Here are the latest additions to our Liberatory Craft Library! Craft tools, inspiration, & insights for building our next world, now. Some just remembered, some newly discovered.
📖 Books
👉 David Waddington’s The Hidden Curriculum of Videogames
https://www.mqup.ca/Books/T/The-Hidden-Curriculum-of-Video-Games
“Rather than asking whether games produce violent individuals, we might more productively ask how they contribute to a commitment to radical capitalism and a belief in highly individualistic worldviews.”
👉 Fawzi Mesmar’s Demystifying Game Development: On originality in game development
“It introduces the concept of creative sobriety—a practice that advocates better understanding our own sources of inspiration so that we can intellectually drive our creative voice closer to originality.”
👉 Mary Flanagan & Mikael Jakobsson’s Playing Oppression (and open access)
“A striking analysis of popular board games’ roots in imperialist reasoning—and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it.”
👉 Nicole M. Brewer’s The Anti-Racist Theatre: Crafting Theatrical Collaboration
“A how-to guide for theatermakers who want freedom from white supremacy in their creative practices.”
👉 Pamela Jaye Smith’s Beyond the Hero’s Journey: Other powerful mythic themes (2nd Edition)
“Having trouble making your story fit the pattern of The Hero’s Journey? Can’t quite make those paradigms match your own characters and plot? Maybe that’s because your story is actually based on a different pattern.”
📜 Articles
👉 Indi Young’s ‘What’s Wrong with Average‘
“Average solutions aren’t just average as in “meh.” They often cause harm to the people who weren’t considered in the design.”
👉 Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s ‘(Dis)Ableing the Creative Writing Workshop‘
“Though many writers experience the workshop’s desire for context, disabled writers have the added task of rewriting the very world their readers inhabit.”
👉 Shea Rigney & Tamika Worrell’s ‘A Missing Player: The absence of Indigenous games in schools‘
“Understanding how, and if, Indigenous developed video games are used in classrooms can aid in the identification of support for teachers and the benefits for students, particularly regarding colonial and decolonial discourse.”
📺 Audio Visual
👉 Eric Rosenfield/Literate Machine’s ‘How Will Capitalism End? The Orville, Eduard Bernstein, and What is to Be Done?‘
“What does comedic science fiction television show The Orville tell us about how capitalism will end?”
👉 Meguey Baker and Vincent Baker’s ‘Underlying Models‘
“Every game is based on some underlying models of our social reality. In this panel, we will discuss how to think about these models and how they will affect the games you create, with Apocalypse World as a working example.”