Playworlds: rule systems & relational art
In this talk, Dr. Mary Flanagan presents games and artworks that function to create emergent values among both designers and players. Arguing that agency is a key concept to designing play systems, Flanagan explores games, values, and the conceptual concerns inherent in the rule systems that constitute contemporary play, especially focusing on the implications of the 'gamification' of everyday life.
Speakers
Mary Flanagan is an innovator focused on how people create and use technology. Her groundbreaking explorations across the arts, humanities, and sciences represent a novel use of methods and tools that bind research with introspective cultural production. As an artist, her work ranges from game-inspired systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts; these works are exhibited internationally. As a scholar interested in how human values are in play across technologies and systems, Flanagan has written more than 20 critical essays and chapters on games, empathy, gender and digital representation, art and technology, and responsible design. Her three books in English include the recent Critical Play (2009) with MIT Press. Flanagan founded the Tiltfactor game research laboratory in 2003, where researchers study and make social games, urban games, and software in a rigorous theory/practice environment. She is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College.
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