Integrating Games Into the Artworld: A Methodology and Case Study Exploring the Work of Jason Rohrer (original) (raw)
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(Published at Videojogos 2010) As claimed by Chris Crawford in 1984, games must evolve to a potential form of art. Over 30 years later, the discussion demands a more mature state of the art, since games are still seen mostly as entertainment products. Considering them as a direct heir of cinema, in terms of language and dispositive parameters, games may be seen as a new form of media, and thus a vehicle both to entertainment activity than to artistic expression. To explore such possibilities, it is necessary to re-think the means of production and to purpose a new model of collaborative work that involves technicians, scholars, and artists.
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The game designer Jason Rohrer has self--identified as an artist. By doing so enters his work into a critique process that, according to James Elkins, dates back to the Romantic period in which artists are evaluated by peers on an individualized basis according to the ideals and creative direction they produce in the form of written and verbal artifacts. Arthur Danto calls these artifacts ‘‘artistic identification’’ in his essay, ‘‘The Artworld,’’ written in 1964. The study applies this critique method to Rohrer’s work in the game medium and asks how it fares when subjected to what Howard Becker calls, ‘‘a continuous process of selection’’ through critique. It asks, finally, how can knowing this methodology help to elucidate the path for the eventual full--fledged integration of games into the Artworld.
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When Art Is Put Into Play: A Practice-based Research Project on Game Art
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When Art Is Put Into Play: A Practice-based Research Project on Game Art is a practice-based research project that aims to contribute to the understanding of the relation between play and art from the specific perspective of computer-based Game Art. This is done firstly through the production of nine works of art that through their means of production all relate to Game Art as it has come to be known in the last twenty years or so. Secondly, the relation between games, play and art is discussed from a Game Art perspective. This project as a whole aims to map and exemplify cases where Game Art successfully inherits rule-systems, aesthetics, spatial and temporal aspects from computer games. This work has in turn resulted in a provisional response to the question of the possibility for Game Art to successfully create a state of play, whilst still maintain agency as a work of art. The claim is that the friction between art and play makes it doubtful that art can maintain its agency as art through play. This claim is made as a result of the artistic process leading up to the works of art that were made as a part of the thesis. It has been strengthened through the study of the concept of play and how it relates to artistic practice.
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Art as an Innovation for Games: A Closer Look at Role of Art in Games
This article presents a methodology to decipher and explore this question: is Art a new predicate, a new way to introduce creative innovation, for games? Examining Art as a new way to innovate for Games introduces the idea that there are low and high games, signified thusly: games and Games. The process exposes, through an examination of Games that are Art, there are currently six (6) Art predicates for Games. This study also reveals that these newly found predicates are, indeed, defining traits of Games that are works of Art. In discovering these traits this article identifies the boundaries of an already existing "Gameworld" as Arthur Danto might have seen it, if he had been inclined to conduct such a study.
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Evoking the Inexpressible: The Fine Art and Business of Games
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This interview is excerpted from a series we conducted in early 2010 with Brian J. Moriarty, Professor of Practice at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Moriarty has been developing games for the better part of 30 years, and has worked for Analog, Infocom, LucasArts, Rocket Science, Mpath, Hearme, Skotos Tech, and ImaginEngine. He has produced a host of critically and commercially acclaimed titles, including Wishbringer, Trinity, Beyond Zork, and Loom, which earned MacWorld's Adventure Game of the Year in 1990.
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Proceedings of DiGRA 2020, 2020
Computer games have come a long way in terms of being considered a creative practice, even an art form. Apart from dedicated festivals, also established electronic art institutions have embraced computer games. Previously separate practices of computer games and interactive art (Wilson 2008; Leino 2013) are slowly converging. However, I argue that this has been possible only because a fundamental conflict ‘built in’ to computer games as a “medium” (cf. Sharp 2015), between the artist and the player, has been conveniently overlooked. The game artist wants to express themselves through their creations, while the player wants a new instrument to play (with). Apart from either side compromising on their interests, there is no reconciliation in sight; hence the “tragedy”.
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This dissertation studies video games as a medium of artistic expression by engaging three key elements of Marcel Duchamp's 1957 essay The Creative Act: Institution, Intention and Artefact. By first studying how Academia and the Artworld in general have engaged historically with video games. Afterwards, the formal and structural qualities of video games are engaged with, bridging the gap between this new medium and art history through aesthetic theories. Finally, medium specific qualities that complicate their study have been addressed by comparing video games with film and Marcel Duchamp’s ideas on the creative process. It is then concluded that while the field of video games-as-art is still in its infancy and that a majority of video games are not art, it is possible for specific video games to be accepted as artworks.
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The Incompatibility of Games and Artworks
Journal of the Philosophy of Games, 2018
Recent debate has focused on whether videogames are art. Whatever the answer, the debate has largely taken it for granted that videogames are games, and that this is unproblematic for the art status of videogames. This paper argues that something being a game is incompatible with it also being an artwork, and thus insofar as videogames are games, they cannot be artworks. This incompatibility arises out of the different attitudes that are prescribed for engaging with games versus those for engaging with artworks. Citing a modified definition of games from Bernard Suits and commonly held conditions of artworks, I show that for an artist to intend something as a game or an artwork is to intend essential constitutive conditions of the object that preclude the object from being both a game and an artwork. This requires a reconsideration of several contemporary theories about games and art while also providing an analysis of games that calls for them to be appreciated as what they are wit...
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