Master Control Program

Operating in the tradition of Tron, this collection fights for the users, highlighting the action of renegade humans and the subversive systems they’ve designed to call into questions logics of dominance and control at the heart of the machine.  As much as the ludic resistance of Flynn & Tron, this collection is informed by Rita Raley‘s observation of tactical media (in the text of the same name) what unites these “forms of critical intervention, dissent and resistance” is the critical function of disturbance.  Each of the games has been selected as an example of tactical interventions disturbing the socially constructed values that lie behind many mass-market experiences of game and play through the detournement of play objects and common logics of those objects.  Most specifically, each of these games, altering the mechanisms of play to highlight the embodied experience, disrupts the expected semiotic regime that severs the player from the world outside the structure of the game.

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