Re: [-empyre-] PLAY Tlönic

[Melanie Swalwell]

Jon,

>...the question of how can/do
>  Art Games enable discourse + what would constitute in (David Surman's
>  words) the "discursive power of aesthetics"?

Yes, thinking through examples might be a good way to flesh this out.

One of the all time standout art games/games art works for me is
"Escape From Woomera", on the detention of refugees in desert camps in
Australia.  (For international readers, this was presided over by
Philip Ruddock, then Immigration Minister in the Howard Government,
who was a masterful creator of fog in public discourse, and who would
wear his Amnesty badge at every opportunity).  I wrote a piece for
Realtime back in 2003, when the project first received funding,
arguing that such a game would,

"enable those who are unlikely to ever get inside a detention centre,
to imagine themselves there.  Virtually recreating these sites
elegantly undermines their 'no go' status, simultaneously shrinking
the space between 'us' and 'them'."

This was drawing on Julian's comments a few months previously:

"this [the detention of refugees] is 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, are not only
strategically isolated to ensure they're harder to escape, but also to
ensure the public will forget it's even there…The inherent tension
within this situation, in the country that you're standing on, [is
that] you don't have access to this stuff.  EFW is all about taking a
highly representative impression of life in a detention centre,
mobilising it throughout public networks, and installing it onto
peoples' desktop computers inside their homes.  Games are an ideal
medium to engage with this kind of content…because to play is to
become a subject of the content."

I think there's not only a connection to Jon's question about
discourse here, but also to the way that aesthetics can be said to
have a discursive power.  To wit:

"The release of a playable demo of the EFW game is still some 6 months
off.  But the importance of this project is already becoming apparent.
 Since it hit the headlines there has been an amazing degree of
discussion of the project.  Apart from postings on gaming message
boards, pro-refugee e-lists, and games industry news sites, EFW has
made it into classrooms, onto comedy tv shows, and, significantly,
onto talkback.  Over the space of a few weeks, it has become a
powerful meme, a concept for thinking with – about refugees, their
detention, and the humourless state of current politics in this
country.  Evidence that it has fired imaginations is contained in the
witty suggestions for sequels, posted to newspapers: Escape from Nauru
and Manus Island, and Escape from Camp X-Ray.

We might not have known it, but we needed an Escape From Woomera.  It
broadens the field of what can be said, thought, and felt about
Woomera, refugees and detention.  That is where the art lies.  That it
also leaves Ruddock spluttering with indignation is icing on the
cake."

That it broadened what could be *felt* was crucial.  EFW cut to the
heart of "the refugee issue", through all the spin and psyops, cutting
through peoples' anxieties and quite visceral fears (remember Howard
threw the 2001 Federal election by whipping up public fear about the
refugees rescued by the freighter MV Tampa, and inaugurating the so
called "Pacific solution", which entailed farming refugees out to poor
nations in the Pacific (eg. Nauru), setting up offshore camps).
Amongst other important things, EFW made people laugh, which I
maintain was exceptionally powerful, given the darkness of those days.

Melanie