Introduction
[Transcript]
"A single user in front of a screen, interacting for hours on end in full concentration, is a superb situation for an artistic experience."
-Tale of Tales
As long as there have been video games, there have been artists using them in their work. But when created as artworks themselves, games take on unique strengths, offering their unparalleled depth of interaction, and significance felt by their players in service of an artist’s vision. While some artists create entire games, video games appear in art on many levels.
Video Games as Subject Matter
There’s Invader, who has been creating mosaics inspired by the game Space Invaders since 1998 which appear on streets around the world, and Suzanne Treister, who created Fictional Video Game Stills on an Amiga computer beginning in the late 80s.
Past these artworks which use video games as subject matter, there are artists using game software directly to make art.
Video Games as Material or Site
Some artists create Machinima films which are compiled from footage shot in games. Like Skawenatti, creating artwork exploring indigenous traditions and futures in digital worlds, recorded in specially made environments in the game Second Life.
Artists can also use the game as a site for artwork- like in Solo Show in Sim City by Kim Asendorf. Kim uses the pre existing assets and tools inside Sim City, to make pieces like Train Derby and the readymade Tree.
Modded Video Games
Some artists modify the original game software and hardware in order to create their work.
In Super Mario Clouds, Cory Arcangel modified the original Mario Brother cartridge for NES, erasing everything but the clouds. When the game is played, the player is effectively rendered a spectator, watching clouds slowly float by.
SOD by art duo JODI is a modification of Wolfenstein 3D, reducing the environment to shapes in black, white and gray, making it difficult to shoot the targets, creating a more aesthetic experience that is easy to get lost in.
In these two pieces, the modded game is a new artwork, but some artists go even further, making entirely original video games as art objects.
Art Games
In 2006, Aureia Harvey and Michael Samwyn presented the Realtime Art Manifesto, calling on creative people, including fine artists and game designers to create art in real time 3D and game engines.
They declared:
“Realtime 3D is the most remarkable new creative technology since oil on canvas.
It is much too important to remain in the hands of toy makers and propaganda machines.”
Through 10 principles, they outlined how to create artistic environments in the form of video games, without falling for the pitfalls of either commercial video games or modern art.
Ultimately calling for a more creative use of video game technology:
“Make art-games, not game-art.”
Their games, like The Endless Forest created as the studio Tale of Tales would be clear examples of these principles, In The Endless Forest the player is a deer, wandering freely through a magical forest without a stated goal, this experience, free of violence and concrete objectives, allows for a more contemplative player experience- “poetry, not prose.”
The structure of The Endless Forest, shows a unique perspective on the role of agency in video games.
A quick definition: Agency is what we can decide to do.
We have it in real life. It’s even in other art experiences like happenings. Agency is crucial to all video games but takes center stage in art games, where artists can design the rules and environment in its entirety, without any concern for the real world.
In Games: Agency as Art, author C. Thi Nguyen explains: “The designer creates, not only the world in which players will act, but the skeleton of the players’ practical agency within that world.”
Agency is not unique to games created as artworks, it is in all games in one way or another- but it takes on a new significance as an artistic tool when artists are able to create an entire web of decisions and choices for what players can and cannot do.
Author and Game designer Frank Lantz writes that games,
"...are an art form about choices and consequences, actions and outcomes, about using our minds and bodies to learn, understand, and accomplish things.”
(Beauty of Games, 103)
The agency to make these choices can be delegated by the artist to express a particular intent.
Boys of Summer
The role of agency can be felt especially in Mitchell Chan’s 2023 art game, Boys of Summer. On the surface, the game appears to give the player an abundance of agency. In the initial pursuit of becoming a professional baseball player, the player can adjust their skills and allocate their time.
As the game progresses, more dashboards with data points appear, most of which the player has no control over. These results can easily take the character far off path, becoming an investment banker, an amazon worker, or a fitness influencer.
As you make decisions of how to spend your time and upgrade your character, you are continually presented with more and more factors to consider, until eventually the screen becomes a wall of data. Though players have a great deal of agency through granular control of character details, the limits of that agency are always present, and every game eventually ends with death, followed by character’s net worth and follower count appearing on screen.
Mountain
On the other side, Mountain, a game by artist and game designer David O’Reilly offers almost no input to the player. After responding to a series of abstract drawing prompts after the game launch, there is no user input, outside of the ability to change the camera, and play music notes by pressing the keys on your keyboard.
With these limited options to interact, the player mostly becomes an observer, watching the mountain develop, seeing the written thoughts as they occur, and underscoring the experience with soft music, if they choose.
Mountain has no clear indicators what it means to win or lose, only that time moves forward, and things grow and die, as the game's description states. Mountain limits the characters agency, placing an added significance on the choices they are able to make, and forcing a calmer experience of the central image of the mountain.
Conclusion
For these artworks which exist simultaneously as video games- though many labels could encompass them, including video game art, game based art, and Harvey and Samwyn’s realtime art to name a few- these terms refer to broader categories, to talk specifically about the games, the term, art games seems sufficient, but it is not universal.
While whether they’re video games is often evident from style and format, whether these games are art is subject to the typical scruples when deciding if something is art or not, notably the views of their creator. Depending on the environment which art games are shown in, one side can be empathized over the other, in the case of the games of Tale of Tales, which were distributed online and today are available on platforms like Steam, they could easily only be considered video games by many players, though with a notable artistic sensibility, while someone playing the same game shown in a museum could more easily view it as an artwork.
While a lack of clear labels might make discussion of these works difficult, and different contexts might highlight one aspect or another- they invariably occupy a dual existence. Not one or the other, but both. This combination has proved enticing to many artists.
Armed with all the materials of video games such as, agency, 3D environments, and a rapidly evolving suite of software and hardware tools, these artists are creating work that is immersive, compelling, and fits into the mold of one of the most popular pastimes in the world. While artists create work about, in, and with games- art games allow them to create entirely new worlds and rules to forward their vision, uniting the best parts of both forms.