[-empyre-] Art cred and advocacy

Sun Mar 3 03:48:13 EST 2013

Paolo, so nice to see Molle here in -empyre. I have been following your
wonderful games since many years and use them as case examples of esthetic
refined and political clever when I teach about games, first in Sweden and
now in Uruguay.
I hope you are familiar with Gonzalo Frasca, an Uruguayan game researcher
and theoric, one of the first to take a PhD in gaming,
http://www.ludology.org/about_gonzalo_frasca.html

He did a game I love, the 12th September,

http://www.gamesforchange.org/play/september-12th-a-toy-world/

Ana

On Sat, Mar 2, 2013 at 2:17 PM, paolo - molleindustria <
paolo at molleindustria.it> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hello empyrialists,
> thank you Claudia and Renate for inviting me.
> I'd like to start by reframing the introductory post. Just a little bit.
>
>
> If your filter bubbles include gaming circles you have witnessed the many
> collective cheers, hoots, and metaphorical stadium waves raising upon every
> glorious step of the videogame medium toward high-culture acceptance.
>
> The repeated "video games can never be art" claims made by Roger Ebert
> from 2005 onward forced a multitude of North American game developers,
> critics and players to confront the mysterious Art Thing, possibly for the
> first time in their lives. Their honor, their reputation and, most
> importantly, their favorite pastime was being attacked by a prominent
> tastemaker.
>
> In the following years, a fierce movement of DIY art criticism emerged
> within the game industry. Programmers started to google terms like
> "aesthetics"; game journalists filled their indignant counter-articles with
> pictures of Duchamp's Fountain. Every strange, intimate, weird looking game
> was measured for its potential to defuse Ebert's argument.
> Even hardcore gamers started to cry while playing (and wrote extensively
> about it) demonstrating they also had feelings. Those little sprites and
> polygons really mattered to them.
>
> As the narrative goes, from that cycle of shame and pride emerged a new
> sensibility. While the gaming community matured and developed higher
> cultural ambitions, the blinded masses of non-gamers and the mainstream
> press became more and more sympathetic to the popular form.
>
> The recent move by the NEA to include games as possible recipients for
> grants has been interpreted as a federal seal of approval (although, in the
> past, the agency funded videogame projects through individual artist
> grants). The exhibition "The Art of Videogames" at the Smithsonian, shortly
> followed by the acquisition of 14 game titles by the MoMA, has been saluted
> as the ultimate institutional validation of the "games are art" truism.
>
> In the midst of the celebrations it wasn't appropriate to wonder whether
> or not the Smithsonian show was a populist publicity stunt "generously"
> supported by Entertainment Software Association. The curatorial process
> involved an online poll asking netizens to vote for their favorite games -
> it didn't make a big difference since only 5 among the 80 chosen titles
> were actually playable.
> And I haven't heard many commentators reflecting on the fact that the
> aforementioned MoMA acquisitions were part of the Architecture and Design
> collection. What does it mean to put Pac-Man right next to swanky
> furniture? Is the hip and yuppie field of interaction design
> imperialistically claiming videogames? Are games furniture? Can
> architecture make you cry (like videogames, of course)?
>
> For those who don't hang out in certain niche art circles, it doesn't
> really matter that artists have been appropriating, hacking, and creating
> videogames (and videogame culture) for about 20 years now. It doesn't
> matter that a myriad of game-themed art exhibitions swept across the
> digital art world, arguably becoming its most popular sub-genre.
> Last night Stephen Colbert cracked a joke about the exotic idea of arcades
> at the MoMA but we rarely see games presented in relation with
> computational, interactive, combinatory and digital art, or even with
> relational aesthetics or performance. All these forms are way more related
> to games than the kind of art that collects dust inside museums.
>
> These issues did not matter because that exciting, pedantic, fractal,
> never-ending dispute we call "art" was never the point of this debate. The
> point was to "elevate" the cultural status of videogames as a whole: as a
> medium and as an industry.
> For gamers it was a retroactive validation of the countless hours they
> spent moving pixels and polygons around: "We knew we weren't wasting out
> time!"
> For the industry it was a way to snort some of that magic art dust without
> accepting the responsibilities that come along with a privileged space for
> cultural experimentation: "We don't want just weird artsy games in
> galleries and museums. We want Pac-Man!"
>
> The game industry and the culture surrounding it can be best understood as
> a traumatized child or an abused pet. Throughout the years videogames have
> been repeatedly treated as cultural punching bags and convenient
> scapegoats. The folks personally involved in this field reacted to the long
> stigmatization by developing a certain brand of groupthink, a perennial
> persecution complex, and a compulsion to stick together no matter what.
>
> In the past I've been accused of damaging the reputation of the industry
> by making games about controversial issues; works defying players'
> expectations or rejecting clearly defined goals were dismissed as "not
> games".
> Now games for social change are often mentioned as symptoms of the
> "maturation" of the form via New Age gurus like Jane McGonigal.
> Independent/artsy titles are presented next to idiotic shooters to support
> the launch of the new PlayStation. Imagine the toilet industry using
> Duchamp to achieve cultural validation (and possibly get art grants and tax
> breaks in the process).
> What did not change between now and then is the tendency to conceptualize
> the gaming field as an  homogeneous space devoid of conflict.
>
> I would love to see a conversation *not* informed by the catch-all
> attitude of the "Videogames and Art" controversy of these recent years. If
> we are talking about games we must learn to qualify the objects in
> question. Because there are major differences between a commercial product
> like Pac-Man and a personal and profound game like Cart Life. The lack of
> critical discourse within the game industry should not influence the way we
> treat games outside of it.
>
> And while we push arcade cabinets in and out of museums we could also try
> to complicate the terms of the debate.
> Instead of asking ourselves if and how games can be art, maybe we can
> start to think how art can be more like games: popular, participatory,
> accessible and yet complex; able to engage people deeply and for more than
> a fleeting moment; capable of providing richer experiences the more you get
> intimate with them.
>
> Love,
> Paolo
>
> ______________________________**_________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>

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