[The War on Afghanistan is already a video game! John.]========================================
November 26, 2001
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/26/arts/26ARTS.html?ex=1007941448&ei=1&en=e93
ARTS ONLINE
A War Game (Sort of), but You Can't Control the Action
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
As a teenager John Klima spent his allowance at the video arcade,
plunking quarters into Donkey Kong in a
relentless quest to defeat the evil ape. Now Mr. Klima, a New York
artist, is playing a different sort of game,
using the visual language of computer amusements to depict the not at all
amusing war in Afghanistan.
Although Mr. Klima's online artwork, "The Great Game," is based on news
events, it is among the first Internet projects
to address Sept. 11 and its global impact in an aesthetically creative
manner rather than in a strictly documentary one.
And as digital artists finally start to produce works inspired by the
terrorist attacks and their political aftermath, the
documentary efforts may be becoming more provocative, too: an M.I.T.
professor has a plan, which may or may not be
realized, to send a robot into Afghanistan to do the on-ground reporting he
says the Pentagon is not allowing the press
to do.
In Mr. Klima's "Great Game," at www.cityarts.com/greatgame, he has built a
digital relief map of Afghanistan. Its
mountainous terrain has been rendered with the cartoonish verisimilitude of
a standard computer "shooter" game,
realistic but not real. Yet the map is merely a blank canvas or an empty
game board. Since Oct. 7 Mr. Klima has been
monitoring daily Defense Department briefings. Each morning, as he learns
the most recent location of armed camps,
bombing runs and Taliban-held cities, he updates the map, marking it with
brightly colored game pieces, like a military
version of Monopoly.
Visitors to the site initially see the map as it was on Oct. 7. Every minute
or so, though, it automatically advances a day,
eventually arriving at the present. Over time the digital skies fill with
blue bombers, and the green Taliban strongholds
within the country's red-limned borders vanish. More significant, the map is
in 3-D, which means that viewers, as they
witness this history unfold, can actively change their perspective. What
they cannot do is control the action; all they can
do is watch it as it occurs. As Mr. Klima said, "You can't actually play the
game."
War is no trivial pursuit, and Mr. Klima risks reducing a flesh-and- blood
conflict to a danger-free diversion. But, he
said, "The Great Game" is intended to dramatize how the limited amount of
information flowing from the region restricts
the ability to visualize, and thus understand, what is happening there. It
appears realistic but remains unreal.
The slick graphics and interactive 3-D environments of computer games come
easily to Mr. Klima after his video-game
adolescence. At 36 he is part of the first generation of artists to grow up
immersed in an entertainment medium that with
$8 billion in annual sales is as large as the film industry. Although game
makers clamor to have their products recognized
as art, digital artists are turning the tables by incorporating the look and
feel of games into their work.
For Mr. Klima this is a natural development. From movies based on the Lara
Croft character to simulated military
exercises that resemble a round of "Doom," computer gaming's influence is
increasingly pervasive. "On the news last
night," Mr. Klima said, "I heard somebody referring to the state we're in
now as the endgame. The language of gaming
has become part of culture."
Still, Mr. Klima is hardly original in applying the game metaphor to a
geopolitical hot spot. "The Great Game" takes its
title from the 19th- century struggle between Britain and Russia for
supremacy in Central Asia. The war in Afghanistan,
Mr. Klima said, "is not the first time that an empire has tried to manage
that particular corner of the world. It's never
worked in the past."
At the moment the war in Afghanistan is widely considered to be a just
cause, so his reminder is not likely to be well
received. Of course artists often voice unpopular opinions, and the
Internet's immediacy may allow digital artists to
express them first. But in the weeks since Sept. 11 and the start of the
bombing, the digital equivalent of Picasso's
antiwar painting "Guernica" has yet to emerge.
Joy Garnett, a New York artist and editor of the Newsgrist.com new- media
newsletter, said topical works have been
slow to appear on the Internet because digital artists are still unsure what
the appropriate creative and political response
should be. She said a debate on this issue, taking place in a number of
online discussion groups, was dividing the
Internet-art community.
One contingent, especially strong in Europe, advocates pacifism. On the
other hand American artists, especially those in
New York, have been so jolted by the attacks that they are reluctant to join
such a protest. "Suddenly," Ms. Garnett
said, "the locus of geography and of cultural baggage is back after all that
utopian theorizing about the Net abolishing
such boundaries."
Chris Csikszentmihalyi, director of the Computing Culture group in the Media
Lab at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, is more concerned with crossing borders. Like Mr. Klima he is
disturbed by the dearth of information from
inside Afghanistan. Without detailed news reports on military action or
first-person accounts from that nation's people,
he said, "I have no idea what's going on there."
Unlike Mr. Klima, whose new work comments on this problem, Mr.
Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced cheek-
sent-me-HI-yee) seeks to solve it. Last week he began to build the "Afghan
eXplorer," a remote-controlled robot
modeled on the Mars Pathfinder that he intends to send into Afghanistan in
January. The four- wheeled, solar-powered
gizmo will have a video camera and a satellite- enabled Internet connection
that will transmit live images and sounds
from the foreign land.
"I thought, `Why not develop a technology that will allow me to get personal
information from Afghanistan?' " he said.
"After the Pentagon clamps down a news hold, it's as if Afghanistan is as
remote as Mars."`
Mr. Csikszentmihalyi, 33, insisted this was no hoax. He is working with
Middle Eastern arts groups to arrange a way to
release the robot into Afghanistan. Once inside, the robot's chest-level
video screen will display a human face, to make
it more approachable. He has enlisted Afghan students at M.I.T. to act as
translators so that he can conduct interviews
with anyone the robot meets. They will be viewable at a Web site at
compcult.media.mit.edu/afghan_x.
"I'm expecting it to get shot fairly quickly," Mr. Csikszentmihalyi said.
This is artist as social provocateur. Even if the
robot does not survive, "its actual mission is with the military and public
opinion about war reportage," he said. "The
secondary mission is the one in Afghanistan."
Everyone, it seems, is playing games, or something like games, these days.
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