Games, Art, and Critical Play: An 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 of an American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowship and commissions from the British Arts Council, the Baltimore Museum of Art, 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 stereo- types 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; Grow-a-Game; Tiltfactor; video games