Games, Art, and Critical PlayAn Interview with Mary Flanagan

Mary Flanagan, the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Digital
Humanities at Dartmouth College, creates artworks, situations, and games
that seek transformative social encounters. Her work has been featured in
the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, and the Center
for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. She is the recipient ofan American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowshipand commissions from the British Arts Council, the Baltimore Museum ofArt, and the National Academy of Sciences. For twenty years, Flanagan has
directed the social impact design laboratory Tiltfactor, creating and studying
games from web-based games to virtual reality escape rooms, from board
games to role-playing sports. Flanagan has spoken about biases and stereotypes in the digital arts in diverse communities from the Museum of Modern
Art to the Tate Museum in London, from the Sorbonne to Oxford University,from the World Economic Forum to K–12 teachers’ groups. Key words: art;board games; colonialism; critical play; Dada; Fluxus; game design; Growa-Game; Tiltfactor; video games

American Journal of Play: How did you play as a child?
Mary Flanagan: I played a lot on my own, with many animal figurines, LEGO
blocks, tiny plants from the yard—I always crafted combinations of miniature items to make worlds. My family also played board and card games
on weekends and at almost every family gathering. From dominos to the
popular card game 500, we had a lot of intergenerational game time. So,
I spent my free time in both structured and unstructured play. As I was asickly child, I could not pursue sports or clubs or scouting, so imaginative
world building was very important to my sense of optimism and possibility.
AJP: How have these early play experiences influenced your work as an artist,
writer, and game designer?
Flanagan: What brings my interdisciplinary interests together is a foundation
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American Journal of Play, Volume 15, number 2 © 2023 by The Strong
Contact Mary Flanagan at mary@maryflanagan.com

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in values-based speculation about the possible. I think my creative work
reflects a balance of structured and unstructured play and conceptualism.
I create games for a public audience through my research laboratory at
Dartmouth, Tiltfactor, and Resonym, my game company, with mechanics
and outcomes goals and win states. Yet I also make imaginative, open playsystems and unwinnable games, which tend to fall more on the artistic sideof things rather than on the design side. I’m also someone who asks a lot ofquestions about why things are the way they are, and this incessant curiosity ends up being the basis of my motivation for writing critical essays andbooks. I am never content to study, describe, and possibly critique without
also trying to make things on my own.
AJP: How did you start studying and making games?
Flanagan: Games have always fascinated me. You suddenly adopt the rules ofanother world and must find out how to succeed in that world. In addition
to analog games, I played a lot of Atari games growing up and would replay
them for hours—if you could do a speed run on a slow-loading adventure
game cartridge, that was me as a kid.
		 When I was in graduate school, I was working on an MFA in film
and media, but I was fascinated with the new ideas and the new notionsof interactivity that emerged around computer games. Major video andperformance artists began making interactive CD-ROMs, and I became
hooked—they are often game-like but subvert some ludic norms that havebecome standardized, like winning, scores, and so on. Then I learned about
Fluxus—a mix of nondigital artists, composers, designers, and poets in
the 1960s and 1970s whose experimental works emphasized the design
process over the completed work of art. In graduate school, I was hired
for a project to digitize a collection of Fluxus works and make them able
to be handled again, because years later these little Fluxus kits—pieces of
paper and objects, meant to be interacted with—were too precious as art
objects to be touched. Fluxus artists were playful, and they basically broke
games by making provocative, nonsensical, and unwinnable games. Afterthat project, I was committed to be a practitioner and a thinker. I studied
film as an undergraduate and was attracted to avant-garde cinema, so it was
natural to link the critical practices of avant-garde art with play. I made thefirst interactive portfolio as an artist at the University of Iowa and ended up
right after school in the burgeoning games and dot-com town of Austin,
Texas, in the 1990s. There, I was a designer and game producer making

Games, Art, and Critical Playgames that had educational aspects. So, my involvement with games isreally a long-term evolution.
		 The genesis of game development is interesting if you’re working inboth art and games contexts, because they involve very different trajectories and ideas of authorship. With ancient games, anonymous authorshipis a given. Just who exactly invented chess? Although strains of evidence
can be unearthed about the origins of some games, it’s nearly impossible
to divine the genesis for most ancient games. Games from the print era—
we’re talking seventeenth- and eighteenth-century games now—were often
produced with news-related broad sheets for entertainment and sometimes,
education. These authors, often printers and map makers, typically used
two or three common game models and just changed the title and content
depicted on the board. Over the past few decades, contemporary games
have begun like art and books to be more associated with their authors.
AJP: In your 2009 book Critical Play: Radical Game Design, you explore alternative games and avant-garde game design. What does it mean to play
critically?
Flanagan: In the book, I noted that “critical play means to create or occupy playenvironments and activities that represent one or more questions about
aspects of human life. . . . Criticality in play can be fostered in order toquestion an aspect of a game’s ‘content,’ or an aspect of a play scenario’s
function that might otherwise be considered ‘a given’ or necessary.” So by
that, if you are playing critically, you’re asking questions, and you might
be intentionally tackling something difficult.
		 Often play and games are described as escapes, which connotes a kindof mindless engagement. While that is a fine role for play, it can be so much
more than that. Play allows us to understand aspects of our identities, toempathize with others, or to test the rules and find new solutions. I suggest that through critical play such engagement can be mindful and aware,capable of playfulness and also of seriousness. Critical play is simultaneously about full engagement and full awareness. It takes practice.
AJP: You suggest artists more than a hundred years ago used games as a medium
to subvert and disrupt. Are there any particularly important examples ofthis?
Flanagan: I’m particularly drawn to history for new insights on the present andfuture. In terms of games as a platform for subversion and disruption, I
can think of no better twentieth-century example than sculptor Alberto

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Giacometti’s No More Play series, in which Giacometti creates provocative
works of art that are also game boards. A few are unwinnable puzzle-type
game boards crafted out of wood. Another seems to be a board game withholes and pieces across the board until you realize that this is a war zone,
and the objects are people whose graves are nearby. Today, these works are
as shown as art masterpieces, but they are also provocative conversation
starters because they imply player agency quite astutely. I’ve mentioned
Fluxus art as well, which, across performances, scores, and more traditional
objects, consistently invoked play and the use of play to bring about absurd,
conceptual, and provocative situations. But before all of these, there was
Dada, the playful but absurd eruption of the avant-garde in the early partof the twentieth century. These are important exemplars, but there aremany. I’m sure new examples will emerge as our knowledge of global art
and game practices continues to be enhanced by international scholarship.
AJP: Why does the Dada art movement loom so large in this history?
Flanagan: Dada questioned everything, and this was essential for art to “modernize” outside of the landscape painting and the portrait. Earlier art movements and particular artists contributed to the eventual upheaval that was
Dada. For example, Cezanne was an innovator who built form out of color.
But the context of a totalizing war like World War I made “aesthetic” artirrelevant, or so Dada artists proposed. Instead, it was a time for mockeryof materialism, for critiques of capitalism and nationalism, which manysay caused the war in the first place. Play and ridiculous performances,
bizarre situations, odd assemblages, and experimental texts show artists’expansive play in the era. In Tristan Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto” from 1918,
he rants that Dada is about freedom, the recognition of human’s grotesqueinconsistencies, and the need to abolish prophets, and he encourages all toprotest logic with disgust. Tzara and the other Dada artists hit a breaking
point at the intersection of art, culture, and everyday life. In its insistence
on senselessness, Dada was an art movement screaming into the void about
the terrible acts happening in the world, all of human making. It’s powerful when truth is spoken to power collectively, and that’s what they were
doing.
		 Although it was unfortunately primarily a White, male-dominatedartistic movement, Dada was among the first European art movements inwhich women were occasionally recognized for their roles. This recognition
is important because so many female-identifying artists have been effaced

Games, Art, and Critical Playfrom history. The performance artist and poet Elsa Von Freitag-Loringhoven; the founder of The Little Review, Margaret Anderson; writer Mina
Loy; and artists Hannah Höch, Clara Tice, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp—thesewere vital influencers on twentieth-century thought.
AJP: Your research concerning artist’s games helped you develop a critical-playgame design model. How does this approach differ from previous methods?
Flanagan: The critical-play model for game design advocates subversion, suchas unplaying games or reskinning them. As game design is taught now,
most game development methods look a lot like design thinking methods,
but there is an art-game contingency going strong, with lone artists orcollectives making unique “works of game,” as my colleague John Sharp
might say. Critical play focuses on this manner of artistic practice, with its
contemporary emphasis on concept and criticality thrown into the mix.
AJP: What is Tiltfactor and how has your research informed its work?
Flanagan: Tiltfactor is the game research laboratory I founded back in 2003,
when I first joined Hunter College, and then I moved it to DartmouthCollege in 2008. In the lab, we research ideas about games and invent andstudy games that, through the playing of, take on pressing social issues.
We’ve made games to educate people about pandemics, to support publichealth reform, and to understand health care quality better. We’ve invented
games that work to change negative biases and stereotypes and games that
help make science disciplines welcoming to female students. Each of theseprojects is backed by an evidence-based approach, and we conduct researchstudies, often using social psychology methods, to determine if the design
is doing what we intend it to do. It’s essential that we use transdisciplinary
methods to understand play, from humanistic inquiry to the social sciences.
No one discipline is right or wrong when exploring a problem; each sheds
light on a problem in its own way. The foundation of interdisciplinary
research in the social sciences and design works well with the humanitiesand arts-based notions embodied in critical play.
		 It’s important to advocate for funding sources to study games rigorously.
They are a key part of everyday culture, and we know very little about how
they impact us, both short term and long term. Given what I have learned
over the years, I believe that we’re only at the beginning stages of this.
AJP: What is Grow-a-Game?
Flanagan: Grow-a-Game is a speculative game design tool—a card deck to help
both new and experienced designers make games with a central focus on

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human values. All games embody values, whether designers intend themto or not. The deck is fundamentally a brainstorming tool that incorporates possible values as lofty human aspirations, such as equity, democracy,
inclusion, fairness, sustainability. Designers can use the cards to invent
new games or reflect on design decisions. There are other cards in the deckthat encourage the designer to summon an existing game to modify orverb cards to help invent new game mechanics. A lot of university design
programs as well as after-school programs for kids use the cards to foster
speculation about game design. They were developed as part of the Values
at Play project I pursued with Helen Nissenbaum and a great group ofadvisors. Details appear in our 2014 book Values at Play in Digital Gamespublished by MIT Press.
AJP: Could you tell us more about some of your artwork such as giantJoystickand Mapscotch that intersect with play and games?
Flanagan: A sense of surprise pervades my art practice—I like to encounternew ideas in the process of creating and throughout the life of a work. I
use various technologies to help create these unstable conditions, but I
also employ playful scenarios and game paradigms to bring out emergent
discoveries. These situations and games often instigate transformative social
encounters, but they can also provoke a sense of wonder or introspection. I
use playful methodologies to make the familiar aspects of our social world
strange—deconstructing what is assumed and posing exploratory solutions.
To make these ideas concrete: the giantJoystick of 2006 turns everyday classic Atari gameplay into something monumental and collaborative through(literally) a ten-foot tall functioning joystick. An object originally designed
for solitary play (or two players at most) becomes, in my iteration, a grandsite for collaboration. The game interface is so large that it requires collaboration and new kinds of embodiment when approaching classic games, so
the work makes the relationship with others, and with the body, something
altogether new. This is similar to Mapscotch works, which are a series of
utopian, critical, or conceptual little rules for the player to use in creatinga hopscotch. These are small instructions that serve as provocations.
		 For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I realized that I havebeen making the Mapscotch pieces for twenty years, so I collected themin a handbook, Mapscotch. Here’s an example, entitled “Linescotch.”
		 Draw a line.
		 Stand on one side.

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		 Hop over the line.
		 Draw another line.
		 Invite someone to follow you.
Linescotch instructs participants to draw, but it’s fundamentally about
action, space, and engaging with other people. So, you will make a friend,
if only for a brief moment! Some of the mapscotches are rather dreamy, butothers take on difficult subjects. Bombscotch, for example, asks players to
document U.S. wartime atrocities and hop on them.
		 Because they are enacted, not just viewed, these little poetic instructions transform into experiences. In certain art circles, this approach could
be called “relational aesthetics” or “social sculpture” because games are
systems capable of social engagement; they can create relationships. Both
Mapscotch and giantJoystick use the generous capacity of play to create anexperience for the player that is, I hope, thought provoking and moving
in some small way.
AJP: How did your 2023 book, coauthored with Mikael Jakobsson, Playing
Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games
come about?
Flanagan: I’ve been studying and making games for social impact since I
launched my research laboratory Tiltfactor in 2003. For me, the bookproject started with an awareness—and concern—about the problematic
models in contemporary European-style board games. I attend many board
game conventions because I make commercial board games, and the number of exotic locales and colonial themes in such games troubled me. In mypractice too, it started to become clear that particular assumptions in Euro
games such as “unlimited resources” and “worker placement” mechanics
felt problematic to use without some rationale as to why these exist in agiven game without sneaky ties to problematic thinking. In 2017 I wasdoing research as a museum scholar at the Getty Museum, and in the special collections of the Getty Research Institute, I found a collection of older
games with colonial themes. After keynoting and presenting some ideas oneighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and Mexican board games astools for enculturation at the 2017 Board Game Studies conference, I waschatting with my colleague Mikke Jakobsson. We found that we had bothbeen thinking about, even obsessing over, the plethora of colonial tropes
and assumptions in board games. We felt strongly we had to say something,
and to say something worthwhile to the wide range of both scholars and

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P L AYplayers who love games. We had to do the research. It was an emotionallygrueling project, too, because each new finding seemed more disgusting
than the last. In the book, we were able to cover only a fraction of what we
actually found. It’s hard to document so much negative bias, disrespect,
and, really, hatred that’s been formalized into what many think of as an art
form, as an entertainment platform, as a plaything.
AJP: What is the 4X model of board games and where does it come from?
Flanagan: The 4X genre of board games and video games dates from the 1970s.
The four Xs stand for explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. These
continue to be popular: 2015’s Empires: Age of Discovery and 2017’s Twilight Imperium are more recent examples of empire building and colonial
thinking. The 1975 game Stellar Conquest is one of the first 4X games, andit has had strong influence on the genre. It’s a Milky Way galaxy colonizing game played on an outer space map of hexagonal spaces—a war gamegenre standard game board. It’s a big game, in which players have forty-four
turns to explore, conduct technological research, expand their industrial
capacity, move their population, and engage in combat. The goal is forplayers to explore different stars on the map, set up industry, and growtheir colonies’ population to get ‘colony’ points (victory points). To dothis, players look for useful planets, whether rich in minerals or habitableenvironments. If other players have already entered a particular star system, players can choose to exterminate the other group. These 4X games
are typically grand in scale: a population counter in Stellar Conquest, forexample, marks a million inhabitants, and distances are measured in lightyears. As an “engine-building” strategy game, it plants the seeds for several
Eurogame conventions.
		 There is no intelligent life on the Stellar Conquest planets, so technicallythere is no extermination of existing civilizations (one of the Xs), but like other
war games, the strongest win and war is inevitable. Games inspired by Stellar
Conquest do feature alien enemies, though, and assume the colonial ideas thatouter space is there for the taking, with or without inhabitants. In our book,
we show that this notion of outer space empires, particularly generated byUnited States sci-fi, extend frontier myths and create a “space cowboy” trope.
In the end, colonial mentalities, space exploration—all the fantasies aroundterra nullis—fed into what was to become contemporary games.
AJP: Why is it important that scholars and players understand the histories andlegacies of colonialist board games?

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Flanagan: The purpose of our book is to move board gaming in a positive direction, to show how colonial thinking has dominated games in a surprisingand lasting way, and to help designers resist taking these design patterns
and assumptions that developed over hundreds of years as neutral. Many
people—even historians—looking critically at board games stop the searchat the game theme. In our book, we dig deeper and look at game mechanisms themselves and their interplay with theme, place, and culture. In theend, we wanted to communicate two essential observations. First, the logic
of colonialism has seeped its way into contemporary games in small andgrandiose ways. Second, we wanted to show that these designs matter toplayers and player experience. Gaming can benefit greatly from this history
as a disruptive force for more justice and fairness that cultures, peoples,and societies around the world deserve. Frantz Fanon wrote about the way
colonialism’s grip involved not just lands and territories, but also the mind.
He pointed out how colonialism distorts and destroys people’s pasts. Oncereaders are aware of the sheer reach of these colonial narratives woven
into games, they might change their thinking and question if games are
relatively neutral systems open for everyone to play.
		 Ultimately, we can create new possibilities through inventive design,
but only if we really see existing tropes for what they are. Our plan for thebook was to share this history and offer a different framing from othertypically apolitical and noncritical board game histories.
AJP: How have game designers pushed back against these colonial and imperial legacies?
Flanagan: Luckily, we’re seeing a few things starting to change. The board gameindustry is diversifying (albeit too slowly), and designers are emerging
who strive to change colonial themes and mechanics. There are amazing
new examples, however, so for those readers who might not know about
them, I want to mention a few titles. Probably the best-known game is2019’s Wingspan, in which players take on the role of bird-watching fansbuilding the most welcoming wildlife preserve. Shifting points of viewand shifting perspectives are part of the solution to create new models.
Shifting scale is, too. Instead of a game that charts out the global tea tradeand encourages players to think of world dominance, 2019’s Chai, by Dan
and Connie Kazmaier, positions players in the role of tea brewers running a teashop. In 2017’s Spirit Island, by R. Eric Reuss, players play thepart of deities who fight on behalf of the indigenous population to protect

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P L AYtheir lands and culture. Abandon All Artichokes is a deck-building gamecreated by Emma Larkins in 2020. Typically, the genre of deck-building
games is a preferred mechanical format for combat-based games, but Larkins reverses this battle narrative in favor of gardening. That same year
MonsDRAWsity, by Eric Slauson, has players drawing the monster theysaw based on descriptions from unreliable witnesses, subtly linking fantasy
game mechanics to the history of African Americans falsely identified inpolice lineups in the United States. And the tabletop, role-playing game
(TTRPG) community is moving fast to develop and distribute anticolonial
games. Coyote & Crow, is a speculative TTRPG in which Europeans nevercolonized the Americas, created in 2022 by a team of Native Americans andled by Connor Alexander, a GWY/Cherokee board game designer. We’rein an exciting new chapter in game creation!
		 I also hope to see more interesting intersections between art, experience, and games. There is a lot of room in this space.
AJP: What advice do you have for game developers who are interested in creating games that have social impact?
Flanagan: Oh gosh, there is a lot to say on this topic. I’d suggest getting toknow the archives and ongoing games selected by the Games for Changeorganization and its festival, the unique games emerging from theIndieCade festivals, and reading articles documenting any studies ongames—research studies in the social sciences and education are important
places to start. Learning about what works and what doesn’t is vital for thedesigner, and the approaches that get results aren’t always intuitive. My lab
Tiltfactor has published quite a bit on gender bias, for example, and games
for health, while other research groups and labs have other specialties. Jump
in—some of the methods and language in social science papers might not
be familiar, but it is not too challenging to get the hang of it.
AJP: What are you working on now?
Flanagan: As usual I’m working in a transdisciplinary way across art-focused
projects, research projects, and writing. Games to me are not so much a
medium but part of a larger system of art and representation, along thelines of music or narrative. Perhaps games are also like a technology—
not like a computer per say but an invention that nonetheless shapes theworld around us. As Bruno Latour noted, “Technology is society madedurable.” In this view, then, the systems I work with could become durable,
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complex web that links materials, environments, communication, sustainability, people, and culture. I aim to collaborate across these zones to reduce
biases, discover new knowledge, and craft transformative experiences fora better planet. Practically speaking, that looks like making and thinking.
I’m currently working on a commission for the Baltimore Museum of Art
involving monumental architecture, urban configurations, and rewilding in the form of giant play space. I just took a fantastic research trip to
Turkey with a bunch of board game scholars and archaeologists, and I’minterested in the trajectory of game play and ritual in prehistory, which is
not the easiest topic to find data on, but is a line of inquiry that is inspiring
me. I’m also interested in analog games and their use in protest, defiance,and critique. I’m also following up on the UNESCO sponsored “Sharing
Desired Futures” conference and the “Practices of Futurecasting” retreat
in Linz, where I advanced the use of games as speculative futures frameworks. Like many of us, I feel called to action in the face of drastic climate
instability and the destructive results of the Anthropocene, and I wish to act
by using the transformative potential of games. Games can make abstract
issues tangible. Games are particularly good for trialing and mediating ourbeing in the world. I will keep working on the world’s pressing issues bybridging the gaps among games, speculative design, and art.

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