Hello all – Last year I organized/curated the online exhibition “The Aesthetics of Gameplay” which you can view here: http://gameartshow.siggraph.org/gas/
In retrospect I dealt with many of the same questions currently under discussion in this forum – including the nature of interactivity, evolution versus revolution and even treating games as discrete self- contained objects or as an art of process.
“The Aesthetics of Gameplay” was (is) sponsored by the ACM SIGGRAPH* Digital Arts Community (DAC) and features 45 certifiable “indie” (mostly) games. Included are titles like: “The Artist is Present” a recreation of Marina Abramovic’s performance (by the same name) at the Museum of Modern Art or “The Free Culture Game” a kind of hacker’s manifesto based on the legal theories concerning intellectual property of Lawrence Lessig. Games like “Thralled” employ conventional side scrolling platformer mechanics using unconventional subject matter (or rather subjectivity). The playable character is an escaped slave and mother who flees the slave hunters and a mysterious ghost like presence. “Unmanned” takes the player into the quotidien life of a drone pilot-executioner by day; father by night. “Invisible Threads” creates a virtual sweatshop in VR (Second Life) and allows the player to print out ‘hard copy’ of the designer jeans that are virtually stitched together.
“Invisible Threads” is a kind of process art. It is performative and like all games requires the ‘player’ to interact and engage the dynamic between ‘consumer’ and assembly line worker. Many of the games invite the player enact the subjectivity of the playable character – a process ‘art’ of engagement, even if the playable character is a cat (as in the “Cat and the Coup” about the CIA sponsored coup d’état of the democratically elected premier of Iran in 1953). “Papers Please” requires the player to role play an ‘immigration inspector’ in a game that is evocative of current events in Ukraine with uncertain outcomes.
I use the term “organized” because I employed the ‘wisdom of the crowd,’ a small crowd at that to nominate titles for inclusion in the exhibition. Each nominator (game designers, academics etc.) suggested titles based on her or his interpretation of “Aesthetics of Gameplay”. There was no totalizing curatorial viewpoint, which is perhaps self-evident from the variety of aesthetic intentions on display.
Games are an art of process in another important way. With the exception of the most cliché ridden first person shooters, games use a development process of iterate and test. At the start there may be a simple mechanic of a core concept. However the game in its entirety is only dimly glimpsed on the horizon. But the key idea is to develop the mechanic or interactive event and then test it. Does it work? Is it fun? Does it engage? Does the ‘new’ mechanic work in balance with the rest of the game? Or as intriguing as it may be does it need to be jettison to preserve the underlying storyline or goal? So until the moment a game “ships” it is in an ongoing process of being incomplete or in a state of continual ‘becoming’. Practicality dictates code freeze and game release, but many games could be developed indefinitely.
Arguably, digital or electronic interactive art is an art of process. However a game designer would view much art of this kind like a single game mechanic. The artist of interaction sees the interaction as inherently interesting; as the raison d’être for the entire installation. The game designer (artist?) would be dissatisfied and would quickly lose interest because a single mechanic does not make a game.
The Santa Fe Institute’s W. Brian Arthur in The Nature of Technology (2009) suggest that technology “builds itself organically from itself” which is likely a salient characteristic of “process art” as well as the process of game development. Innovation is not linear but rather it is “combinatorial” – there are many moving parts that combine in unexpected ways. This combinatorics create radical discontinuities. (It is tempting to compare this to paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of “punctuated equilibrium”). The very process of the evolution of art practice creates the conditions for radical breaks - art that perhaps only appears in retrospect revolutionary. Yet the residue of past practice persists in the present.
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