Playing with Art
For some years there has raged a debate as to whether or not it is possible to consider videogames an form of Art - with a capital 'A' - alongside that of cinema or literature.
In 2005, well-known film critic Roger Ebert said games are "inherently inferior to film and literature” much to the upset of a great many gamers and critics alike. At the other end of the debate we have M.I.T professor Henry Jenkins, who contended in his article Art Form for the Digital Age (2000) that: "Games represent a new lively art, one as appropriate for the digital age as those earlier media were for the machine age."
While much of this contest is over the categorical definition of games in the context of Art it is undeniable that the medium of the videogame - if we can call it that - has a profound presence in popular culture and is already showing signs of influencing trends in traditional arts themselves.
Videogames are not, however, an entirely new expression with an exclusive vocabulary; like any medium widely used it cannot escape the rich cultural heritage that has gone before; game developers are often the last to hail videogames as an immaculately conceived phenomenon. Instead, they're quick to cite cinematic or literary influences when discussing their own designs. Moreso, every 3D game sold has camera work, set-design, costumes, props and a sound score. To these ends, rather than seeing videogames as a medium set to dethrone traditional arts, it is perhaps useful to learn to read videogames as works that continue to develop and draw from the legacies of art - and mediums - that pre-date them.
Regardless of its innate heritage in traditional arts, video-gaming is most certainly a mass-culture phenomenon, now eclipsing the economic scale of the motion picture industry and touching the homes of more people every year. While there are those actively contesting that videogames are art, most videogames themselves are not generally intended as such. On the other hand, there are those videogames that are actively positioned as 'High Art'. With this in mind it is as useful to generalise videogames as Art as much as it is to do the same with the history of cinematic production.
Perhaps the question as to whether or not games are art is not useful; an extraneous concern in light of the cultural work the medium actually performs. If a primary goal of any artwork is to exert cultural influence, and to be valued as such, then videogames are doing that already. They do not need the canonical title of Art in the annals of history..
Nonetheless, those that don't consider videogames as culturally important as cinema or literature often reveal a deeper bias, one that describes how the videogame challenges the way people have consumed and valued cultural works in the past. Here, the reluctance to 'take games as art' is not so much in the content itself but how that content is engaged. Simply put, Art - traditionally speaking - is just not something that is played with; play is not seen to be a valid vehicle for transporting the kinds of meaningful and instrinsic experiences we value Art for.
The Great Work of Art - as it is traditionally upheld - is an immutable and singular cultural work held in great sanctity. Whether a film, book or sculpture, it is neccessarily open for multiple interpretation. It in itself however, is unshifting in its material or temporal life. This is the game we play with Great Art. Art is traditionally presented as a singular impermeable thing, prepared by the artist such that it can be read in many ways.
Videogames disrupt this traditional relationship with The Work of Art on a primary level. Any game must be manipulated to be read. In a videogame, playing is a form of reading, a form of interpretation. In fact, in order to use a videogame at all, one needs to become very good at interpretating patterns, signs and themes: to become a good player - in other words - is to become adept at operating in the abstract.
It's is precisely this abstract language that has attracted so-called fine artists to use videogames in their own work. Coupled with the international reach of gaming culture and the rich aesthetic possibilites, videogames have quickly become very attractive target for investigation by artists and experimentalists.
Art or not, Videogames are finding their way into museums, galleries and private collections and as such, are positioned very much as this thing we call Art.
Artistic Videogame Development: Tools, Trends and techniques
While videogames predate video and even video-art, aritstic game development is a discipline that has only recently emerged. The reasons for this are many-fold but summarily it can be said that as a technical practice, videogame development demands a rarefied skill-set with little inheritance from neighbouring creative arts. The same cannot be said for video-art, for instance, which borrows from a rich technical history of cinematic and photographic production.
As a result of the entry barriers to game development being comparitively high, almost no artistic video game is created entirely by the artist. the videogame artist is rarely entirely responsible for the creation of the all the content and technology in their game. Instead, and in a very post-modern tense, they most commonly work with the videogame as both content and medium in the production of new work. In this way, to make a game is almost entirely reliant on the work of others and this frame for production is primary in steering the development of artistic game development, from design to distribution of the resulting work.
If we are to consider the videogame as a medium, it is a complex one, comprising a wide array of media: sounds, 3D models, images, video, animation sequences and computer code. As a technology however it can be simplistically understood as a software game engine that provides a structured means with which to engage the artwork (the media files).
Writing computer game engines is extremely difficult, generally requiring a team of individuals with a background in software-engineering and graphics programming to produce software ready to host the resulting artwork. Creating artwork itself however, while specialist in itself, is within reach of artists (and enthusiasts) with skills in multimedia production, assuming the software game engine itself allows for user-created content.
Mapping: Videogame Art at the entry level
Mapping or Level Editing is a term used to refer the practice of producing content for an existing game that supports user created content.
Level editing was initially popularised by the Bards Tale Construction Set in 1993 (***). By providing game level creation software users could create and distribute new games to run ontop of the original game software. This proved to be a great success for both the company and the players and so a whole host of other game development teams offered means to do the same.
The Bards Construction Set however was a 2D adventure game with a very dominant genre. It wasn't until pioneering developers idSoftware produced the first 3D first person game, Doom – and provided tools to create custom content - that the possibilities enticed those who would become the first 'fine artists' working with the medium of the video game. Up until this point Virtual Reality had attracted many artists interested in exploring the possibilities for creating so-called immersive environments in a first person view.
Doom, while not as graphically and technically rich as that of high-end VR technology at the time, allowed for content to be created on a domestic PC. To give this some scale, the impact this had for artists interested in realtime 3D technology could be likened to the impact the Sony Camcorder on the experimental video arts and cinema. (from Nam June Paik to Lars Von Trier).
The little-known, first recorded artistic game, Arsdoom, was a level made for the First Person Shooter game Doom and appeared at Ars Electronica in 1995. Arsdoom was positioned as an antagonistic intervention on the exhibition space, and explored the now popular strategy of situating the game environment as the site in which it is presented – a corporeal/non-corporeal doubling of sorts. Players would find themselves in a re-presentation of the building in which the game was exhibited, shooting digital representations of the artists and their work (a humble if not slightly gruesome beginning for the field...).
With the success of Doom itself success came a second videogame, Quake, whose consequent success propelled the First Person Shooter onto domestic PC's worldwide. The Quake series (I, II, III) were primary in the development of artistic game development, and in the game industry itself. Several other well known engines were technically derived from this technology, game engines which went on to support levels made by other artists. Work of this sort includes virtual knowledge spaces (Fuchs/Eckermann's Exositur, 1999, made in Unreal Tournament), fictitious reconstructions of existing sites (Condon's Chinatown, 2000 - Half-Life), virtual instruments (Oliver's Qthoth, 1999-2000, QuakeII then Half-Life) and formal explorations into the development of synthetic places (Swearingen, QuakeIII).
The artwork itself is generally distributed as an archive that is then loaded by the audience as a custom level. For this reason, the original game is required to be installed on the host computer. This is an important distinction between many artistic games and other digital art, one I'll talk about later.
Modding: Art on the Shoulders of Giants
Modding is a term most commonly given to the practice of adapting existing game code (game-logic and functionality) to the ends of transforming a known game into something else.
Like mapping, this practice was endorsed by several game development houses to the ends of extending the market-life of their existing product. This is done by providing code relating to the parts of the game they wish to encourage modifactions for. The user then has the possibility to become a developer, creating new game-logic and game features alongisde creting new artwork. Mods, like levels, are generally freely distributed as a set of modules – and relating art – on fan sites. Some mods have many millions of players and were eventually commercialised (the vastly popular CounterStrike being an example).
Other games however were not released with the intention to be modded and as such require entirely different strategies in the production of new work.
To Hack is to Make
In this case the artist finds a game or game-engine that interests them for its technological or aesthetic offerings, and then starts to pick it apart. The more they learn, the more they can pick, and so, at the very base of this approach to modding is a strong hacking culture, where to hack, is to make.
One pertinent example of this in effect is the early artistic modification Mario Battle No. 1 (Myfanwy Ashmore, 2000) for the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). As opposed to adding new content she simply took it away. Choosing to remove enemies from the game Super Mario, Myfanwy re-presented a game millions had played as a landscape free of competition and trial. Mario Battle No 1. is significant for several reasons, but perhaps it is most important in that it begs the question: Can you make something new by taking parts away?
Working in a similar vein was the later work Clouds (Cory Arcangel 2002) which simply removed all game elements from Super Mario except the famous clouds players will remember floating above the terrain. This work required no interaction, and so approaches video-art in one respect.
In another direction is found work such Joan Leandre's Retroyou R/C (2000). Here the artist worked with the opacity of the original software - a racing game - on its own terms. Using techniques such as software decompiling and hex-editing he begins by taking the software apart as a function of learning about how it works. Along the way, the artist encountered unexpected results that he brought forward as primary elements in the final work. The result, was a rich painterly abstraction of colours, shapes movement driven by a demonstration race happening behind-the-scenes in software. Here a racing game was used as the mechanism to create infinitely iterating rich abstract art.
More than an appropriation of content, work of this kind can be considered a remix of the original that celebrates the complexities of the underlying software on both a technical and aesthetic level.
Nonetheless games already speak a language that millions understand, and offer the artist a unique opportunity to create works that explore multiple outcomes or situational experiments of known places and/or events.
In highly contentious works such as 911 Survivor, Waco Reconstruction and Escape From Woomera we see very little abstraction on a technical or aesthetic level. Instead, a familiar 3D first person viewpoint and an attention to realism is deployed in the work itself to the ends of placing the player in a situation they would not other wise have access to. Here, it is not the technology that is interrogated so much as repurposed to encourage critical investigation of topics surrounding a known event.
In the case of 911 Survivor the game revealed that unlike documentaries or literature, the relatively un-coloured representation of tragic events in a videogame was considered morally offensive, as though the introduction of play antagonised the sanctity of the topic; just as games will never be Art to some, it seemed they could also never deal with sensitive topics.
Both Escape From Woomera and Waco Reconstruction also dealt with controversial real-world events. Using the classic break-out game format, EFW put the player in the character of an illegal immigrant held captive in one of Australia's controversial desert detention centres, and gave them tools to learn to escape. It was so contentious that it was publically condemned by Australia's Immigration Minister, the mastermind of the detention centre itself.
These works reached gamers and non-gamers alike, having had press in many national and international newspapers and journals, documentary film festivals and game festivals. While even developers of these works may not consider these games Art, they are most certainly appreciated as influential videogames that have never appeared on a shopping mall shelf. Such games are often referred to as Political or Documentary games.
Haunted Code
Like Level Editing, mod-based artistic games are entirely reliant on the software support of the original game. This makes it difficult to determine where the game-art (as a cultural artifact) begins and ends, given that no artist is ever wholly responsible for every component of the delivery of their work. The resulting artwork always refers to the original and in many respects is as much a conversation about that prior-art as it is a work in itself.
Whether level-editing or modding, working with an existing game affords the artist a great deal of possibility. Nonetheless, any game engine is written to support the game created for it and this legacy often becomes apparent to the artist seeking diverse outcomes for their project; there is only so much that can be 'undone' in the original software to free it of this legacy without full access to the original code responsible for the game. Even then, built-in features like the point-of-view (first-person, third-person), rendering modes (3D, 2D) and physics are especially difficult to escape: no game-engine is innately plastic enough to support any kind of game.
Standalone games
Up until this point, artistic game development is most certainly living in the shadow of the Entertainment Industry; an industry that defines the tools, genres and rights of re-distribution of artworks made using commercial videogames. For these reasons it is fair to say that the video game - as a medium - is not an independent one. To even have the rights to manipulate all the code in a commercial game-engine and redistribute the results costs many hundreds of thousands of dollars: this is a problem that short-film makers, painters and writers to not have to content with.
Many artists consider that becoming free of this restriction is vital for the medium of the videogame to develop. Acheiving this freedom presents a significant challenge for artists however - either develop your own tools or work with tools that are licensed to allow for creator friendly re-distribution.
While labour-intensive and technically difficult this direction of development provides the artist a deeper proprietorship over work produced: work can be more readily distributed and done so without depending on the audience computer having a commercial game already installed.
A loose analogy to the problem this presents artists might be: would there be such a rich short and/or independent film culture if the companies that made video-cameras held redistribution rights over films made with their hardware?
Known as Standalone games, work of this kind seeks the same rights to sell and redistribute work as that of the painter, composer or film-maker.
The right to mix colours.
As the videogame industry has grown so has enthusiasm for the technology, especially amongst those with technical backgrounds. Artists or not, there are many that want to make games and work with the technology.
Often using open-source licensing - a form of copyright that favours collaborative development and re-distribution - several high-quality game and 3D engines have recently evolved that offer the developer and artist alike tools for making and redistributing games. Similarly idSoftware (maker of the Quake series of games) recently committed to releasing their engines under open-source licenses once they had developed a superceding product.
Such developments have been a boon for artists working in this area and represent a critical opportunity for artists to take the medium in new directions while affording them the right to sell and/or redistribute their work.
Projects like Endless Forest (Tale of Tales 2005), Fijuu2 (Oliver, Pickles 2006) and Flow (ThatGameCompany 2007) all represent work that cannot be made by modifying an existing game without vastly more effort than it would take using open-source (or other favourably licensed) tools. Flow, while starting out as an experimental/artistic exploration made by a student was eventually licensed for distribution on Sony's PlayStation3.
Ending notes.
With every new medium comes a challenge to the definition of Art. While Art is always informed by the cultural movements of its time it is also shaped the development of new materials and new modes of production.
As the plastic possibilities of the videogame continue to inspire artists it will be used and developed as a medium in its own right, a medium with a rich life outside the interests of Entertainment Industry.