Rules Are Not Neutral: Play As Sense-Making, Acts Of Resistance, And Imagining Otherwise

This exhibition brings together a range of analog games – including board, card, role-playing, and other participatory works – that engage social and political realities in different ways. The works span widely circulated commercial games to independently produced projects, one-of-a-kind artworks by artists, faculty, alumni, and students, and materials drawn from UC Santa Cruz Special Collections and Archives.

In part, the exhibition challenges the persistent assumption that games and play are detached from social and political life. On the contrary, game designers and artists across diverse perspectives and positions have long used play to engage questions of social systems, lived experience, and how power operates. This exhibition does not attempt to represent that full spectrum. Instead, it brings together a particular set of works that foreground how games can make systems visible, intervene in them, and imagine alternatives.

All games embody values, whether intentional or not. 

– Mary Flanagan, game designer and scholar

Across all of these works, games are not only forms of entertainment, though they may be that as well. They are encountered in multiple ways: as objects, as systems, as artworks, and as experiences that unfold unpredictably through interaction. In each case, rules and constraints shape what participants can do. In these different forms, the works stage systems – such as housing and land ownership, capitalism, race and identity, civil rights and protest, fascism, and colonialism – in ways that are simplified and easy to see, opening space to recognize similar structures beyond the game. In this sense, the works suggest that rules are not neutral – they organize experience, distribute power, and produce meaning.

Games are the art of agency.

– C. Thi Nguyen, philosopher

The exhibition is intentionally dense. This abundance reflects the breadth of ways games operate across contexts, from activism and education to art and everyday life. While it celebrates creativity and difference, it also asks how these works engage critically with the structures that shape our lives. 

Some works use rules to model systems, helping players understand how those systems operate. Others use play to rehearse action, asking players to practice navigating or challenging those systems. Still others turn toward speculation, inviting players to imagine alternative futures, worlds, and the systems that might shape them. 

The imagination is an instrument of change.

– Ursula K. Le Guin, author

The focus on analog games reflects how they foreground materiality and shared physical presence. Played face-to-face, handled, read aloud, and experienced together, these works show how rules operate not in abstraction, but through lived, embodied experience.

Ultimately, the exhibition asks us to consider not only how games represent the world, but how they shape our engagement with it – and how through play, the social and political systems they model might be understood, challenged, and reimagined.

Games are not apolitical.

– Kishonna L. Gray, media scholar

Gallery Reception

May 15 from 1 to 4pm at the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery

Art Friday

Hands-on art activities drawing from the current exhibition.
ALL ARE WELCOME regardless of skill level. Art supplies and free snacks are provided!