltfactor.org). • Victoria and Albert Museum — Gameshow (exh. cat. 2011).