Critical Play

1) "Around 2002, the year the first Sims game peaked in popularity, a significant shift in U.S. culture affected the balance between the physical and the virtual. Since the 1980s, there has been a growing U.S. trend to move to controllable spaces. The house has shifted from being a place of comfort to a site for defense. Unsurprisingly then, amid 1990s dot-com culture, The Sims embodied a period of great optimism, when a robust economy and low crime rates contributed to the utopian appeal of a new era. Software and hardware industries provided an almost mythic promise of a new, technology-infused lifestyle. Americans actively participated in both the consumption of household goods and virtual technologies.
The collapse of the dot-com bubble was followed by a period of unusual economic decline and instability due to fears generated by the idea of impending terrorist threats. In the United States, old city neighborhoods are growing at the suburbs' expense. With cities touted as terrorist targets, and U.S. Department of Homeland Security bulletins encouraging citizens to fortify their homes with plastic sheeting, stored water, and duct tape, digital entertainment sales simultaneously boomed. These practical everyday trends, combined with the increase in games' (especially The Sims) popularity, demonstrate that American consumers have retreated into their homes both physically and virtually to discover and enact their utopian ideals."

2) "The shift from the Shang dynasty, during which divination diagrams were popular, to the Zhou dynasty, when yin and yang and other rational systems were emerging, may have helped shift an interpretation of the game [Weiqi/Go] from its roots in divination to its contemporary identity as a strategic game system.
If we situate the creation of early board games alongside the advent of other types of divination materials, the comparison points to a Neolithic shift in consciousness that agriculture brought to much of the world. For this generation of people, the shift was not only a technological change from food gathering to the sowing and planting of materials but also an intellectual shift, especially in the redefinition of space and time that this upheaval engendered. Agricultural planning, the saving of seeds, animal breeding and domestication, along with the abstraction of the heavens or rivers to create calendars all demonstrate new ways of understanding time. Separating hunting space into agricultural space, the division of land into fenced areas, and the invention of ploughs, irrigation, geometry, and mathematics made the abstraction of space a highly prized mental process. Board games appear to manifest these concepts and their effects on relationships, both social and physical, by presenting them in a safe, ritualized form."

3) "Dada's subversive practices in its reworking of authority and authorship were one way social norms were pushed and literally 'at play.' The Dadaist critiques discussed here used participatory play, gaming as practice research, and interactivity to reflect everyday concerns and to unplay, reskin, rewrite, and, in some cases, actively redefine culture. The artistic experiments with games [...] serve as a provocative look at how artists can challenge objects, behaviors, and ideas and subsequently transform them."

4) "The Surrealists made games in order to make art. Games were a process—an integral part of their research—not merely an outcome. Games such as exquisite corpse harnessed the notions of chance and automatism, a set of unconscious acts that emerged possessing the unusual 'possibility of thought, which is that of its pooling.' This pooling of thought, its collective distribution among artists and intellectuals of the day, in turn created an effort that went beyond the perceptions of one individual author, transcending ego and self-interest to create an artifact of group research.
In critical play, the performance of games can foster creativity, and further, produce new art forms, styles, and genres. Performance might reveal particular connections between subjects or shapes previously unknown. It might help the designer, for example, explore questions of permutation, repetition, and repeatability. The sense of subjectivity and the role of the player are additionally questioned and repositioned in these games. And, furthermore, 'winning' might mean to experience or make something new, beautiful, or surprising, or to touch on an artifact or process that helps one experience the artistic process or the mysterious mind."

5) "As a cautionary note, however, it must be admitted that political and social climates make critical play, especially in the form of performance, unavailable to a significant percentage of the population. What would happen if The Yes Men were, say, immigrant women, or African American men? We can only speculate. But in the first part of the twenty-first century, minority artists would likely have difficulty entering venues and staking their claims. This is why radical groups such as the Guerrilla Girls use costume, or artists such as Keith and Mendi Obadike use online venues as an arena. If artists of color did manage to infiltrate certain places of power, the result might be deportation or prison rather than acclaim. What does this say about critical play's efficacy regarding real-world issues? How probable is it that everyday people may playfully intervene? In the final analysis, a critique of performance practices must ask: Who gets to play?"

6) "But the question remains: Can locative play reflect the contested nature of lived space? If technology is used, can it too reflect the realities bound to space? Is locative media work mistakenly aligned with the principles of psychogeography, which, by its very nature, is distinctly political? Few of the projects in this medium address key concerns like biotechnology, consumption, war, identity, militarization, or terrorism. These are certainly central aspects of the contemporary interactive city. Are locative media events billed as artworks merely a new form of entertainment, a new spectacle? Are city spaces, as theorist Dennis Judd might argue in relation to new urban renewal projects, merely building a tourist city, one that chooses not to engage with local residents?"

7) "While moving through the stages of the Critical Play Method, the artist, activist, or designer can reflect upon the state of his project and see if the design continues to meet the base goals set initially for the research:
Set a design goal/mission statement and values goals. The designer sets the goals necessary for the project to create meaningful play, and sets one or more equally weighted values goals.
Develop rules and constraints that support values. The game designers rough out a framework for play, including the types of tokens, characters, props, etc. necessary to support the game's values and play.
Design for many different play styles. The designer could, for example, provide for a noncompetitive type of play alongside a competitive play scenario. The designer should design for subversion of the system and other means by which play can emerge.
Develop a playable prototype. The idea is mocked up on paper or by acting it out during the early stages of design.
Play test with diverse audiences. Designers need to get out of the studio or laboratory and play test with a wide-ranging audience, making sure to play with nontraditional gamers. Various players test the game for dead ends and dull sections, and types and levels of task difficulty.
Verify values and revise goals. Designers evaluate the game through the play tests and player comments. They verify that the values goals emerge through play, and revise goals and add or drop options based on feedback to ensure an engaging game and support the project values.
* Repeat. This process is repeated to make sure the game supports the values it set out to frame and support, as well as provide an engrossing and playable experience. These two criteria for success must be measured in each iterative cycle."