When Flanagan states, “[g]ames—like film, television, and other media—are created by those who live in culture and are surrounded by their own cultural imaginary, and are a cultural medium that carries embedded beliefs, whether intended or not,” I hear what I consider to be an echo of (one of) my foundational questions when I begin a new art project. What do I want to explore, and why? How are the potential proposed aesthetics and politics interpellating each other? Why does the medium I am using matter to the experience of the viewer/participant who will encounter it? What expectations will the framework of the location of the work leave the viewer to start with? What will their relationship to my viewpoint offer them? What process, what method, and to what end?
The exposition or complication of a norm or idea is often the hope, or maybe even goal, in work I make or projects for which I design theatrical environments. I was excited to encounter this idea in relation to the making of art-games, to which I am only relatively recently exposed. Flanagan’s third point – concerning employing criticality to create new forms of play – was immediately recognizable to me in terms of a technique which interests me in performance mediums (including the digital). It made me think further about the ‘double-performance.’ An example of this Postdramatic technique could be summarized as when a theater production uses a live camera onstage, but forefronts the interplay between the filming, the filmed, and the live (re)mediation of the filmed. This multifaceted liveness tells an audience member who might be accustomed to sitting in the dark watching a narrative scene unfold that they have multiple points of reproduction to track at at the same time. Often, my hope with this technique is that the disruption of how the audience is supposed to pay attention to the form comes under question as the content of the production unfolds, and hopefully in the in between spaces of interpreting the double (or triple depending on how you want to look at it) performance new ways of experiencing the idea can be accessed. I think there are a lot of intriguing possibilities for considering how new forms of play relate to attention, and how such relationships help convey the transfer of specific critiques of dominant (or assumed) values.