Videogames and Art
By Andy Clarke
3/5
()
About this ebook
Together, the contributions position videogame art as an interdisciplinary mix of digital technologies and the traditional art forms. Of particular interest in this volume are machinima, game console artwork, politically oriented videogame art, and the production of digital art. This new and revised edition features an extended critical introduction from the editors and updated interviews with the foremost artists in the field. Rounding out the book is a critique of the commercial videogame industry comprising essays on the current quality and originality of videogames.
Related to Videogames and Art
Related ebooks
Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Indie Games: The Complete Introduction to Indie Gaming Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLudopolitics: Videogames against Control Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Kojima Code Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Before the Crash: Early Video Game History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Works of Fumito Ueda: A Different Perspective on Video Games Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNarrative Mechanics: Strategies and Meanings in Games and Real Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExperimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWell Played Retrospective: The Past, Pandemic and Future of Video Games, Value and Meaning Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSave Point: Reporting from a video game industry in transition, 2003—2011 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsImaginary Games Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGames | Game Design | Game Studies: An Introduction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsArchitectonics of Game Spaces: The Spatial Logic of the Virtual and Its Meaning for the Real Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Impact of Akira: A Manga [R]evolution Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Power Play: How Video Games Can Save the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Comprehensive Guide to Video Game Design Schools Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGame Time: Understanding Temporality in Video Games Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExploring Modeling, Texturing, Lighting, and Rendering With Autodesk 3ds Max 2021, 3rd Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGaming the System: Deconstructing Video Games, Games Studies, and Virtual Worlds Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFirst Steps in Unreal: Building Your First Game: Mastering Unreal Engine: From Novice to Pro Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLazy Designer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnity Game Development Blueprints Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExploring Modeling, Texturing, Lighting, Rendering, and Animation With MAXON Cinema 4D R20 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThinking about Video Games: Interviews with the Experts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/53D Animation Essentials Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Unity Game Development Scripting Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNarrative Design for Indies: Getting Started Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Art For You
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Art 101: From Vincent van Gogh to Andy Warhol, Key People, Ideas, and Moments in the History of Art Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Shape of Ideas: An Illustrated Exploration of Creativity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All About Love: New Visions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist: A Graphic Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The History of Art in 50 Paintings (Illustrated) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On Photography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Kids: An Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Designer's Dictionary of Color Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Morpho: Anatomy for Artists Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Visual Guide to Classical Art Theory for Drawing and Painting Students Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Living: The Classical Mannual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Erotic Photography 120 illustrations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sketch like a Boss! Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sketch Your World: A Guide to Sketch Journaling (Over 500 illustrations!) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Midjourney Mastery - The Ultimate Handbook of Prompts Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Videogames and Art
2 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Videogames and Art - Andy Clarke
SECTION I
Overviews
From Appropriation to Approximation
Axel Stockburger
Introduction
Recent years have seen a significant surge of museum and gallery exhibitions focusing on works in the context of computer and videogames. At the same time the discussion about the ontological status of computer games in relation to art, specifically whether they can be understood as an art form or not, is heating up.
Contemporary artists are increasingly influenced by computer and videogames, while game designers are turning towards the world of fine arts for inspiration.
It is the intention of this paper to examine the relationship between contemporary fine art practice and computer games. In order to understand how and why contemporary artist practice is moving towards games it is necessary to take a step back and take a look at the mutual attraction between the fields of games and art.
Modern Siblings
Johan Huizinga, the famous Dutch game scholar, posited play and games at the roots of all cultures and clarified that they permeate various sectors of society such as art, philosophy, law and politics. The notion of games as a core element of culture is also perceived by McLuhan. He states that Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture.
¹ He hints at the historic importance of games as a form of collective art at the heart of ancient non-literate societies, for the constant modelling of the universe through dramatization and enactment. Similarly, Callois describes tribal rites as forms of play with mimetic functions that are often related to full bodily involvement.
According to McLuhan, the shift towards literacy brought about a change of focus from a mimetic relation to the outer world to the inner world of the human psyche. Tribal and participatory forms of art, which were homologous with games, evolved into literary substitutes and private dramatizations of the human psyche. Games in this context have to be described as a social art demanding bodily involvement and mutual participation. Adorno and Horkheimer identified the myth of the Odyssey and the personal struggle of the individual with this shift from the ancient world to an early phase of enlightenment. The cultural forms of art and games seem to depart onto separate tangents at this point. Text and the emergence of the individual narrative gradually create forms of art directed towards individuals, and thus move it away from the participatory game.
What then is the relation between art and games?
On the first glance we can identify a number of similarities, in that both are generating spatio-temporal zones, which are perceived as different from everyday life. Furthermore, art, as well as games, are said to be on the one hand governed by rules and on the other hand related to notions of freedom. The latter has led Sutton-Smith to critique the romantic conflation of art and play. He reflects upon the romantic ideal of childhood as a realm of freedom and creativity that can be traced back to Schiller and writes: Essentially what this ‘romantic’ relationship between children’s play and art did was to obscure whatever the true relationship between play and art actually is and to contribute instead the notion that what is most important about them is the freedom, originality and autonomy they connote.
²
Sutton-Smith is convinced that the direct identification of play with art is clouding the options of explaining the true nature of play. However, the interest in so-called primitive art and children’s art as sources of innocent creativity has had a strong influence on modern art and therefore has to be treated as one important strain of proximity between the two forms.
Whereas child’s play has been idealized as seemingly free from constraints, games are usually based on rules. The consensual acceptance of these rules by all players is necessary to enter the spatio-temporal microcosm of a game. Furthermore, the rules are precisely the means to create the difference that defines the threshold between everyday life and game. This adherence to the rules can be likened to a contract, which if broken by one of the participants holds the power to destroy the game.
Objects of art emerge from being perceived as different from profane objects and it can be argued that this process is similarly based on rules. As Boris Groys has shown in his famous examination of the concept of the new in art, we are only able to identify works of so-called high
art based on processes that generate a difference between the profane world and the realm of art. For him the locus of differentiation throughout the history of modernity is the museum. In relation to the avant-gardes of the last century he states that [t]he less an artwork differs visually from a profane object, the more necessary it becomes to draw a clear distinction between the art context and the profane, everyday, non-museum context of its occurrence
.³
What is important here for our argument is that every profane object that is transported into the museum at some point in time is thereby valorized and transformed into a work of art. Consequently, if games are passing this line, they are becoming works of art. A number of artists are indeed using traditional
strategies of the appropriation of elements from the popular culture phenomenon of computer games and transform these objects into pieces of art by placing them in the art context. Groys relates to Marcel Duchamp as one of the most important artists to directly address the process of transformation from non-art to art. The concept of the ready-made challenged the differentiation process itself and has thus also transformed the rules of art itself. Groys asserts that in recent years the artistic focus has gradually moved away from the transformational power of the object in the museum space to the creation and examination of the context surrounding the artwork. He writes:
In the modernist tradition, the art context was regarded as stable – it was the idealized context of the universal museum. Innovation consisted in putting a new form, a new thing, in this stable context. In our time, the context is seen as changing and unstable. So the strategy of contemporary art consists in creating a specific context which can make a certain form or thing look other, new and interesting – even if this form was already collected before.⁴
In other words, in his view, contemporary artistic practice is particularly concerned with examining, creating and transforming the rules governing the emergence of art itself.
The game of chess is the central metaphor in Marcel Duchamp’s work. For him: Chess is undoubtedly one of the most private forms of artistic activity, since the artist’s constructions, however beautiful, occur on the invisible plain of thought and could not be said to please a wide audience.
⁵ The simple rules of chess are able to generate a universe of plastic
constructions. Part of the pleasure that can be derived from this process is its solipsistic nature. It creates a private aesthetic spatio-temporal realm. Here we have the perspective that playing a game might be part of an artistic practice in its own right with the player as the audience. It might be far-fetched to relate the playing of a computer game to Duchamp’s notion of the creation of temporal aesthetic constructions on the plain of thought
, but the core element of individual aesthetic pleasure could be said to be similar. This is not to claim that every player of a videogame is an artist of some sort. However, the practice of playing a computer game most definitely can be regarded as an aesthetic and sometimes creative process, constricted by time that generally does not leave an artefact behind.
Game elements turn up in various shapes in Duchamp’s work. There are the recurrent language games, the use of aleatorics or chance as an important part of artistic production, the constant play with gender identities, as well as the ever-present practice of chess. From the Surrealist exquisite corpse (cadavre exquis) over William Burroughs’ cut-up method and John Cage’s composition strategies to Karl Sim’s artificial life installations, the use of aleatoric elements has played an important role in artistic practice. Fluxus art strongly employed various game structures such as participation, chance and the examination and dramatization of rule-based behaviour. The playful approach to the representation of gender identities can be seen as another highly influential aspect of the game in modern art. Callois refers to this element of games that can be found in children’s play as well as forms of drama as mimicry
. There are numerous examples of mimicry in art; some of the most famous include Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose Sélavy
as well as the work of Cindy Sherman.
Since computer games have only become important as a medium with the arcade games of the early 1980s the focus here will be on artists who have been influenced by and have used computer games for their artistic practice. Most of these artists seem to come from the fields of Net and Media art.
Between Appropriation and Approximation
In the last ten years we have witnessed a significant cultural re-evaluation of video and computer games. Whereas these games were generally treated as children’s toys during the 1980s, they have permeated the whole of society by the year 2000.
Academic research and contemporary artistic practice are accompanying a general establishment of the cultural importance of those games. Currently they are entering the museums from two directions. On the one hand they more and more perceived to be cultural products worthy of exhibition in their own right and on the other hand they have become an integral part of contemporary fine art practice.
The exhibition Game On
⁶ was an interesting example for the shift of perception that has been taking place in the last decade. In the exhibition catalogue, Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire promote the notion of computer games as the art of contested spaces
. They write: We should consider … viewing games as spatial art with its roots in architecture, landscape painting, sculpture, gardening or amusement-park design.
⁷ This approach is especially worth noting if one considers the impact of installation art during the 1990s that was led by an examination of spatial configuration and audience participation in space. Whether one adheres to the notion of computer games as an art form or denies their potential for creating high art, it remains obvious that they have a number of characteristics that are not entirely shared by fine art.
First of all they are a mass medium attempting to deliver compelling entertainment for a fixed prize on a PC or console. Furthermore, they demand a high level of participation and engagement. To put it bluntly: As games they have to be played. In terms of production a lot of similarities with the medium of film can be observed. Computer games and films are usually produced by teams consisting of professionals with highly specialized roles. The emergence of hybrid entertainment products incorporating film, game, toys and even fashion manifestations has led to a strong connection between formerly separated entertainment