[-empyre-] games experimentation

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

more musing on games in the museum space..

thank you Troy and Melanie

The in-museum LAN sounds fascinating? I would be interested to know what game were they playing and if it was team based?
Was it very performative by nature? Where they there as a form on installation in the gallery? Did the museum attempt to explain or contextualise the activity to visitors? Where visitors invited to play? - What was the response of visitors?

I find that interactivity is still a challenge for most art institutions but multiplayer game worlds are even more problematic. 

The exhibition of Velvet Strike at the Whitney Biennale was only in the form of documentation - stills and video. It did not allow visitors to actually enter a Counterstrike Game and attempt their own in-game-act of peace activism. Working for an institution I can understand many of the reasons for this. Entering a commercial games space like that would be problematic for the gallery to take responsibility for, as they would have no control over the behaviour of players in the space and how they would respond to the Velvet Strikers. As abuse followed by initiating the violent death of your avatar is a common response from counterstrike players to velvetstrikers you can see why a public institution may be concerned! In addition what commercial gamesite would welcome intrusion by a continuous stream of unskilled disruptive players ruining everyone's game. So in this sense VelvetStrike is a performative work only possible by those imbedded in the culture of Counterstrike. Part of the games culture of experimentation, modding and hacking. 
A work where agency is a vital part of the concept but where it cannot be extended to the exhibition of the work.

as Melanie states part of an active culture with game culture itself - in this case an intervention into games most famous mod.
a very different position to Troy's use of game technology, working with programmers and the middleware Renderware to develop the behaviours, AI and virtual environment that could support his complex interactive world.





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