[-empyre-] games experimentation

["Melanie Swalwell" <Melanie.Swalwell@vuw.ac.nz>]

Hi everyone,

Thanks Helen for the terrific introduction to what will hopefully be an interesting week of discussion.

Talking about games and art/game art is tough in a way cause its such a huge area.  And usually I find listserves aren't the best places for having in depth discussions.  But I know the empyre format is different to normal listserves, so here goes.

Thought I might mention/throw out a couple of anecdotes/observations to begin with, that people may like to take up.  Then I'll try and summarise my own interests in games and the concerns which inform my work, which tend to be around games consumption and players' experiences of gaming.  I suppose in the gallery context this becomes the visitor's experience...

But first a couple of anecdotes:

Knowing that this forum was coming up, a discussion last month on DiGRA's list (Digra being the new Digital Game Research Assoc), Gamesnetwork, caught my eye: it centred on whether games had already found the form that they would have for many years to come or not.  Debate ensued as to how media develop, with someone claiming that it was sheer romanticism to think that games might become something more/other than the established genres of today.  This interested me, that people would try and force this into an either/or mode - some of the more thoughtful posts IMO were those that accepted the both/and position, (one such post came very early in the piece from an industry person, but seemed not to be noticed).  I would put myself firmly in the both/and camp, because while I see the need to look more into why the established game forms of today are so popular, the need for work which seeks to understand the specific pleasures that games offer in positive terms, I don't see that this need entail disregarding the potential for innovation and experimentation with the form.

The other anecdote I wanted to mention relates to the "games in the museum/gallery space" thread.  After seeing acmipark displayed at ACMI early this year (btw, I was impressed, Helen, by the floor staff's preparedness to explain and make it accessible to all comers) I have been thinking a bit about how games get installed in museums.  Well the weekend before last I went along to a LAN held in a museum, here in New Zealand.  It was great to see.  For those who mightn't be familiar with the term, Lanning refers to a way of playing games where gamers get together with their computers, usually building a temporary Local Area Network (LAN) to play each other across.  The organisers of this LAN were using the museums' seminar space.  Being slightly familiar with museums' desires to attract new audiences etc, and knowing too that LAN groups can often have trouble finding a good venue, this seemed a really fabulous solution, as well as a remarkable blending of two quite different cultures that probalby don't often come into contact.

to provide a bit of an introductory post on my work and interests in the general area:

I first became interested in computer games in terms of players’ sensory-aesthetic experiences and engagements with them.  The interest is both in thinking about players’ engagements in and with virtual environments (games constituting some of the most readily accessible of these), and in thinking about players’ material bodily engagements with computer technology (cyborgs, attention, new experiences of embodiment etc).

As part of my PhD I conducted a study of a multiplayer LAN gaming group in Sydney, beginning in 1999.  I am still working on publishing this research, but there is an article on some of this at http://www.reconstruction.ws/034/swalwell.htm if you're interested.  In the context of this discussion (& it seems to echo some of the discussions over the last week, as well), I’d mention the ideas there on gaming as a practice that involves crossing through various “materiality and reality statuses”.  This is a concept I borrow from Margaret Morse, which provides a rich way of thinking about gaming (as well as other new and not so new media -- who was it who asked where you are when you’re on the phone? (Ronnell?)).  It’s the both/and thing -- the 'here' and the 'there' -- that really fascinates me, the way that both material and virtual spaces are being experienced, a kind of mixing of realities if you will.  This is really brought home at a LAN with the physical face to face AND online virtual encounters players have with each other, but it also applies to other modes of gaming, I’d argue.

This is one of the things that makes a game art work like Escape from Woomera so nuanced and interesting -- the being across completely dissimilar situations, playing in the space between the situation the game puts you in and your immediate everyday surroundings, or wherever you’re playing.  Julian Oliver made this point nicely in an interview I did with he and Kipper back in 2002:

“These [refugee detention] centres are something that we’re in a kind of public detention from.  We don’t have access to Woomera, let alone its insides.  Woomera, and detention centres like it, is not only strategically isolated to ensure it is harder to escape, but also to ensure the public will forget it’s even there… you don’t have access to this stuff.  Escape From Woomera is all about taking a highly representative impression of life in a detention centre, mobilising it through public networks, and installing it onto people’s desktop computers inside their homes.  Games are an ideal medium to engage with this kind of content – better than a documentary could ever be – because to play is to become a subject of the content.  In this way Escape From Woomera is an opportunity to better understand what these people face inside, and to practice getting out.”

I also just generally find the experimentation with the games form (for want of a better term) very exciting in terms of seeing what can be done.  This needn't be read as implying a denigration of current commercial games, I would argue.  It's just doing something different.

It need to be remembered that experimentation is rife within the game scene and has been for a long time.  i.e. artists aren’t the only ones who experiment with games: gamers have been making mods and skins for avatars for ages.  (And there were some great examples of work from people who mod old consoles at electrofringe’s “Fragged” show last year, so its not only recent games that we’re talking about.)  Another thing that my research with gamers has shown is the degree to which gaming is itself often highly experimental: eg. “What’s this do?  Well, there’s only one way to find out”.  Experimentation in this sense of trying and testing, and seeing what something does or will do – what the limits of a game are – harks back to what the term “experience” used to mean, according to Raymond Williams -- experience was “once the present participle not of ‘feeling’ but of ‘trying’ or ‘testing’ something”. 

Ok, that’s probably enough from me to start with.

cheers,

Melanie


-----Original Message-----
From: Helen Stuckey [mailto:hstuckey@acmi.net.au]
Sent: Thursday, 17 June 2004 11:38 p.m.
To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: [-empyre-] game to game...


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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