May 31, 2020

Emma and Gil welcome Dr. Mary Flanagan, designer of Monarch,

Visitor in Blackwood Grove, Buffalo,
Awkward
Moment, and plethora of other games in a myriad of styles and
platforms, from party to strategy on digital in tabletop. Dr.
Flanagan is also an artist, having exhibited works (many
game-related) all around the world, and teaches game design at
Dartmouth, who also hosts her game design and research lab,
Tiltfactor.

We discuss designing games from the perspectives of
fun and meaningful change. How does one make a
transformative game that players actually enjoy, but that is still
effective at building empathy and fighting prejudice?

CONTENT WARNING: There is a brief mention of racial prejudice,
and sexual assault in literary works towards the end of the
episode.

SHOW NOTES

0m21s: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo
buffalo” is a grammatically correct sentence. This video
explains it, and other lexically ambiguous sentences.

1m21s: Tiltfactor, Dr.
Flanagan’s game design and research lab at Dartmouth 

1m57s: If you’re reading this, congratulations, you’re reading
the show notes!

3m58s: Professor Scott Rogers covered The Game of The Goose in

Biography of a Board Game 221.5.

4m27s: For more information on these French Revolution-themed
versions of Game of the Goose (Jeu de la Revolution Francaise),
check out
page 17 of this PDF. It’s also interesting to note that
Robespierre attempted to install a new state religion for France
during the Revolution, the Cult
of the Supreme Being (Culte de l’Être suprême); it’s entirely
possible that its dogma was reinforced through things like board
games. Perhaps it also helped with the bizarre decimal-time-based
calendar that Robespierre couldn’t get to stick, but that still
frustrates historians to this day.

5m30s: More information about Dr. Flanagan’s book, Critical
Play.

6m39s: The
Landlord’s Game by Lizzie Magie is
the game that Monopoly was based on.

7m51s: September
12: A Toy World is a game where a player is trying to kill
terrorists by firing missiles at a village. But every terrorist you
kill creates more terrorists, as the locals get angrier at your
actions. Soon, the village is gone and you are surrounded by
terrorists. There is no way to win the game through shooting.

7m56s: Paolo Pedercini
also makes commentary games. (Note that this link contains adult
content.) Jump to the McDonald’s Videogame here. 

8m13s: More info on Profit Seed.

8m33s: More info on Layoff.

9m40s: More info on Pox: Save the
Puppies.

10m32s: “Designing
Games to Foster Empathy,” the paper Dr. Flanagan wrote with
Jonathan Belman.

15m04s: More info about psychological
distance.

16m16s: Gil is referring to
Ludology 213.5 – The Incan Gold Experiment, run by Dr. Stephen
Blessing and research assistant Elena Sakosky. (Gil refers to the
game from the original European release’s name, Diamant,
but it was released in English as Incan Gold.)

19m51s: For a longer discussion on what “fun” means in a game,
and on a deeper level, how games create meaning, check out
Ludology 201 – Are We Having Fun Yet?

21m20s: More info on the party game Buffalo.

24m14s: More info on social
identity complexity

26m13s: More info on the party game Awkward
Moment.

31m10s: For more discussion on board games and colonialism,
check out
Ludology Episode 197 – Empires Up in Arms. For more information
about the effects of “terra nullius” in board games, check out

this article from Nancy Foasberg.

32m26s: “Failed
Games: Lessons Learned from Promising but Problematic Game
Prototypes in Designing for Diversity,” by Dr. Flanagan, Max
Seidman, and Geoff Kaufman.

34m15s: Dr. Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University,
has
suggested that biological differences could explain why there
were fewer women in science. 

36m18s: More info about Blokus.

39m39s: More info on the strategy game Monarch.

40m04s: Dr. Flanagan’s book (with co-author Helen Nissenbaum)
Values
at Play.

40m18s: Here are some articles on Will
Wright and
Chris Trottier.

45m12s: More info on This
War of Mine: The Board Game and
Freedom: The Underground Railroad.

49m05s: More info on Dr. Flanagan’s art,
including giantJoystick.

50m40s: Gabriel Orozco’s Horses Running
Endlessly.

51m48s: Dr. Flanagan’s
paper, with Sukdith Punjasthitkul and Geoff Kaufman, on “Social
Loafing.”

54m53s: The article in question is “The
Mechanical Muse,” published in The New Yorker on January 7,
2020.

56m28s:
Here’s an article in Wired on the paper in question, in which
large collections of photos used to train image-recognition
software – including one used by Google and Microsoft – were found
to amplify exisiting biases. 

57m15s: In 2015,
Google apologized for their facial recognition software
mislabeling Black people as “gorillas.” 

57m42s: More info about Reload: Rethinking Women
and Cyberculture.

58m49s: The story here is “No
Woman Born,” by C.L. Moore.

1h03m31s: The show will be called “Gameplay:
Video Game Culture,” at the CCCB in Barcelona, Spain. 

1h04m07s: “Max” is Max Seidman, game designer at Resonym and
frequent collaborator with Dr. Flanagan.

1h05m41s: We’ve covered the lightweight interactive fiction
platform Twine before on the
show, most notably on Ludology 217 –
What IF?