Games & ArtFA/AK 2100 Art and Technology

Feb. 22, 2006

What is a game?

• A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules that result in a quantifiable outcome

• Major elements of games

• system

• players

• artificial

• conflict

• rules

• quantifiable outcome

Salen, Katie and Zimmerman, Eric. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press, 2003

Digital Games

• Digital Games are systems: a formal system of rules; an experiential system of play; a contextual system embedded within larger systems of culture

• Major elements of digital games

• immediate but narrow interactivity

• information manipulation

• automated complex systems

• networked communication

Salen, Katie and Zimmerman, Eric. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press, 2003

Games, Narrative and Play

• What is the relationship between hypertext, narrative and games?

• Many scholars dispute the idea that narrative has anything to do with computer games

• Games are not a kind of cinema or literature but colonizing attempts from both these fields have already happened and no doubt will happen again - Espen Aarseth

Games, Narrative and Play

• Raises the point that games are not like other media

• Ludology: the study of game structures (or gameplay) as opposed to the study of games as narratives or games as a visual medium

• The term highlights the idea that every medium engenders a unique set of experiential and material circumstances

• http://ludology.org/index.php

Games, Narrative and Play

• Raises the point that games are not like other media

• Ludology: the study of game structures (or gameplay) as opposed to the study of games as narratives or games as a visual medium

• The term highlights the idea that every medium engenders a unique set of experiential and material circumstances

Interactive Fiction

• IF or Text Adventure

• Often dismissed by hypertext theorists as being artistically inferior to literary hypertext

• IF provides a thin and inadequate experience when compared to the reading of print based detective fiction - Sarah Sloane

• Sloane also argues that computer games based on the conventions and structures of interactivity are ethically problematic because they force the reader to partake in acts they may find personally repugnant

Adventure

• Adventure: created by Will Crowther in 1975. Led to the creation of Infocom which released the very popular Zork in 1980

• An important forerunner to hypertext, interactive fiction and computer based adventure games

• Based on Crowther’s experience as a “caver”

• Game contained elements of D&D but mainly based on real world locations of the Bedquilt Cave in central Kentucky

• Significance of game lies in the fact that gamers interacted with the game world by typing in simple English phrases that gave the impression that they were communicating with the computer

• Despite its limitations Adventure can still offer a compellingly immersive experience

Immersion

• Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus . . . in a particular medium, immersion implies learning to swim, to do the things that the new environment makes possible . . . the enjoyment of immersion as a participatory activity (Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, p 98-99)

• Immersion not just the result of realism or good graphics (think of Tetris and how addictive it was/is)

• The importance of causality and the importance of rules

• The role of “flow:” the condition where self-consciousness disappears, perceptions of time become distorted, and concentration becomes so intesne that the game or task at hand completely absorbs us.” J.Yellowless-Douglas

Game Art

• gaming has developed into a varied field of artistic practice

• game environments crystallize some of internet art’s most distinctive features, especially interactivity

• hacking is also integral to game art

• spatially based narratives

Game Art

• Natalie Bookchin’s The Intruder

• Based on a story by Jorge Luis Borges

• Part game history, part experiment in applying physical relationships to words

• Thematically the work explores the relationship between the combat fantasies of most video games and sexual domination

http://www.calarts.edu/~bookchin/intruder/

Game Art

• Artists and gamers began to explore and domesticate commercial games via a process called “mods” or modification

• Patches: changing the appearance of a game’s character and its texture maps

• Critique: material methods for diversifying a game’s politics or its visual aspectscombat fantasies of most video games and sexual domination

I am interested in the notion of art as culture hacking, art with a critical agenda that seeps outside the boundaries of prescribed art audiences and engages itself with a broader public (i.e. gaming public). Art that finds cracks in the code and hacks into foreign systems. I also want to invite a cross-pollination of gaming and art strategies by providing artists with tools and techniques developed by game hackers adn exhibiting game patches created by gamers as art (Anne-Marie Schleiner)

Game Art

Brody Condon

DeResFX.Kill < Elvis; 2004Computer Game modification (Unreal 2003)Thanks to Matt Vitalone for Elvis Model

Karma Physics< Elvis is a modification of the first person shooter computer game Unreal 2003. As the viewer camera floats through an infinite pink afterlife, twitching multiples of Elvis are controlled by the original game's "Karma Physics" real-time physics system - generally used to simulate realistic game character death.

http://www.tmpspace.com/elvis.html

Game Art

Brody Condon

Suicide Solution, 2004Documentation of In-Game PerformanceDVD (20 min)

Suicide Solution is DVD documentation collected over the last year of committing suicide in over 50 first and third person shooter games. The title is a reference to the 1981 song of the same name by Ozzie Osbourne that was blamed for the suicide of an American teenager in 1984. Through the angst ridden logic of teen existentialism, the work offers a repetitive meditation on the act of taking one's own life in a contemporary culture intertwined with interactive screen based entertainment

http://www.tmpspace.com/elvis.html

Game Art

Anne-Marie Schleiner

Schleiner’s own work and curatorial projects are creative engagements with gender ideologies and stereotypes common in many games

http://www.opensorcery.net/

Game Art

Eddo Stern

Stern’s works are assembled from computer games such as Nuclear Strike, Delta Force and Settlers. They are considered to be significant in internet art history for their preoccupation with recreational, media-based and historical foundations of self-hood - concerns that intersect and reflect one another in contemporary techno-art

http://www.eddostern.com/index.html

Game Art

Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead

“Trigger Happy” (1998) challenges the player’s attention spans by forcing a dilemma between reading the quotes and preserving one’s safety amid dropping bombs while shooting at them. See http://www.triggerhappy.org/

http://www.thomson-craighead.net/

Game Art

Mongrel

The game BlackLash is part of the Mongrel's campaign National Heritage, an international project that forces audiences, artists and collaborators to confront their complicity with cultural, biological and technological racism. Mongrel is a mixed bunch of people and machines working to celebrate the methods of an 'ignorant' and 'filthy' London street culture. The core group is Matsuko Yokokoji, Richard Pierre-Davis Harwood, and Mervin Jarmen (source: http://synworld.t0.or.at/level2/gaming_reader/artofgaming/backlash.htm#)

http://www.mongrel.org.uk/

Game Art

Metapet

‘MetaPet’ was an on-line virtual pet game by Action Tank, collaboration between artists Natalie Bookchin and Jin Lee. The project explored the complex social and political issues surrounding genetic engineering and corporate behavior.

http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2003/MetaPet/MetaPet.htm

http://www.creativetime.org/index.html