RE: [-empyre-] games & art/commerce + museum?

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

Hi Noora, everyone,

thanks for your thoughtful post.  It's good to hear what others' experiences have been, so thanks too to others who have shared some of theirs.  Apologies for the slow response, i had to go out of town yesterday, back late, etc.

The question of visitor engagement that you raise has been knocking around my head as this discussion has been unfolding.  It is, as you say, not only relevant to games in the gallery/museum, but new media more generally (and beyond).  Your post made me remember the comment an artist made to me about visitor interactions with their work, which takes the form of interactive installations and where figuring out how interaction happens is often part of the work.  They remarked that having stood and watched some groups in a gallery with one of their installations, they were able to appreciate the choice that some people made *not* to interact.  That having seen the work, the visitors appreciated what it was about, and didn't want to interact with it themselves.  (& I recently found myself choosing not to interact with a work - the dynamics were just too confronting (intentionally so, I believe) - but reflecting on my decision and why I made it was a valid and productive engagement with the work in question.)  In one of his articles David Rokeby (from memory) talks about interactivity being understood by some ppl as a kind of control - once you've sussed it out, it doesn't hold much interest.  Lots of others have made similar points over the years in relation to new media art.  This is not an answer to the point you raised, more a gesturing towards the *poetics* of interaction, and engagement per se.  That there are many variables in how and why people do and don't interact strikes me as being an encouraging thing generally - I don't think many people would want to prescribe standardised interactions - though it's understandably frustrating if you're in public programmes!

I liked what Kipper said too about watching competent gamers play: "so people
have the opportunity to see games played with some element of grace..."
This is one of the things I enjoy about watching gamers play.

Another point you raised was:
>, i still wonder how to answer successfully a question that was fired to me from a
colleague about where the aesthetics might lie in a game installation, let's say? 

I take a broad view of aesthetics (aesthetics as pertaining to the senses and bodily perception more generally), and so see the issue as related to the ones (above) of interaction and engagement.  The engagements that we have with games are complex and interesting ones, for all sorts of reasons - historical, social, subjective, etc - I would argue.  I admire Jason Wilson's work in this area, which considers games as an important factor in our becoming familiar with a particular (& particularly intimate) configuration of body and screen, a configuration which now finds all sorts of applications, most obviously in the workstation.  The whole arrangement of our bodies with computers in gaming (as in other activities) is an aesthetic one.  That artists want to work with and comment on this pervasive and influential arrangement of bodies and technology seems perfectly obvious - of course they do.  

Perhaps the question that your colleague is really asking is the one that's been asked a lot over the last couple of years: the "can games be art?" question.  This tends to be a question that carries much of the baggage about games more generally (which Rebecca referred to in her post last week).  I have to say, it's a question I find singularly uninteresting, probably for this reason (cos of the baggage).  (My preference is to talk about the art in specific works of games art / installations, something I haven't done very much of in this forum, I realise...oh well.)  Some time ago I got really tired of always beginning talks and papers by countering the stereotypes and baggage games carry --> "yes, this has all been said about games, but really, they're not like that, they're like this...."  It's not a strong way to make a case, and you wind up being forced to always champion games and gaming; I'm keen to reserve the right to also criticise where its warranted.  In general I think it's far more productive to do (theoretical) work that focuses on more interesting and positive questions, than simply answering back to those who define the agendas of moral panic (or those who define what meets the definition of art for arts funding or whatever) - they're unlikely to be listening to what one is saying anyway.  Though the funding bodies may sit up and take notice when you've got a killer idea, as happened with Escape from Woomera in Australia.

Melanie