Kirjahaku

An examination of subversive games-games designed for political, aesthetic, and social critique.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.

From childhood violence to romantic ruin in a retirement home, mayhem and magic are never far away in this work. Deliciously conceived, highly flavored, and subtly blended, these stories are a feast for lovers of literature.

Celia Pippet, founder of a feminist magazine, impulsively steals a bizarre artifact from the British Museum. Joined by her friend Martin, a filmmaker, and American academic Tamara, she flees to Bez in southern France to escape detection and to pursue the trail of the beguiling Adele. Fifty years before, Adele had been rescued from Bez by Dr. Jonas Sylvester. He brought her to Paris where she captured the city's attention with her alluring beauty and air of secrecy. When Sylvester brings over sister Blanche to look after Adele, he is not prepared for the love between them nor their escape from him. He takes his revenge. Moving between Blanche's life with Adele and Celia's search for clues into that life, the stories converge in Bez where the three friends discover Blanche's existence and Adele's true, if unbelievable, identity. The effects of the revelation are shattering--Adele's erotic power extends beyond the grave, melding past and present into a single reality. A provocative and original novel by an accomplished literary writer who steps beyond the boundaries of what we know as male and female.

This first novel tells the story of Eleanor and her relationship with her artist lover Jason and their daughter Clover. The story moves from Eleanor's secret endeavours to provide for Clover's future to Clover's story which is a tale of faith and duplicity in New York, London, Paris and Utah.

"Incendiary, dizzying, deadpan, GHOST SENTENCE is a love letter, an ultimatum, a wildly poetic survival guide to the death throes of the patriarchy, our age of bogus authority, white noise, and disembodied menace. Flanagan's charged lines shimmer between desire and disaster: "everyone knows it's not safe to/go out on a brimstone night/ especially with you"; "leaves still cling to the trees but/the sun is telling them to drop dead." This book coins a new language for a world that blazes all around us. GHOST SENTENCE is brilliant, contemporary to the millisecond. "--D. NURKSE, author of eleven books of poetry including Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult (2017), A Night in Brooklyn (2012), The Border Kingdom (2008), and Burnt Island (2006). His recent prizes include a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim fellowship. He has also written on human rights and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College."Written under the spell of 2016 election and under the weather of our local dictator's inauguration, GHOST SENTENCE plunges into the chaos to give us a core sampling, deeply personal and political. Our sentence may be dire, but the phantom grammars, crypt words, semantic branchings, and spectral logics of this hauntology resist the consumerist doublespeak of now. Flanagan's "voracious mouth" playfully spews "a hot core of knowing" at lovers and dictators alike. She weaponizes poetic structures by loading them with history, philosophy, theory, heart, humor, and an intimate sense of you. Yes, you were waiting for this book." --CHRISTINE HUME, author of Musca Domestica (2000), Alaskaphrenia (2004), and Shot (2010), Hume is also Professor of English at the Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University."These poems begin with personal concerns which find themselves afloat and submerged in the currents of today's political waters. "_Are you near_ or / _Can you swim?_" Mary Flanagan asks, posting updates with God, wondering at America's endless varieties of toilet paper and fake news, and meeting a vampire who is neither teen, nor paranormal, nor romantic. GHOST SENTENCE makes something hauntingly real out of several sorts of profound, contemporary crises."-- NICK MONTFORT, author of Autopia (2016), the collaboration 26 (2016), # (2014), and forthcoming, The Truelist (2017). He is Professor of Media Studies/Writing at MIT."Grief at a lost love, and grief and fury at a lost America, power Mary Flanagan's compelling, original Ghost Sentence. The private and the public merge: a personal voice and sensibility reacting to a lost, terribly flawed personal love (no less missed because flawed); and a grief-stricken, rage-fueled depiction of what it's like to be living though this American moment. Ghost Sentence is passionate, original, and oddly bracing--a book not to be missed."--PATRICIA CARLIN, author of Second Nature(2017), Quantum Jitters(2009) and Original Green 2003), as well as Shakespeare's Mortal Men (1993). She has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and VCCA. She teaches literature and poetry writing at The New School, and she co-edits the poetry journal Barrow Street.

In 2014, an interdisciplinary group of researchers at Dartmouth College, University of Buffalo, and Carnegie Mellon University came together to combat gender disparity in the sciences. Together these three principal investigators began the Interactive Narrative Technology to Reduce Implicit Negative Stereotyping and Improve the Climate in STEM for Underrepresented Students (INTRINSICS) Project. They set out to accomplish this goal by designing interactive experiences and leveraging breakthrough technology to support the development of and combat biases against women in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. This book serves as a document of their innovative research, study findings, and outlines interventions and prototypes that can be used by educators to reduce the impact of bias in the classroom.

A striking analysis of popular board games' roots in imperialist reasoning--and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it. Board games conjure up images of innocuously enriching entertainment: family game nights, childhood pastimes, cooperative board games centered around resource management and strategic play. Yet in Playing Oppression, Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson apply the incisive frameworks of postcolonial theory to a broad historical survey of board games to show how these seemingly benign entertainments reinforce the logic of imperialism. Through this lens, the commercialized version of Snakes and Ladders takes shape as the British Empire's distortion of Gyan Chaupar (an Indian game of spiritual knowledge), and early twentieth-century "trading games" that f ted French colonialism are exposed for how they conveniently sanitized its brutality while also relying on crudely racist imagery. These games' most explicitly abhorrent features may no longer be visible, but their legacy still lingers in the contemporary Eurogame tendency to exalt (and incentivize) cycles of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. An essential addition to any player's bookshelf, Playing Oppression deftly analyzes this insidious violence and proposes a path forward with board games that challenge colonialist thinking and embrace a much broader cultural imagination.

A theoretical and practical guide to integrating human values into the conception and design of digital games.All games express and embody human values, providing a compelling arena in which we play out beliefs and ideas. "Big ideas" such as justice, equity, honesty, and cooperation-as well as other kinds of ideas, including violence, exploitation, and greed-may emerge in games whether designers intend them or not. In this book, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum present Values at Play, a theoretical and practical framework for identifying socially recognized moral and political values in digital games. Values at Play can also serve as a guide to designers who seek to implement values in the conception and design of their games. After developing a theoretical foundation for their proposal, Flanagan and Nissenbaum provide detailed examinations of selected games, demonstrating the many ways in which values are embedded in them. They introduce the Values at Play heuristic, a systematic approach for incorporating values into the game design process. Interspersed among the book's chapters are texts by designers who have put Values at Play into practice by accepting values as a design constraint like any other, offering a real-world perspective on the design challenges involved.