[-empyre-] games as art or art as game

Christian McCrea saccharinmetric at gmail.com
Tue Mar 18 02:12:23 EST 2008


>  we also feel the pressure at Select Parks, which host around 140
>  'artistic games' - a difficult term in itself - and are in urgent need
>  of a high resolution taxonomy before undertaking an overhaul of our
>  archives (and site in general). particularly problematic are works of
>  the following types:

Julian, I want to just address this specificially - especially in just
thinking about how 'Videogame Art' creates this category which at its
most vague threatens to put the preproduction sketches of a corporate
game artist like Yoji Skinikawa with your works, which is presumably
bad all round.

And also I think to say just as an outsider, that SelectParks's very
positive impact on this question is worth accounting. The degree to
which SP foregrounded knowledge and to an extent, mastery, over the
tools of production - modification over easy, frictionless works - let
categories assert themselves without closing off debate. But the three
examples you offer generate all sorts of interesting taxonomy issues:

>         - works that engage videogame culture yet employ no game technology
>
>         - works that reproduce popular videogame logics using entirely
>           non-electronic media
>
>         - works whose interaction model contains little or no game-logic yet
>           deploys popular game technology.

For me personally, there is a massive textual and rhetorical
difference between an artwork done with game technology and an artwork
that references game culture. They are both capable of subversion in
whatever capacity I care to slot around them, so I would never presume
to value one over another.

One thing I keep returning to, though, is multiplicity and seriality.
Referencing the grand miasma of games as a rhetorical and visual
toolset - metamateriality - ends up with perhaps an answer to
Melanie's question of how do you shake up the relationship between
nostalgia and amnesia. Just personally, this question of multiplicity
needs major unpacking and conceptualisation. Work that heads in this
direction, I've been calling the specifically plural 'Games Art' - (I
Am 8-Bit on one hand but also Paul Robertson's Pirate Baby Cabana
Battle Street Fight 2006). I like your use of 'logics' as a far more
fluid and interesting term that interactivity, which might otherwise
poison the well on this one.

My use of the term 'Games Art' means that it comes from the
multiplicity of games plural. They are generated out of a relationship
to a shared history. Game art is commonly used to describe
pre-production work for commercial games, so its a neat (too neat,
obviously) ellipsis between a sketch for one and a sketch from many.

With art games more generally I've always looked to what is at stake
in production to create more naturally different but still fluid
boundaries. Say looking at how a Guitar Hero hacked to work on a
Commodore 64, its not staked in art so it doesn't come from it. So
your last exception is the most interesting and the most difficult to
wrap my head around. The academic brain tries to take over creating
categories for styles; like you say, curatorial and editorial
ambitions abound. I wrote a piece for gamer magazine The Escapist on
art mods which I later realised was shot through with some pretty
absurd generalisations:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_95/532-Limit-and-Measure

My rhetorical violence made me keenly aware that categories are of
particular use to me rather that artists. So looking at SP and seeing
little clusters form without things shutting off is very instructive,
and especially so in focussing on the means of production.

-Christian McCrea


More information about the empyre mailing list