Games & Art

Games as Art?

http://pc.ign.com/news/25422.html

Taking Video Games Seriously, as Art and Product

By JEFFREY R. YOUNGRIGGER HAPPY: VIDEO GAMES AND THE ENTERTAINMENT REVOLUTION By Steven Poole (Arcade Publishing, $25.95) STEVEN POOLE was a child in the late 1970's, when video games first invaded arcades and homes, and he fondly remembers spending countless hours gunning down aliens and saving many a digital princess. During the last year, he has played hundreds of past and current video games with a more critical eye, in an effort to understand what makes these hyperkinetic amusements so captivating. The result is "Trigger Happy: Video Games and the Entertainment Revolution," which is both an eloquent rationalization for the guilty pleasures of video gaming and a persuasive argument for taking electronic games seriously as an art form worthy of critical attention.

American consumers now spend more on video games than on movie tickets — with video game hardware and software sales now totaling about $8.9 billion per year, compared with about $7.3 billion in box office receipts. And video game characters — from the cartoonish Mario Brothers to the curvaceous Lara Croft — have become cultural icons. But the games themselves are often ignored by serious critics and scholars, according to Mr. Poole. "Video games today find themselves in the position that the movies and jazz occupied before World War II; popular but despised, thought to be beneath serious evaluation," he writes.

Mr. Poole, a 28-year-old British journalist whose day job is reviewing books, music and video games for the British newspaper The Guardian, believes that video games get a bum rap when they are dismissed as mindless wastes of time or blamed for inspiring violence like the killings in Littleton, Colo. Sure, he concedes, the latest driving games or shoot- 'em-ups offer cheap visual thrills, but they also provide unique aesthetic experiences. And curling up with a good PlayStation 2 title might help players tame the increasingly complex technology that surrounds them. "A person who is very good at Time Crisis will probably be a good shot with a real gun," Mr. Poole writes, referring to a popular arcade game in which players shoot a plastic light gun at a video monitor. "But no convincing explanation is available as to why such an otherwise well-balanced individual would want to make the move from play to murder." Nevertheless, Mr. Poole argues that video game makers should demonstrate "a type of moral responsibility" by simulating emotional elements and depicting the consequences of violence. To him, this simply makes for better art. Extremely violent titles like Carmageddon, for instance, offer players nothing to do but drive around randomly shooting pedestrians, which can quickly become dull. Metal Gear Solid, which Mr. Poole cites as an example of a mature video game, is more interesting because it presents nuanced characters and encourages players to kill as few people as possible. "Trigger Happy" offers a solid history of four decades' worth of electronic gaming. But by comparing the video game to ancient contests like spear throwing or to the wonders of the penny arcades of the 1800's, it also struggles to situate video games within broader historical contexts of both art and play. The book also tries to analyze the various components — sound effects, characters, plot, interfaces — that make video games tick. Mr. Poole argues that the key to understanding video games is not to think of them as interactive versions of films or as attempts to simulate reality.

Instead, he says, video games should offer open environments to explore, and those environments should have their own internal logic that can transcend the boundaries of real-world physics. The best video games can induce an almost Zen-like state, Mr. Poole says, "a kind of high-speed meditation, an intense absorption in which the dynamic form of successful play becomes beautiful and satisfying." "Games will never be as good as films at telling stories visually," he concludes. "They'll never be as good as books at weaving cerebral tapestries of ideas and human lives. But video games are already extremely good at providing an exhilarating blast of the animal emotions. Fear and triumph — that is why you play a video game at the moment." Mr. Poole seems to treat the research for the book as a kind of adventure game in its own right, as he enthusiastically leads readers through industry trade shows in Los Angeles and Chiba City, Japan. And to support his arguments, he gives detailed examples of favorite moments from his own gaming sessions. Mr. Poole may be preaching to the converted rather than crying in the wilderness.

Many scholars have already embraced the notion that video games deserve critical attention. In the past two years, a growing number of scholars and artists have turned their attention to video games, said Dr. Lev Manovich, an associate professor of visual arts at the University of California at San Diego and author of "The Language of New Media," published earlier this year by the MIT Press. And the University of California at Irvine recently considered a proposal to make "computer games and gaming" an official undergraduate minor. (The faculty senate rejected the idea, which may be resubmitted.) Until you can get a degree in the art of playing video games, however, "Trigger Happy: Video Games and the Entertainment Revolution" offers an introductory course. At times it even reads like a college textbook, employing the techniques of postmodern theory and frequent references to Plato, Descartes and Shakespeare. Don't be surprised, Mr. Poole says, if future poets, painters, novelists, architects and — of course — game designers take their inspiration from their favorite video games.

"Toys'n'Noise" Center for Contemporary Art, Arcade, Linz, Austria, curated by Margarete Jahrmann & Georg Weckwerth http://www.ok-cca.aec.at/ausstellungen/toysnnoise/toys.htm

Artists: Play & Games

Michael Kelley

http://www.altculture.com/aentries/m/mxkelley.html

http://www.rooseum.se/prevex/precol/kelley33/kelley33.html

http://www.rooseum.se/prevex/precol/kelley33/craft.html

Roy Lichenstein

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/lichtenstein_roy.html

http://www.lichtensteinfoundation.org/#

RtMark

http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/cmnpd01fm.cfm?PrgDate=6%2F20%2F2000&PrgID=2

RTmark (14.4 | 28.8) -- RTmark is an anonymous collective of media provocateurs who have pulled some of the best-known cultural pranks of the past five years. Among their practical jokes: swapping the voiceboxes of talking Barbie and GI Joe dolls at a New York Toys-R-Us, and launching satirical "Giuliani for Senate" and "GATT" Websites. They've also emerged as effective defenders of artists against commercial interests on the Web. Now their work has been included in the Whitney Biennial. NPR's Rick Karr reports. (7:45) View RTmark's Web site. http://www.rtmark.com/

Kathleen Ruiz

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,38314,00.html?tw=wn20000830

Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria, "Toys'n'Noise", curated by Margarete Jahrmann & Georg Weckwerth http://www.ok-cca.aec.at

http://www.rpi.edu/%7Eruiz/Bang/Bang.html

http://www.elpais.es/p/d/temas/pisani/8pisan31.htm

Kathleen Ruiz is a digital media artist who creates interactive virtual environments, simulations and digital photographs that express issues about the structure of perception, behavior and interaction, and restructured reality. Her work has been seen in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

An Assistant Professor of Electronic Arts and Information Technology in the Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Ruiz is represented by the Sandra Gering Gallery in New York City. Ruiz has developed graduate and undergraduate courses in Virtual Environments/3D Web, Digital Imaging, Computer Art, Cyber Arts, The Art of Gaming, Media Arts Studio, Advanced Digital 3D Projects and Creativity & Visualization.

Ruiz's work has been published in Leonardo, The New York Times, Aperture, Art News, USA Today, Wired and many others. She has received numerous awards including the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Award, a New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Commission, and a recent New York State Council on the Arts grant. Her current work satirizing media violence is a continuation of her interests in the borderline between reality and fantasy.

AnneMarie Schliler

http://www.rhizome.org/cgi/query.cgi?a=Xref&q=game&f=k

http://www.rhizome.org/cgi/query.cgi?a=Xref&q=game&f=k

Linda Vigdor

http://www.paraspace.com/

Jeff Koons

http://www.sfmoma.org/collections/painting+sculpture/ma_coll_koons.html

http://www.altculture.com/aentries/k/koonsxj.html

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/koons_jeff.html

Mel Chin

http://www.artcarmuseum.com/knowmad.html

Margarete Jahrman

nTRACKER by konsum.net an artist based COOPeration Programm implemented by Max Moswitzer and Margarete Jahrmann located on the independent

Konsum Slacker Server

http://www.konsum.net/ntracker live performed on the 25th 201 at 8pm Zagreb Fair Building, Avenija Dubrovnik 15, 10 000 Zagreb, Croatia at the occasion of the exhibition 26th Youth Salon, In nTracker we show in a Supertheory event a new COOPeration Programm of the Konsum artists. It uses the principal of Tracker - which came out of the game crackers demo scene - means for the strucuture of a certain software: to use very small samples - "modules" and combine it with a timepattern- "Track"- which says when to play the sample. nTracker uses the binary number traces you leave on the net - traceroute and logfiles for this timepattern.It is an ndimesion of information you can experience in psychoacoustic noise. All kind of data you leave behind you on the machines have timestamps. One player is transfering the data live into sound with the help of the nTracker online software and the webpage. He is slightly mutating the existing codes and inverting its function. The other player is mixing all sources and performing live autotheoretisation of the artwork done and using thinkingmodels and lingo of the so called super-systemtheory. Trackers ...the word refers both to the software used and the people who do it ... It opens a new aera of COOPeration programms connected with the Konsum SLACKER server location. +--------+ +--------+ | SENDER | | TARGET | +--------+ +--------+ | ^| [============( Router )=====( Router )=====( Router )==|====] ^ ^ ^ | | TTL=1 | TTL=2 | TTL=3 | TTL=4 Traceroute | | | | shows these -----+--------------+--------------+------------/ IP addresses [] Shot0008.jpg [] shtr04.tif [] shtr02.tif [] Shot0024.jpg

The "Game Show" The Bellevue Museum, Bellevue, Washington

http://www.bellevueart.org/home.htm

Game Show November 20, 1999 - January 30, 2000 Games and game theory shed light on aspects of the artistic process. The exhibition included interactive stations and artists in residence. Game Show served as a prototype for the ongoing presence of artists and thinkers in the new museum.