[-empyre-] Videogames of the oppressed / oppressive games

[Renate Ferro]

Hi Paolo,
Thanks so much for the link to your work and links.  They are amazing!
 I wanted to push you to talk a git more about how you feel that the
less abstract games.  You said:

<snip>
> The less abstract are the games, the more they tend to be problematic and
> fall under scrutiny. There is a lot of literature discussing the urbanist
> ideas advanced by SimCity or the portrayal of contemporary and historical
> conflicts in first person shooters or strategy games....They are artful
> depictions of reality, and as such, we should describe them not in terms of
> how "realistic" they are, but in terms of the arguments they deploy and the
> narratives they support within the larger context. This is, by the way, the
> reason I often use satire, cartoonish styles, and a rather overt authorial
> "presence": to defuse the temptation of interpreting these games as
> objective.

Many of our subscribers are not gamers but new media artists,
programmers, and curators. My question is (and my apologies if this is
naive) but how much do you think the platform, that is the coding and
programming structure and the scale of games has to do with your
understanding for the necessity of the aesthetic of less abstraction
as you describe it.  Games especially successful ones seem to  have a
common aesthetic or at least those that I am aware of.  Any thoughts
about that? I refer here to the look not the content here....
Thanks. Renate



-- 

Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art
Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420
Ithaca, NY  14853
Email:   <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
      http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net

Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
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