Making games for social change

The figures in this paper and the cultural trends discussed are focused on the United States. However similar trends (the popularity of games, the growth of the industry, and the non-participation by women) are tendencies in many other nations.

In contrast, the film industry ticket sales were just 7.7 million in 2000 (AP 2001).

Thus some artistic intervention takes the form of performance, parody, simulation, game, activist, and “hactivist” strategies. For over a century, artists with strong ideologies have utilized the “manifesto” to communicate a group goal (such as the futurists, with Marinetti 1909, or the surrealists, with Breton 1924, 1971). A number of artists have used interventionist strategies, especially women artists. Women artists have functioned as outsiders in both overall culture and The work of Dada artists such as the radical street performer Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (Hjartarson and Spettigue 1992; Gammel 2003), and Hannah Hoch (Kimmelman 1997; Ollman 1998); Surrealist artists Maya Deren, Djuna Barnes, and Claude Cahun (Martyniuk 1998; Rice 1999); Gutai artist Atsuko Tanaka (Munroe 1994; Tanaka and Kanayama 2004); and Fluxus artists Yoko Ono (2000), Jenny Holzer (1998), Suzanne Lacy (Fisher 1997), and collectives such as Paper Tiger TV all activated social, public spaces, intervening in contemporary art venues and the street to change them. Intervention was a popular strategy historically with street performers and activists: feminists reworked theatre practices and turned to street theatre for intervention (Goodman 1993).

I look at this type of play as a kind of philosophical subversion, extending the term from other feminists who use Raymond Williams and Antonio Gramsci’s notion of subversion as those behaviors which work against the monolithic structures of “culture” and “state” dominance through hegemony. The feminist work of Kenway (2001) on Gramsci is especially important, for she argues that notions of hegemony can be applied to technology culture; while many postmodernist theorists (Hebdige (1979), for example) have given up on the possibility of anything but an ironic position on the idea of subversion; this stance is in keeping with Jameson’s description of late capitalism and power systems co-opting change into its own matrix so that subversion is simply not possible. Theorists such as Negri (1989), however, and his postmodern Marxism, bolster the possibility of subversion by insisting that there are alternative modes of perceiving and producing social forms and culture. This is a useful proposition when designing activist games.