[-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?

[Daniel Cook]

>
>
> The following step is social agreement: other people  talking the language
> of art have to accept it as an art work. And the last step is certification
> and attribution of economic value. Daniel wrote:
>
> > And this strikes me as a major difference between games and much of what
> goes as art.  Games work.  They are utilitarian tools.  You can have a
> functioning game or a broken game and it is not merely a matter of taste or
> education or external validation.  Games either create the internal value
> structure in the player or they do not.  They are exactingly engineered to
> drive a particular emotion and we can sample a large enough population to
> determine if they are success or not in their stated functional purpose.  A
> functioning game has inherent value.  It does not need to be certified or
> discovered or framed.
>
> I don't agree with this. Art works as well, and has an inherent value as
> well. It does not need to be certified or discovered or framed. But it does
> need it in order to survive in time, because this process, like it or not,
> is a premise to the process of preservation of a work of art. It is the way
> the contemporary art world keeps the meme alive in time. To buy an art piece
> is like to buy a videogame: the difference is that a videogame can rely on a
> stable industry and be distributed in thousands of copies, while a work of
> art relies on a little niche and is sold at an high price to one or a
> limited number of persons.
>

To continue a thought from the previous email and show a bit more of the
perspective I'm coming from here, let's imagine an experiment:

   - We place a painting on a thousand websites that target various
   communities.  Let's assume our population is a statistically balanced spread
   of humanity in the US.
   - Pick a work that isn't broadly known.  In general we want people to be
   ignorant of the baggage behind the image.   After all, we are testing
   inherent value, not the value of the organization and context placed around
   that image.  We want it to be naked.
   - People can look at the picture for as long as they desire.
   - Then they are asked to rate it.  Pick your own scale of meaning:  Joy,
   Delight, Life Changingness, etc.
   - After you get about 10,000 or so ratings, see how you did.

Now we'll do the same experiment with a game with the same scale and compare
the ratings.

The game, if it is made well, can cheat. It can be built for this very
scenario.  It prods the viewer to interact in a basic manner.  Just click
the button, it states.  And then that click evolves step by step into a
game.   You won't get everyone.  40% won't make it past the first action.
But the rest will. Games explain themselves.  They have inherent value
because every game is a tutorial about value structures within a system.  A
video game has the potential to be a meme that spreads itself.  If a
painting is a virus that requires the cellular structures to reproduce, a
video game is at the very least a bacteria that has all the pieces it needs
to go forth and prosper.

The painting, in order to cheat, devolves quite rapidly into the base world
of advertising and pornography.  Context is everything for the
painting...the best it can ever be on its own is a shallow trigger for
evoking existing value structures in the viewer.  A painting that awards the
user +10 points for viewing it is an ironic reference, not a system building
an internal value structure.  As you state, it requires the contemporary art
world to keep it alive.  More often than not, it requires the contemporary
art world to give it meaning.  If there is a game present at all, it is the
artifice of the museum with its tutorials, PvE events, Exhibit/Level flow
and memberships. :-)

I of course realize that not all works in modern art are paintings. :-)
 There are some delightful examples out there of art that prompts the viewer
on how they should interact with it, Yoko Ono's instruction paintings come
to mind.  In the best of these, you have the start of a game.  There is a
hint of a coherent system of working rules that resulted in a predicted
action occurring.  In short, it a functional system...which once again leads
us back to games, not art as it is typically imagined.

As a side note, I see game designers fundamentally as engineers.  Except the
technology we work with is that of human psychology.  Instead of
sporadically evoking 'universal truths' in a haphazard process of inspired
creation, we engineer emotional reactions into a reproducible system of
rules that operate on the underlying psychology of the human brain.  This is
a vast undertaking that will likely have a meaningful impact on how humanity
lives.  I often wonder if perhaps a more productive partnership would be not
the arts community but instead those who study economics, religion or
government.  Media is a tool of games, but I don't think you can call what
games are evolving into media any more than you can call Boy Scouts media.

http://www.iniva.org/dare/themes/play/ono.html
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