The art of games Machinima and the limits of art games

http://m.understandingmachinima.com/chapter7/ 7 The art of games Machinima and the limits of art games Larissa Hjorth A s a genre drawing on games, new media, and art references and techniques, machinima has not only become a rich source for commentary upon these areas, but also a melting-pot for rethinking the convergence and boundaries between the disciplines. With its non-interactive and analog soundscapes, machinima suggests that “new media” cinema in the twenty-first century—like the twentieth-century—is haunted by old media (Manovich 2003; Chun 2005). Although some choose to explore machinima’s relationship to film, this chapter is concerned with its relationships to art, new media, and games—an association that can expose as much about these disciplines’ limits as their potentialities. Through the lens of machinima, we can begin to reconceptualize these intersections that are often blurred, remixed, and remediated. While much 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 129 31/05/2013 10:22 UNDERSTANDING MACHINIMA 130 machinima, such as Rooster Teeth’s Red vs Blue series (2003–present), are very much made for and part of gaming cultures, examples of machinima may also increasingly be found in realms “outside” of games, such as the visual arts. But does this movement of machinima between the disciplines represent a convergence between art, games, and new media? Or does it actually highlight attempts at disciplinary boundary-making? To explore this issue and the limits of machimina in relation to art and games, this chapter examines in particular the work of one artist who has done much to popularize machinima—Cory Arcangel. United States-based Arcangel is indicative of a new breed of artist who is bringing machinima and art games into the mainstream.1 Reviewed by The New Yorker (Scott 2011) in the wake of a solo museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) (North Miami), called The Sharper Image, and another at the Whitney Museum of American Art, called Pro Tools (both in 2011), Arcangel has taken game-art convergence to new audiences, especially through his machinima works. In this chapter I want to use the work of Arcangel to outline the terrain of machinima through its relationship to art games and its reappropriation by the visual arts. By “art games,” or “arthouse games,” I am not referring to “art” within games but, rather, to a wider notion that plays into the tradition of avant-garde movements by seeking to challenge audiences’ expectations (Flanagan 2009; Pearce 2010). After first outlining art games and their relationship to machinima, I turn to examine the work of Arcangel as arguably one of the representative artists of gaming and new media cultures. But behind the media hype, what does Arcangel’s machinima proffer and contribute to the study of machinima? Does Arcangel’s recent exhibition, Pro Tools, further the intersection between art games, new media, and machinima? Art games: collisions between new media, games, and contemporary art Much has been made of the growing pervasiveness of games as a vehicle for global popular culture. From iPhone game apps and haptic Wii consoles to the burgeoning of social media games made by companies like Zynga, games have arguably become one of the most dominant twenty-first-century media forms. Whether this phenomenon is called a “ludification” (Raessens 2006) of social ties or a “casual revolution” (Juul 2009), the fact that games have become an all-encompassing form of social media culture is undeniable. In this transformation, we see that games provide a lens into understanding 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 130 31/05/2013 10:22 THE ART OF GAMES 131 practices of the vernacular and local in the face of global forces (Dovey and Kennedy 2007; Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. 2008). Characterized by three key features—mobile, social, and casual—games have arguably become the symbol with which to analyze, reflect, and intervene in social, cultural, and political issues (Kerr 2006). Given the pervasiveness of games as both cultural practice and artifact, they have also become tools of experimentation for new media groups such as the UK’s igloo (e.g. Swan Quake) and US artists such as Arcangel and Brody Condon. As a culture formed and informed by hacking (Haddon 1999), games and ancillary genres like esports are exemplary of the rise in “vernacular creativity” (Burgess 2008) and user-created content (UCC). This is particularly so with machinima, in which games are rendered tools for and of expression (Arvers 2010). Games are also connected to art in increasingly intricate ways. Art games draw heavily from the political subversions of avant-garde strategies, especially urban mobile games (Lantz 2006).A They take two forms—interactive and non-interactive. Some genres draw their techniques from new media art; others deploy more conventional visual art strategies from disciplines such as sculpture, painting, and video art. According to Celia Pearce, art games may be viewed as “a collision between the worlds of art and video games” (2010). At the 2010 Art History of Games conference in Atlanta, Pearce noted that art games drew from process-based avant-garde movements like Fluxus (i.e. Nam June Paik) and evoked the spirit of artists like Marcel Duchamp, father of the readymade.B In her examples, Pearce discussed hybrid mixed reality projects such as Frank Lantz’s PacManhattan, whereby the game of PacMan (1980) was placed onto the grid of Manhattan. Here the limits of the game blur across online and offline spaces through the sandbox performance of the game. Rather than being goal-driven, the game brings notions of the social and the political to the forefront. As a genre once evolving from gaming cultures, machinima has grown to become its own “art-form.” Fusing art, cinema, new media, and games, machinima’s genealogy echoes that of other misunderstood genres like net. art (Arvers 2010). According to French games critic Isabelle Arvers (2010, 236), Machinima can be seen as following in the footsteps of Dadaism and Surrealism, which saw play and entertainment as the most subversive and also as the ultimate forms of art. Even outside of an art context, it is important to remember that as soon as the first personal computer was created, MIT computer scientists hacked the computer code to conceive the first digital creation: Spacewar! And Spacewar! was a computer game. So, if computer game history is related to the roots of digital creation 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 131 31/05/2013 10:22 132 UNDERSTANDING MACHINIMA and to digital code hacking, machinima can be understood to follow this tradition. Not only does machinima highlight the fact of games history as an evolution driven by hacking (Haddon 1999; Arvers 2010), it also illustrates its role as part of a critical play genealogy that has its origins in avant-garde movements. According to Arvers (2010) and US-based game designer and historian Mary Flanagan (2009), machinima may be paralleled with critical play techniques evoked by avant-garde movements such as the Situationist International (SI). Machinima demonstrates that play can be a way to explore and innovate, signposting much of the play literature that has discussed it as a form of social and cultural practice (Sutton-Smith 1997). For Flanagan (2009), cartographies of twentieth-century avant-garde media practice may be mapped through the notion of “critical play.” In Critical Play, Flanagan highlights the important role artists/activists have played in shaping game culture. Through alternative games, Flanagan provides new ways of thinking about game design and play, specifically from an avant-garde context. Drawing on an art history canon, Critical Play “outlines how play has influenced the history of creative exploration of the social and the political” (Flanagan 2009, 2). Contrary to Lev Manovich’s claim that games need to be contextualized in terms of computer science (2003, 48), Flanagan argues that we need to understand games’ “creative and aesthetic origins rather than a primarily technological context” (2009, 2) through correlations between games and art. Flanagan’s focus upon “artists using games as a medium of expression” (2009, 3; emphasis in original) has been central in “activist approaches to media” that highlight “media’s inherent imbalances” (2009, 13). From Surrealism and Dadaism to Fluxus, games have played a pivotal role in artistic and political expression. As Flanagan observes: In the early part of the twentieth century, World War I, scientific developments, and the increasing influences of the writings of Sigmund Freud brought new interest in the unconscious and new experiments with play.… Artists have used games as a medium of exploration and expression for over one hundred years. Like art, games tend to reinforce larger cultural influences. Artists, especially those who followed the Surrealist and Fluxus movements, also tend to be especially critical of the ways games are tied to social structures, economies, and ideas of their times. FLANAGAN 2009, 88 Much of game art tends to question a key premise of games—interaction. This questioning can also take the form of non-interaction such as machinima. 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 132 31/05/2013 10:22 THE ART OF GAMES 133 The work of ArcangelC is exemplary of deploying both the interactive and non-interactive elements in his installations to consider the relationship between game art, new media, and contemporary art. Examples of Arcangel’s game art include the hacked (non-interactive) console mods of Mario Brothers (1983) called Super Mario Clouds (2002),D along with an interactive modding of Hogan’s Alley (1984) in which the aim of the game becomes to shoot Andy Warhol, called I Shot Andy Warhol (2002).E Within the realm of interactive art games, we can find various forms of machinima that traverse between the analog and the digital, between online and offline worlds. The art of machinima: migrations from analog to digital, online and offline, political and beyond Machinima is just a medium, neutral as any other medium. Yet, as any other “remix” practice, it has an enormous potential that emerges when the existing material is used to convey a meaning that conflicts with its own source. The video becomes a kind of prosthetic narrative, which extends the game’s narrative in an unpredictable direction. And that, sometimes, rejects the body it was designed for. From cut-up theory to culture jamming to Nicholas Bourriaud’s “postproduction” model, many great theorists have discussed this potential: what is interesting to me is that, when it comes to games, your appropriation is not only dealing with “existing cultural material”, or with a medium, but with your own life, the life you lived inside the game. QUARANTA 2009, NPF The word machinima mixes the idea of cinema, machine, and animation. It is the encounter between a film and a game, in which gamers become film directors. As a technique to produce films, machinima is a new cinematographic genre. ARVERS 2010, 260 Machinima expands and rehearses twentieth-century media practices at the same time as it provides a space in which to reflect upon contemporary interactive media. By infusing digital visual cultures with analog voice-overs, machinima is a perfect blend of digital and analog (Arvers 2010). Echoing the marriage of old and new, of analogue and digital so pivotal to intersections between new media and game art, machinima epitomizes the specters of the old in new media. As Lev Manovich (2003) observes, contemporary new media 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 133 31/05/2013 10:22 134 UNDERSTANDING MACHINIMA and digital practice are all consumed by fetishizing the real through the lens of the reel—that is, the texture and skin of the analog. He identifies the haunting of the analog through a variety of software—such as Adobe Photoshop (1990) and Pro Tools (1991)—that all operate to maintain the presence and aura of the analog through the digital process. This is furthered by the rise of UCC from mobile phone apps like the Hipstamatic for the iPhone, which not only appears on one’s screen like an analog camera but also takes pictures that have a filmic, analog look to them (think 1970s film stills), thus borrowing from the aesthetics, texture, and memory of the analog while exploiting the digital quality to afford easy uploading and sharing through social media. While this haunting is omnipresent to the discourse of new media and its “what is so new?” genealogy (Chun 2005; Gitelman 2006), its specters underlying art games are emphasized in the case of machinima. As Arvers identifies, “voices are the human side of machinima”, (2010, 230), bringing an “‘as if’ analogue feeling to the machinima—a counterpoint to the digital” (2010, 231). Arvers further notes that the voice in machinima may be seen as a technique of the Situationist, most notably the détournement. She writes: By using virtual spaces and changing the perspective as an artistic strategy, machinima allow a distanced critique of a simulated world…. They reactualize the Situationist conception of cinema, in which images, voices in dialogs or interviews or voice over, act as different layers of content. 2010, 231 Drawing from Joseph Beuys’s discussion in 1977 of the voice as the sculpture of thought, Arvers continues that voice is the information sculpted by the air through the organs. It transforms the immateriality of thinking into materiality by bringing the body inside the sound…. Voice reflects the idea of alterity and the relationship to another person. Voice is the simultaneous presence and absence of human corporeality. Voice is the content and the meaning in language but also the sound of a persona and their body through time and space. 2010, 234 The role of sound to overlay the analog onto the digital in machinima highlights this remediation as part of broader new media practices (Gitelman 2006). Voice is an important part of machinima and its extension of the analog. Sometimes this extension of the analog can operate through the negation of voice by way of subtitling, reminding us of early twentieth-century media such as silent films. For Alex Chan’s The French Democracy (2005), 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 134 31/05/2013 10:22 THE ART OF GAMES 135 the choice of no voice-over, along with the English title, was important in its distribution to a broader audience. Deploying the game engine of The Movies (2005) to make one of the first political forms of machinima (Arvers 2010), Chan directed, subtitled, and uploaded his work in a week in response to the 2005 Paris riots. With over one million downloads, Chan’s choice to subtitle in English was important to the message having global appeal and currency. Moreover, it signaled that machinima had come of age—it had become a tool for political expression, illustrating that games can become vehicles for expression not just symbolically but also literally. Machinima not only provides a medium to explore the transitions between the analog and the digital through playing with voice and image combinations; they also provide a critical space to consider politics, often implicitly rather than explicitly. The deployment of intertextual references across different genres and media can be a way for machinima to reflect upon games. One key example of early machinima made for and by gamers is the Red vs Blue series (2003–present) adapted from the Halo (2001) game engine. Its creators deconstruct the genre of FPS (first-person shooter) games by deploying postmodern techniques such as irony, intertextuality, pastiche, and parody. Rather than performing the typical FPS features of Halo, Red vs Blue consists of some characters trying to be sensitive, reflexive, almost new-age types—the antithesis to the avatars in Halo’s typical shoot-’em-up roles. This intertextual deconstruction of FPS is most prevalent in the 2006 series of Red vs Blue,G in which the characters not only unpack stereotypes around violence and videogames but also use it as a platform for exposing fictions around identity politics in the US. In playing up this antithesis, Red vs Blue utilizes, again, the classic machinima tension between analog and digital with the human voice and humorous dialogue evoking the “analog” that works against “cold digital spaces” (Arvers 2010). In this way, machinima proffers a space to critique and challenge notions such as violence in games. Within gaming cultures, modding has also provided a space for play, critique, and reflection. Given this phenomenon, it is no accident that early examples of modding as political in-game intervention often took a political angle. In-game interventions involve, as the title suggests, interference in online game spaces in order to upset game norms. One key example of this online intervention genre is Velvet-Strike (2002) by Anne-Marie Schleiner, Brody Condon, and Joan Leandre (an intervention within the game Counter-Strike (2003).H Another example is Eddo Stern’s RUNNERS: EverQuest (1999–2000), an online intervention where three players run around endlessly in the world of EverQuest (1999). Stern’s political commentary is strongly voiced in his real-time performances, including Tekken Torture Tournament (2001)I which “immerses” the players by giving them electronic shocks every time onscreen damage occurs. 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 135 31/05/2013 10:22 136 UNDERSTANDING MACHINIMA In his collaborative work with C-Level (particularly with Peter Brinson, Condon, Michael Wilson, Mark Allen, and Jessica Hutchins),J Stern commented on the 1993 Waco massacre in his work Waco Resurrection (2004),K by rendering the tragedy into a game. In this game space, every player becomes David Koresh (the cult leader), sitting in his shoes. With the aim of the game being to die and become a martyr like Koresh, Waco Resurrection players are forced to experience the inescapable tragedy. With his background serving in the Israeli army giving him firsthand experience of violence and bloodshed, Stern’s works are highly critical of the relationship between media depictions (in game spaces and in the general media) and the real world itself. This is highlighted in Stern’s first machinima in 1999, Sheik AttackL—a palpable depiction of Israel’s bloody history. Like Waco Resurrection, audiences are given few options to deviate from history and must experience the unavoidable tragedies and collateral damage. By deploying game engines, game art machinima elude a sense of interactivity by positioning viewers as quasi-players. This quasi-player agency creates a different sense of embodiment and affect from conventional film. Stern’s work thus highlights the way in which his machinima films may, like Chan’s The French Democracy, be used as a political tool to comment on media, such as games, as a lens for broader social issues. Rewriting the relationship between machinima and new media art, Stern’s work illustrates how art games can provide some of the most explicit examples of political commentary. More than that, as Domenico Quaranta points out, Stern’s work is best understood not by the portmanteau of “machinima,” but rather as “machine animations.” By emphasizing the mechanical nature of the animation process, Quaranta highlights the way in which Stern inverts the compulsion to hide the artificial elements, thus covering the mechanical behind the seamless scenes. Rather than allowing us to just watch a scene of violence, by exposing the methods Stern also highlights the realities behind the illusion. While much of twenty-first century cinema may have been about creating illusions, Stern’s “machine animations” are about the inverse. As Quaranta (2009, np) observes: If videogames, through photorealism and immersion, employ considerable effort to make the player forget the machine, Stern returns the machine to the forefront. This could be unpleasant for both gamers and non-gamers, but it’s the only way to escape the magic of so-called virtual worlds and start making works that are critical of self. The need to expose the artifice behind the images we consume is also important to Beijing-based Cao Fei, another artist who marries politics with 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 136 31/05/2013 10:22 THE ART OF GAMES 137 games and art through machinima. As an artist who explores popular culture through a variety of methods, including video and machinima, Cao Fei’s work transforms cultural stereotypes in her ongoing Second Life project, RMB City (2010).M Drawing on popular stereotypes from China such as panda bears, Cao Fei’s avatar, China Tracy, explores the possibilities and limitations of the “virtual” on various levels by creating different formats of RMB City from machinima to “live theater” performances in Second Life. In the sci-fi scape of RMB City, the virtual and the offline are reflected upon through the project’s various mutations. At the same time as deploying stereotypes, Cao Fei playfully blurs commodities as part of a global imaginary. In RMB City, we are met with utopian skyscrapers accompanied by sinking Mao statues—a collision of Chinese popular culture references. For Cao Fei, RMB City represents a laboratory for past, present, and future interdisciplinary collaborations across design, art, politics, and cinema. Cao Fei highlights that the tapestry of Second Life is much more than just corporate, educational, or experimental in flavor. By rendering her Second Life works into machinima, she uses its space to comment on the virtual space and its reflections upon the offline. While Cao Fei uses popular culture and new media as a site for experimentation that have both real-time (in terms of Second Life performances) and machinima outcomes, other artists use a fusion between machinima and in-game intervention to experiment on more abstract levels. For instance, artists like Julian Oliver make generative and hardware mods with the real-time capacities of games to produce works that continuously evolve. Oliver’s ioq3aPaint (2003–2010),N a generative painting system modded from the game Quake III (1999), is an excellent example of this genre. But of all the artists deploying machinima, Arcangel is the most well known outside of the world of gaming and art. This makes him perfect to discuss the reappropriation of game-art, specifically machinima, and its relationship to and between games and visual art. Traversing game and art: a short case study of Arcangel’s Pro Tools exhibition Cory Arcangel is indicative of a contemporary milieu of visual artists exploiting the currency of games as a growing part of collective global memory and cultural practice. This makes him a perfect example of an artist deploying “game-art” and “art games” techniques like machinima, and branding them for the art world. Within the art world, one often finds a decontextualization of art-games’ dimensions for art world consumption. Specifically, Arcangel’s 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 137 31/05/2013 10:22 138 UNDERSTANDING MACHINIMA work addresses the memories and sentiments of the growing demography of curators and buyers, now deemed to be Generation X, or the post-babyboomer generation. This mnemonic capacity of game-art to unhinge the affective aspects of games is overtly co-opted by Arcangel. Curator Ruba Katrib, associate curator at MOCA (North Miami), notes in her catalog essay of his work that Arcangel is one of the first generations to grow up on videogames: Most people growing up in the United States in the 1980s distinctly remember the way these games looked, their soundtracks, and the hours spent fighting over whose turn it was to play—familiarities that Arcangel employs in his works.… However, Arcangel focuses more on the iconic quality of the games he uses in his work for both their novelty at the time of their creation and their dated graphics as time progresses, rather than on cutting-edge technological innovations. KATRIB 2011, 9 As Katrib observes with regard to Arcangel’s earlier works such as Super Mario Clouds (2002), in which he hacked the game cartridge to remove everything apart from the blue sky and clouds, Arcangel has a “Fluxus tendency towards art-making, with roots in a John Cage lineage” (2011, 11). Having studied composition and electronic music at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, Arcangel’s passion in everyday popular media and sound cultures as reflecting epochs is clear. In Super Mario Clouds as well as Various Self Playing Bowling Games (2011; discussed below), the avatar (i.e. Mario) is absent from the visual narrative, which is, in turn, accompanied by a soundtrack without voiceover (i.e. without the “analog” and human elements). For Katrib, Arcangel’s work references avant-garde practices which have often sought to problematize technology. Specifically, Arcangel’s Structural Film (2007) draws heavily from Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film (1962–4); other works are inspired by John Cage. But beyond the explicit attempts to locate his art within an avant-garde tradition of critical play, the “revolutionary” aspects of Arcangel’s practice are questionable, especially when taken out of the rarified context of the visual arts and placed into the realm of machinima. My point in discussing his work is not to undermine its currency, as many of his works are funny and playful. Rather, it is to examine the way in which he is packaged in the context of the art world, devoid of art-game contextualization, and which I argue is deeply problematic. From Super Mario Clouds to his Self Playing series (including Self Playing Sony Play Station 1 Bowling (2008) and Various Self Playing Bowling Games 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 138 31/05/2013 10:22 THE ART OF GAMES 139 (2011)), Arcangel transforms iconic game moments into the mundane signs that comment on the meditative, abstract, and prosaic elements of games. While some art curators like Katrib celebrate Arcangel for his exploration of technological “failure” and obsolescence, they do so without contextualizing him in terms of the growing body of machinima that traverse the political, the social, and the creative. For example, Chan’s The French Democracy, as discussed above, is a great example of a political machinima commenting on contemporary malaise. Are Katrib’s observations therefore indicative of the visual art world’s myopia, claiming innovation and criticality, when, in actuality, the “critical play” (Flanagan 2009) elements of avantgarde art practice is more likely found these days in game subcultures like machinima? I will focus now on Arcangel’s Pro Tools exhibition, which I visited in 2011, to explore this question. In June 2011, Arcangel became one of the youngest artists (along with Bruce Nauman) to hold solo museum exhibitions in the United States (The Sharper Image at MOCA and Pro Tools at the Whitney). In Pro Tools, Arcangel examines the relationship between older and newer videogames, “fake” interaction, and remixed YouTube clips. The title evokes the aforementioned “haunting” of the analog in new media, where the software program, Pro Tools, emulates the texture of the analog. This relationship between analog and digital runs throughout Pro Tools as Arcangel takes “interactive” media like games and renders them noninteractive (i.e. machinima). For example, many of Arcangel’s works, such as Various Self Playing Bowling Games and Masters (2011), both of which I will detail later, give the illusion of being interactive games when they are actually machinima. Here Arcangel toys with audiences’ memories, expectations, and disappointments as they move from what they are led to believe is interactive, but actually isn’t. By re-contextualizing games and game art in museum spaces like the Whitney, Arcangel’s work provides another inroad to reflect upon art and game convergences and divergences. However, Arcangel’s work also almost self-consciously tries to emphasize the “art” rather than the game elements. In Various Self Playing Bowling Games, the audience is greeted by a large video projection (approximately 4 meters high by 15 meters long) depicting various types of bowling games from the 1970s to the present. What we see are not only the advances in technological and graphic abilities but also the ways in which the ways of playing have not changed all that much. In the process, the audience is also able to compare and contrast the different aesthetic playabilities while being provided with a short history in the types of bowling videogames. Nostalgia is overlaid with gradations of technological obsolescence as seen in, for example, a table of old and new consoles which sit inert while games are played. Here there is an inertia between the 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 139 31/05/2013 10:22 140 UNDERSTANDING MACHINIMA games played and the missing player, as if to highlight the limits to interaction. Moreover, by deploying bowling games, Arcangel is referencing one of America’s most scathing attacks on contemporary social capital by Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone (2000). For Putnam, the decline in social welfare and community awareness has led to a weakening of “social capital,” a situation he depicts through the analogy of bowling alone. One doesn’t have to be a bowler to know that the sport is a highly social one; to be bowling alone thus defeats one of the game’s central premises. Not only does one feel in watching Self Playing a degree of inertia with respect to the non-interactivity of the piece but also a sense of general failure, given that the player fails every time to score a strike. Looping perpetually, the failure is repeated until it becomes part of the pattern. Arcangel highlights the fact that much of gameplay time involves failure. Here one can reflect upon the rise of sandbox games and their lack of purpose in terms of conventional winning in goaldriven games. Rather than just “bowling alone,” Arcangel’s work makes us feel as if we are bowling in a sandbox (game) both literally and metaphorically. For Christiane Paul, curator of new media art at the Whitney Museum, Arcangel’s videogame modifications “[undermine] the experience of play” (Paul 2011, 3): “viewers do not get to interact with the bowling games but instead watch the games seemingly play themselves” (2011, 3). Here the lack of interactivity, so central to the rendering of games into machinima, seems to place the work in a paradoxical place. Viewers in art galleries are long accustomed to not touching art. However, when the piece in question is a game or has game-like aesthetics or texture, audiences suddenly feel torn between their instinct to play and engage with a game and the actuality of being a lurker. This situation of lurking, so pivotal to Arcangel’s machinima and game modifications, highlights the anxieties around interaction and engagement in a period marked by “participatory” and “co-creative” (Banks and Humphreys 2008) media. With the internet becoming ubiquitous with the rise of media devices such as smartphones, one always feels compelled to interact. As Kate Crawford observes, so much of the discussion about new media participation denigrates activities like listening as “lurking” (2009). However, it should be noted that such judgment varies, depending on the cultural context. In China, for example, “lurking” is seen as a positive form of participation (Goggin and Hjorth 2009). These anxieties around the need to always participate and multitask have caused theorists to re-examine debates around co-presence and embodiment. In this sense, machinima as an example of twenty-first century cinema also clearly links to twentieth century media paradigms, where the participation of the audience does not take place as players but as interpreters, or reader-as-producer (Barthes 1967). It is important to acknowledge 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 140 31/05/2013 10:22 THE ART OF GAMES 141 that these paradigms existed before the so-called transformation of the digital age as forwarding the agency of users as “prod-users” (Bruns 2005).O In the case of Arcangel’s work, in which so much of it performs “interactivity” (i.e. looking like a game to be played when it actually isn’t), we witness an inversion of the Barthesian notion of the “death of the author.” Given the emphasis of contemporary media upon interactivity and the rhetoric around user agency and co-creativity, Arcangel challenges audiences and their so-called co-creative agency with works that promise interaction but deliver anything but. In this way, Arcangel invokes much thought about our relationship with the text. Arcangel’s interest in game-art doesn’t just involve game engine textures; it also involves the way in which games are packaged. Interlaced between videos that deploy machinima and YouTube techniques, one can find various “tributes” to games and older media such as cassette tapes. Here we see that the growing acceleration of technological obsolescence driving much of today’s lifestyle cultures leaves in its wake a history of cultural artifacts (Wilson and Jacobs 2009).P We are reminded of Sherry Turkle’s call for “intimate ethnographies” of objects as reflections upon their owner’s identity, social and cultural capital (2008). We are also reminded of Igor Kopytoff’s idea of material objects as having lives and biographies (1986, 66). Places and objects become a collection of stories that are rendered by people into narratives of self in order to make sense of the world. In the case of game art’s continuous and accelerated need for updates, we are left with nostalgia. Sitting next to aesthetized obsolete objects (in the form of consoles) rendered “cool” by their very retro quality (think DJ culture and its deployment of vinyl to distinguish itself from mainstream DVD culture), we find yet another work, Masters (2011), this time incorporating a game resembling a game of Wii golf. In Masters, the audience are not only allowed to touch the game, they can also “participate.” It is only after a few attempts at hitting that one realizes one isn’t the player and that the game is continuing on its own path regardless. As Paul (2011, 6–7) describes: In Arcangel’s Masters (2011) … viewers can play an interactive golf game in its regular setup by putting a golf ball but their actions will not lead to a corresponding result in the virtual world. No matter how players hit the ball, it will never end up in the hole. As in Various Self Playing Bowling Games, Arcangel humorously employs the failure of game play to highlight a subtle point about the technology of the game. In this case, Arcangel’s intervention questions the relationship between the actions of a human body in sports and their extension into a virtual environment, playfully commenting on the nature of “simulating” a physical activity in the virtual 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 141 31/05/2013 10:22 142 UNDERSTANDING MACHINIMA world of a game. Golf itself is a simulation of a simulation, a highly stylized reproduction in which people engage in the imitation of a chase (after a ball) in an artificial landscape. For Arcangel, simulation is a key element of our world and our obsession with highly manufactured renditions of reality. Masters may thus be viewed as an analogy for Arcangel’s practice and what it contributes to art games. It takes interactivity as part of a fake performance—an infinite regress of simulation. Masters also fuses machinima with game genres, confusing and infusing the limits of where games end and machinima begins. What looks like an interactive golf game is actually machinima. The magic circle of the game becomes an audience watching other people as they attempt to interact, only to find that they can’t. Here we see an example of machinima as live performance, in which the work is less about “watching” the screen but, rather, about engaging with the game in the physical space and seeing how that relates to the screen. In other words, the machinima is one component in an installation that seeks to fuse and confuse what is interactive and what isn’t. Masters looks like a game, but is actually a machinima feigning interactivity through attendant props like a golf ball that audiences can hit. While audiences may at first think that the golf ball and screen have a relationship (as in a Wii game), in Masters the screen and installation have no connection—they are a simulation of interactivity. In an age of haptic and mobile gaming media, this moment of, and for, the contemplation of disembodiment is important, whether it takes place in an art gallery or otherwise. While Arcangel’s work popularizes machinima for the art world and provides a commentary on the expectations of games and new media more generally, his work does not revolutionalize machinima. Rather, it highlights machinima’s established track record of toying with analog and digital interdependencies and the fallacies around interactivity through borrowed avant-garde techniques. Although the art world may believe Arcangel’s position to be prominent, within the context of machinima he is just another good artist among many. Traversing game and art worlds, Arcangel’s work highlights the types of boundary-making exercises taking place in an age of so-called convergence. Rather than merging the areas of art and games, we see how tactics in deploying the miminalist mantra—context as content—operates today. While games may be burgeoning across various platforms and realms that encompass its mobile, social, and serious features, “art” and “games” nonetheless still appear to have clear divisions. While the portmanteau of art games seems to suggest a hybrid space between the two, it actually highlights their divergences and differences. This has partly to do with art world contexts like museums providing a different space for commentary and 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 142 31/05/2013 10:22 THE ART OF GAMES 143 contemplation away from the multi-tasking worlds of online media. However, due to the all-pervasive rise of smartphones and the resulting inability to escape the “internet,” the art world can no longer claim such rarefication. Specifically, the relationship between games and art inside and outside the art world occupies a curious position in need of analysis. Through the example of Arcangel as one of today’s most celebrated artists deploying game-art techniques, we can see some of the distances and differences that are still in need of connecting. Machinima, as both screen media and part of broader art performances, thus provide new avenues for exploring art and game convergence. The art of gaming: conclusions on machinima and art games This chapter has provided a rudimentary outline of some of the ways in which art games and machinima can be considered inside and outside art world contexts. It has argued, in tune with Flanagan (2009), that there needs to be more of a discourse between art avant-garde history, games, and new media. As the games industry moves increasingly into the mainstream and thus becomes a more integral part of global popular culture, so, too, are we seeing a rise in indie and art games as well as their growing importance as an aesthetic and technique in the art world. I return to my initial provocation: is this just the myopia of the visual art world wanting to claim innovation and criticality when, in actuality, the “critical play” (Flanagan 2009) elements of avant-garde art practice are more likely to be found these days in game subcultures such as machinima? In that respect, I have discussed some examples of art games that oscillate around the area of machinima. This area, I argue, is growing and converging as it takes on new types of content and techniques. With artists like Chan making political machinima, the realm for the medium as a space for commentary, reflection, and contemplation of games as well as of games as a lens for socio-cultural practices dramatically expands. The art world, with all its references to avant-garde practice, can no longer safely occupy such an arena. Through works such as those by Arcangel, I have attempted to extrapolate some of the ways art games techniques in the art world can provide possibilities and limits for both art and games, enabling us to learn more about the limits of the art world than that of art games. Indeed, the growing world of machinima demonstrates that, as the art world shrinks, game-art expands. 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 143 31/05/2013 10:22 144 UNDERSTANDING MACHINIMA Note 1 Other artists comprising this “new breed” include Beijing-based artist Cao Fei. These artists embody the playfulness of avant-garde artists like Marcel Duchamp. See Mary Flanagan (2009) for further elaboration on the role of play in historical and current avant-garde practices in art games. 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