FOUL PLAY

A reading group for people who want to think together critically about play and games

organized by Aidan Wall & Lauren Fong at the Rietveld & Sandberg Library

Starting Tuesday, March 15, 5 pm and then every two weeks after that

Welcome to people of all levels of knowledge and interest in games! Spaces are limited: sign up via hello@aidanwall.com — update: FULLY BOOKED!

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The Foul Play reading group is returning to the library in March! Foul Play is a reading group for people interested in thinking together critically about games and play, either as a part of their practice, as part of broader culture, or even just as part of their daily life.

Last year, Foul Play dove into the “dark side” of games culture—taking a focus on the troubling far-right links with ”gamer” identity, the idea of “empire” in the games space, and looking at how capitalism’s systems penetrate both the video game industry as well as our ways of playing their games. This year we’ll keep some of these critical considerations in mind, retread some ground from new perspectives, and focus on looking toward a future of radical spectrums of play.

We’ll be reading essays and texts about games and texts that are themselves playful, and each session we’ll also discuss a small game that links in with the themes of the text(s). Although we will have a grounding in digital games, we’ll also touch on tabletop and board games, folk games, “play” in general, and digital culture more broadly. The reading group welcomes people of all levels of “game literacy”; with the texts we read and the discussions we hold, we hope to specifically avoid and challenge the typical “boys club” conception of a “legitimate” game-player or game-maker—there is a beautiful, messy, and diverse world of play shimmering in the fringes of popular game culture. Let’s play in the mud.

Aidan Wall is a game designer, musician, writer, artist, and precarious freelance cultural worker from Dublin, Ireland who lives in Amsterdam. They finished a Master’s Degree in Critical Studies at the Sandberg Instituut in 2019. Aidan runs the semi-dormant small press Rotted Cavern. They co-run, alongside Rachel Pafe, the game design project/reading group The Word for World is. They work as an editor/meddling bureaucrat at Public Sandberg; their favorite color is lilac; and their favorite wrestlers are HOOK and Thunder Rosa.

Lauren Fong is an artist and game designer from Cuba based in Amsterdam. Her work focuses on technology, interactive narrative and Caribbean diaspora. She is an alum of the VAV Moving Image Department of Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and currently works at the MediaLab of the Sandberg Instituut. She co-organizes together with Ladipo Famodu and Alec Mateo, Recipes for a Technological Undoing, an extracurricular program within the institution seeking to research technological bias and unravel systematic oppression within the field of technology.

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Design by Fanni Falucskai

15.03.2022 to 10.05.2022

at Library

17:00

FOUL PLAY

also: Reading Groups