Locating Flanagan
After I found out that Mary Flanagan, the big kahuna at Tiltfactor Lab, also roams the hallways at Hunter college, I decided to dive into her writing before making contact. So today I read “Locating Play and Politics: Real World Games & Activism.”
I was not disappointed. In my ongoing search for finding evidence of what Bogost calls “the expressive potential” of games, Flanagan adds nicely to my literature. This paper focuses on “locative media projects involving play and games,” and covers a spectrum consisting of French philosophy, Big Urban Games, and everything in between.
A lot of familiar names pass the revue, such as Boal, Brecht, and LeFebvre. Building on Situationists (ie. Debord), Flanagan sets out to identify the “ambiguous game experience” that locative games offer. In her words, she attempts to flesh out “the political implications and possibilities intrinsic in taking play to the streets.” And so the first noteworthy observation was “while the phenomenon of play is universal, the experience of play is intrinsically tied to location and culture.” After reading Geertz and Huizinga, this may seem obvious. But it is the physical aspect that interests me. Yes, games originate in a particular cultural context, but so often the material dimension is overlooked. Think, for example, about the fundamental difference between playing a game of chess on a regular board versus playing it life-sized. Applying certain organizing principles within an everyday context can have an arresting, contemplative quality.
Flanagan uses the “flâneur” as a unit of analysis, aiming to transform “the formerly aristocratic walker [...] into a conscious, political actor.” According to many of these French guys, the problem with space lies in the constitutive ideologies. Says LeFebvre, “capitalist spaces [...] are systems of property relations, surveillance, and consumption.” And so flânerie was transformed into “psychogeography” as a “method to study the world” to ultimately transform “the whole of life into an exciting game–the play principle before the work principle.”
Whenever scholars outside the field of architecture say “urban space” they generally mean “New York City” or some Western country’s capital. But the point is well taken: Big Urban Games break down the boundaries between ‘play’ space and ‘work’ space. As I’ve argued elsewhere, sports and play are generally relegated to assigned spaces, extending the modernist idea of play being different from other aspects of daily life. Locative play, Big Urban Games and its ilk, collapse these boundaries and reintegrate playfulness into a quotidian setting. Along this line of thinking, “artists have long used games as both research methods and as outcomes of research processes.”
This is where Flanagan and I part ways. Rather than having an artistic collective design a game that offers alternative readings of everyday experience–which I believe is always a worthwhile venture–it is my desire to move away from these top-down approaches to using games as transformative devices. Flanagan admits, “Who has time to engage in “’alternate playgrounds,’ those urban spaces in which designers should ‘create new sandboxes in the metapolis’ and promote playful encounters?”
My interests go towards the ways in which the non-artists, non-architects and non-scholars apply game mechanics to gain epistemic access to quotidian realties. And after reading this text, I look forward to paying a Ms. Flanagan a visit.
Source: Flanagan, Mary. “Locating Play and Politics: Real World Games and Political Action.” Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference , Perth Australia Dec 2007 (.pdf)