In previous writings I alluded to a case for the video game or simulation to be considered a unique form of artwork in that the medium is detached in some way from lived experience (see 2-3).
This is not to discount the medium’s ability to bring together art and life, as the likes of composer and artist John Cage had sought to achieve with his ‘Happenings’ — “bringing to life a world of chance experience built out of everyday materials” (Turner, 2006:48). Rather, it is an observation founded on a contrast between games and other mediums such as film, music and literature, all of which maintain a commonality of being artworks, whilst simultaneously maintaining contemporary forms linked intrinsically with capital.
For instance: films or photographs can capture a lived moment within a designed form (in the case of modern, CGI-driven films, the illusion of such is still maintained and presented to an audience through the actors); a piece of music serves as a record of a physical, lived action taking place; a novel directly interfaces with a reader, drawing on their lived experience to formulate imagery in their mind.
The game however, through which a viewer interfaces with a designed experience through means of systems, by nature falls outside of this spectrum. But this need not strictly be considered a failure of the medium. In fact, there is much to be said for the potential of games as interfaces; a framework within which the dominant conditions and understandings surrounding a variety of art forms can be identified, modified and challenged.
Particularly, when interrogating a space designed to contain, enhance and modify art such as a gallery, a designed game world that itself encompasses aesthetic, technological and social decisions in some material form, yet with an inherent separation from that which it contains, acts as a unique architectural and social analogy.
Writer and game designer Anna Anthropy says of the contrast between mediums: “A painting conveys what it’s like to experience the subject as an image; a game conveys what it’s like to experience the subject as a system of rules” (Anthropy, 2012:3).
If games are to be considered systems first and foremost, we can perhaps assume that they are the artistic medium through which pre-designed rules are at their most lucid, acting as the primary modifier of a work’s structure and means of activation. Simultaneously, rules are at their most versatile in this form, exposed and malleable; changing the rules will inherently change the form of the work, and therefore our understanding of the work and the overlapping processes that give it shape.
Notably, the manner in which games address rules in a participatory manner offers further potential for developing more coherent understandings of the design of these systems. Anthropy explains that the audience or player of a game “does not merely observe the interactions” between systems/rules, but rather directly engages and participates in them (Anthropy, 2012:49), making them valuable tools for exploring the dynamics between pre-designed conditions in a variety of contexts.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Turner, Fred (2006)
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press
Anthropy, Anna (2012)
Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How freaks, normals, amateurs, artists, dreamers, dropouts, queers, housewives, and people like you are taking back an art form
New York, NY: Seven Stories Press