[-empyre-] game to game...

["Helen Stuckey" <hstuckey@acmi.net.au>]

late in the day as this ...welcome to game to game at empyres
a week of discussion dedicated to exploring the increasing significance of video game technology and culture to screen arts
participating in this panel are; Rebecca Cannon curator of the renowned game art archive at selectparks.net - a site that has underpinned many an international games art show; Troy Innocent new media artist and innovator whose recent work uses the rule based world of games to explore the rule based world of language in dynamic ways incorporating play and performance; Anita Johnston whose work invites you to navigate a perverted game space wonderland - but unlike American McGee's no evilly grinning cat to help you here!
And Melanie Swalwell games and media theorist, researcher and lecturer at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.


Ready or not games are in the gallery. According to the artist Brody Condon, a collaborator on Velvet Strike a Counterstrike intervention featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennale, games offer the artist an immedialty accessible tool for cultural criticism. Brody Condon is one of a new generation of artist’s who use modding, reverse engineering and utilizes 3D game development technologies to create work that both reflects on the culture of the video game and the world beyond.   

These artists recognise the potential of game technologies to offer a level of meaningful interactivity and the possibilities that player agency can bring to work. In addition it is a medium that the new generation of artists have grown up within - the fourth place where skills are honed, friendships made, aesthetics fostered, time clocked and worlds explored.  

In the artwork 9-11 Survivor you play an office worker trapped in the burning Twin Towers your choices appear to be to perish by fire or plunge to your death. In the USA the three students who made this work received death threats and public condemnation from those who viewed the work as just another violent game. Their goal, however, was to reinterpret a historic moment by transplanting it to the medium with which they were most familiar. It was a personal response to the mass repetition of the televised images of bodies falling from the towers on Sept. 11, 2001. They hoped that an immersive, interactive version in which the user felt trapped and frightened would break the CNN induced narcosis and restore immediacy to the day's horrors. 

In Australia the Escape from Woomera Team have received a similar hostile reaction to the notion of working within the structure of a video game to produce a serious meditation on a human rights issue. Escape from Woomera is underpinned by a considered methodology and rigorous documentary research. It addresses the Australian Governments attempt to suppress information about conditions within the detention centres and human rights concerns for the effects of detention by placing the users within an exact model of the camp and monitoring the players “hope”.

We cannot ignore the tools that games technology offer artists nor can we ignore the significant culture of games themselves and the new paradigms for immersion and interaction they create. From the alternate worlds of massive multiplayer games, to our increasing occupation of virtual space - games offer complex and varying systems of ideological representation.  They also offer an established cultural of resistance and transformation through modding, hacking, machinima and transgressive play…so let the games begin.



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