<div><div dir="auto">Hi Isabelle and others. Thank you for your interesting work about games and postcolonial narrative.</div></div><div dir="auto">I started to review computer games at the very start, when the computers were Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari, long before PC and consoles were used to play.</div><div dir="auto">I travelled to Palo Alto and interviewed Brenda Laurel one of the pioneers at computer games aimed to women. She was sponsored by Paul Allen and his Interval Research financed her projects.</div><div dir="auto">The games at that time were sexist with an old fashioned narrative. The women were princesses to be saved or villains.</div><div dir="auto">Lara Croft was the first heroine but she played a male game based on muscles and weapons.</div><div dir="auto">I travelled to Damascus and met the people behind Muslim games where the missions were aimed to destroy the old enemy Israel. But the games were not innovative they repeated only the structure of the traditional war games but changed only the flags and the villains to kill or maim.</div><div dir="auto">Ana </div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">tors 26 sep. 2019 kl. 00:09 skrev isabelle arvers <<a href="mailto:iarvers@gmail.com">iarvers@gmail.com</a>>:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<div dir="ltr">
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">Hi,</font></p><p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next"><br></font></p><p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">Thank you so much Shu Lea
for this introduction and also for this possibility to talk about my
art and games world tour, following these 4 amazing weeks of
discussion. </font></p><p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">To celebrate my 20 years as curator in the fields of art
and video games, I embarked in June 2019 on a world tour that takes
me to over 15 countries: South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand,
Japan, India, Colombia, Argentina, Brasil, Mexico, Nigeria, Ivory
Coast, Senegal, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine.</font></p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">I am meeting digital
artists and independent game developers in order to come back with a
richer, non Western-centric and more nuanced overview of the
different ways gaming communities across the world are exploring the
issue of diversity, with an emphasis on female, feminist, queer and
decolonial practices.</font></p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">My expedition also
investigates how we can create new concepts of “working together”
and new connections within the worlds of game art, independent games,
games DIY art.</font></p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">In each country I am
visiting, I interview artists, game makers, curators, activists,
hackers and also give lectures and workshops about the relationship
between art and video games. During these workshops, I use
independent, experimental and artistic games to make movies or hybrid
artworks. I use some of the independent games I am finding on my
world tour as a way to promote these games made in Korea, Taiwan,
Indonesia, Thailand, which sometimes are still in the demo state. Here is a machinima made during a workshop in Thailand by a teenager : </font><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwlXtjTFXbw" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwlXtjTFXbw</a></p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">The aims are to break
boundaries between the art and the game world and also to promote
alternative, independent and experimental games in order to enhance
diversity – gender, ethnicity and representation - in video games
and to promote the use of games as a pedagogic tool and as a tool of
expression to raise awareness about social, cultural, political and
environmental issues. Cf my interview on these issues with Audrey Tang,
Minister of Digital in Taiwan : <a href="https://youtu.be/sZ1WvVhzPgA" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/sZ1WvVhzPgA</a></font></p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">By meeting media artists
and indie game developers and then writing articles about their games
or distributing podcasts of their interviews is also a way to better
understand a local culture, history and politics through the lens of
video games and artworks. In each country, I try to focus on projects that
deal with control and submission in South Korea, or environmental
issues or animism in Taiwan, mysticism in Indonesia,
crypto-colonialism in Thailand, extreme right shintoism in Japan,
etc. </font>
</p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">I monthly write articles in french for the online reviews Poptronics, Immersion and
Usbek & Rica
<a href="http://www.isabellearvers.com/category/art-and-games-world-tour/" target="_blank">http://www.isabellearvers.com/category/art-and-games-world-tour/</a>
but I would love to find an english spoken media interested to
publish my articles in english as all my interviews are in english. </font>
</p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">To better understand the
focus on women, feminist queer and decolonial practivces, here is an
extract of the interview given to Régine Debatty for
We-make-money-not-art : « Women are still underrepresented
in the industry and even if things changed a lot after the Gamergate
in the US, there is still a need to change the representation of
women in videogames and to give more attention to games created by
women or trans persons. In western countries, there is a quite new
consciousness about it, with conferences on diversity in events like
the Game Developers Conference or at Amaze, but I am really
interested to discover and meet other feminists in the non western
world as well as LGBTQI organizations around the world in order to
connect with other realities and create new paths and connections
between networks.</font></p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">I worked a lot abroad but
it was a “western” abroad: I mostly worked in the US, in Europe,
in Canada and in Australia. Western and white…</font></p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">There is a strong network
for our practices in the western world, but diversity is a very
recent concept in these worlds. It is great to feel that recently it
even became a new “trend”, a “tendency”, people even
mentioned feminism or diversity as a new “fashion”… Interesting
but dangerous when you see the power of evangelism growing in
countries like Brasil, USA or South Korea as well as abortion bans
around the world. Our emancipation is still young and might be weak
so we need to defend it and to connect around the world.</font></p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">Trying to promote
decolonial practices is something very important when you think about
games as a globalized culture. When I traveled to Brazil or Egypt to
give machinima workshops, I was surprised to discover that youngsters
were all playing to the same games: GTA, FIFA, Call of Duty,
Fortnite, etc… even if the local culture was powerful. In my
workshops, I tried to push youngsters to play Indie Games or games
related to their local culture, but it appeared as less fascinating
to them… less “beautiful”. It made me realize that we almost
play the same games everywhere, which mean that the moral, ethics,
concepts of these games are globalized. So, are they universal?
Universalization is a colonialist heritage. I want to decentralize my
point of view in order to tell an other story of videogames and art
and create new types and axes of collaborations. »
</font><a href="https://we-make-money-not-art.com/universalization-is-a-colonialist-heritage-an-interview-with-video-game-curator-isabelle-arvers/?fbclid=IwAR1O8T7L0-aCVbc1lQgf0vp3q1O6Jdei8NFWvM9geovZcuklh4FDHVi71Bc" target="_blank">https://we-make-money-not-art.com/universalization-is-a-colonialist-heritage-an-interview-with-video-game-curator-isabelle-arvers/?fbclid=IwAR1O8T7L0-aCVbc1lQgf0vp3q1O6Jdei8NFWvM9geovZcuklh4FDHVi71Bc</a></p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">This project is giving
birth to art and games exhibitions in Bogota (French Alliance),
Buenos Aires (Game on!) and Enschede (Overkill Festival) in November
as well as in the Digital Museum of Cairo next year. An international
conference on post-colonial games studies will be held at la Sorbonne
in fall 2020. I am also currently working on the organisation of
other projects in the countries visited for the upcoming years. Any
help, feedbacks, advices, etc are more than welcome as it is a one
person project that entirely depends on other people collaborations,
meetings and contacts. I am currently in Japan and will fly to India
on sunday.</font></p><p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">Thank you,</font></p><p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next"><br></font></p><p align="justify" style="margin-bottom:0.25cm;line-height:120%"><font face="Avenir Next">Isabelle Arvers </font>
</p><div><div dir="ltr" class="m_8057187083321739006gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><a href="http://www.isabellearvers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/animLogo.gif" target="_blank"><img alt="http://www.isabellearvers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/animLogo.gif" src="http://www.isabellearvers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/animLogo.gif"></a><br>Isabelle Arvers<br>Curator, art critic and artist<br>Wattsap: +33 661 998 386<br><a href="http://www.isabellearvers.com" target="_blank">http://www.isabellearvers.com</a><br>Director of Kareron<a href="http://www.kareron.com" target="_blank"> www.kareron.com</a></div><div dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/ArtGamesWorldTour" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/ArtGamesWorldTour</a><br>twitter: @zabarvers</div><div dir="ltr"><a href="http://instagram.com/zabarvers" target="_blank">instagram.com/zabarvers</a><br><a href="http://youtube.com/zabarvers" target="_blank">youtube.com/zabarvers</a><br><a href="https://vimeo.com/isabellearvers" target="_blank">https://vimeo.com/isabellearvers</a><br>Skype ID: isabellearvers</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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