Video game

When does a video game become art? – Financial Times


Are video games art? Most gamers today greet this question with a yawn. They might respond: How many times do institutions like MoMA, The Smithsonian or the V&A have to spotlight gaming before the medium is taken seriously? They might point to the aesthetic hybridity of game design; combining visual art, sound, writing and interactivity. They might patiently defend video games as an art form, or they might just not bother. For many of us, games don’t have anything left to prove.

The discussion about games as an art form normally examines triple-A games (big-budget mainstream games) and the indie market. It looks at artists within the gaming world. However, the opposite also exist: gamers within the art world. Like generations of artists before them, they harness technological innovation to articulate a moment, using the language of games to comment on our digitally mediated lives.

In 2002 digital artist Cory Arcangel made Super Mario Clouds, a hack of Nintendo classic Super Mario Bros where every graphical element has been removed except for the clouds, which scroll across a blue sky, evoking an enigmatic nostalgia. More recently art game Ennuigi cast Mario’s plumber brother, Luigi, in a meaningless landscape of blocks and green pipes, where players can walk slowly and draw long puffs on a cigarette. Press the “ruminate” button and Luigi makes existentialist remarks about the game-world, such as: “I look at this turtle and think — I have done you one better. You wear a shell, I have become one.”

It’s not always satire. Art games generally prioritise provocation over play, detaching gamers from familiar objectives like levelling up. Many are technically “mods”, made with design tools certain games provide for anyone to create their own in-game environments. A notable early example was Velvet Strike, a mod of popular shooter Counter-Strike made in the wake of 9/11, where players sprayed antiwar graffiti on walls instead of shooting each other, interrogating the thoughtless violence committed in so many games.

Jenny Jiao Hsia’s ‘Consume Me’ explores eating disorders

Chinese artist Feng Mengbo has engaged with gaming throughout his career. Taking Mount Doom By Strategy interpolates scenes from one of the Mao-era’s few permitted operas into the classic shooter Doom. His grand work Long March began as acrylic pieces fusing retro gaming aesthetics with personal memories of the Cultural Revolution and culminated with a playable game on an 80-foot-long screen in MoMA. There the player battles through Mao’s much-mythologised “long march” as a Red Army soldier, encountering wry critiques of communist China’s propaganda campaign.

Lawrence Lek also uses virtual environments to explore political questions. His work Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy Is Yours) places the player in a world where the venerable London institution has been sold off to become the playboy mansion of a Chinese billionaire, replete with sports cars and a Jeff Koons bunny in the courtyard. It debuted, fittingly enough, at the real Royal Academy of Arts in 2015.

Video games offer a pliable medium for creation at the crossroads of digital and experiential art. They are well positioned to interrogate questions of aesthetics, narrative, virtual space, agency and human behaviour. Artists are only beginning to explore this potential, ranging from Jenny Jiao Hsia’s Consume Me, a thoughtful exploration of eating disorders, to Cao Fei’s art platform RMB City, created in the virtual world of Second Life. David O’Reilly’s Everything is particularly accomplished, underlining the essential harmony of the universe by allowing you to fluidly control anything, from microorganisms and plants to animals and planets.

When does a game become art that belongs in a gallery? Perhaps when it asks questions about what it means to be alive in the world today. Few do this as concisely as Passage by Jason Rohrer, maverick artist and the first game developer to have had a solo museum retrospective. In this five-minute game you experience a pixelated character’s lifetime. As you move along the narrow tunnel from the left of the screen to the right, you age. You find a wife. Gradually, there is more ground behind you than there is in front. Near the far right of the screen, your wife dies. You know you will, too, but you don’t stop or turn around. You keep walking until the end.



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