Art Games

Have video games attained the status of art yet? Does it really matter when we consider their power for innovation?

Last class we discussed whether or not video games had reached the level of 'fine art', and whether or not they would go further towards this potentiality in the future. An interesting point that came up was that the video game medium itself may not have matured enough yet to be able to be self-reflexive. During their inception and initial maturation, mediums such as film and photo may have not produced truly self-concious art pieces until the medium itself reached a certain technological plateau. Once a medium has plateaued, art within it starts to conceptually deconstruct the medium itself, showing us how the medium itself has already affected and changed our perception. When painting had truly reached its limit, a truly brilliant painter named Marcel Duchamp produced a ready-made urinal (The Fountain) and labelled it as art to show the meaninglessness he saw for himself and other artists to try to innovate in the area of paintings at this point in history.

Rather than acting as a detached deconstructionist of the medium, art produced during the initial evolution of said medium functions as a creator of inovation. Because art produced at this time is less about conceptualism and more about just trying new things, it a less intellectual but more dynamic, original and probably exciting place to be. This is the phase in a medium's development when pure innovation is still happening. The medium itself is trying to attain its maximum potential for realistically representing the so-called "real world", and during this time people will keep finding new and immaginative ways to do this visually, interactively, and emotionally.

To add this discourse, I've decided to post a few of my favourite flash-based art games. Because the medium of flash games, for the moment, has somewhat plateaued, it gives artists certain design constraints to work creatively within. These artworks are innovative in the way they work within these constraints, as well as highly conceptual because of the current constraints of the technology. Submitted for your approval, some conceptual art flash games:


But That Was [Yesterday]...


This is probably the most emotionally affecting game I've ever played... and it was made in the flash! In addition to featuring a purely image and sound conveyed narrative, the gameplay mechanics are also extremely conceptual with regard to the game's central theme and message. The emotion conveyed by the interplay of narrative, incredibly music, and art makes this one of the most beautiful things I've ever experience through a computer screen. A sublime soundtrack completes the package and can downloaded at the designer's website. Made by a game designer known only as Bean.


Everyday the Same Dream


An interesting exploration of modern, work-a-day melancholia. If you play it, you will probably get the concept pretty fast. However there are further layers of mystery added by small details in the game. The multiple, divergent ways one can finish a 'day' are also interesting. Apparently there is a way to actually finish the game, but I haven't found it yet. Made by the prominent, popular, and political flash game group, Molleindustria.


Love

Whereas the last two games rely heavily on image, music, and somewhat traditional narrative elements to create a sense of the central theme and game story, this game uses purely mechanics. The game designer has obviously thought to death about a mechanic that would systematically represent the vaugaries, triumphs, and pitfalls of this most central and confounding aspect of the human condition. And he or she seems to have found something close. By Contrebasse.

Simulation and Simulacra

The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is 
none. The simulacrum is true. 
-Ecclesiaste


The entire Treatise of Baudrillard's Simulation and Simulacra can be found here, very interesting stuff.

A few classes ago we discussed Baudrillard's well-studied article, 'The Precession of Simulacra' about the nature of reality, the image, and the imitation of reality. As we talked, Manuel charted out the relationship between the three core ideas of the 'representation', 'simulation', and 'reality'.

(note: I'm missing the bottom part if anyone knows it)

Such would be the successive phases of the image: 


it is the reflection of a profound reality; 
it masks and denatures a profound reality; 
it masks the absence of a profound reality; 
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; 
it is its own pure simulacrum

The above quote essentially describes how and image becomes a Simulacra. Throughout the class we tried to delve further into this concept with the help of the above diagram. I'll try to explain my understanding of the diagram as follows:

In one cycle of the image, 'representation' was created during the medieval times in an attempt to depict, and thereby honour, the sublime beauty of 'the idea' (the idea being the inconceivable beauty of 'god'). However it was the concern of the iconoclasts that this representation would so seed itself in the minds of the masses that they would eventually come to revere the images themselves, rather than inconcevable 'idea' they were based upon, without even realizing they were doing so. This was in defence of what they believed to be 'reality'. 

In a way, the iconoclasts were predicting the inevitable evolution of the 'representation' into the 'simulation': the point at which an image begins to replace reality in the mind of the consumer. The distinction between what used to be considered reality from what is now considered simulation becomes successively blurrier. At this point one begins to question whether an objective reality truly exists or not!

When you take subjectivity into account, it seems to me that reality exists somewhere within the intermediary space between 'the Simulation' and 'Reality'. Though life as we live it now is mediated beyond recall, we still exist tangibly within this largely simulated reality, so this is still reality to us. The fakeness of this part of our reality is still loosely related to the 'beauty' of the original idea, and as such can come to represent a purpose for the individual. However the simulation is also created, through time, by the reigning social order. The social order itself acts a mass simulation, or simulacra self-perpetuating and evolving through the new minds it envelopes.

At this point the question of power becomes apparent. Those with power within the simulation matrix reinforce the simulation as icons, but those with true power likely exist beyond the bounds of the simulacra itself. To segue, Kanye West is one icon within this matrix who seems self-reflexively aware of his iconic status and role. His latest efforts have affected a sort of artist merit by expressing this self-reflexivity.

The video itself is very symbolically simulacranal in content, bringing forth ideas of the holy, the icon, and western art historical tradition. It's very similar to another art piece brought to my attention by people who have visited New York (edit: it's because they're both by the same artist, Marco Brambilla). Within the elevator of the Standard building in New York, as one ascends, one finds oneself travelling through the successive layers of hell, purgatory, and heaven. Only the iconography used is strangely familiar, and quite obviously fake, though still strangely enticing. Kind of like the simulacra itself.

Marco Brambilla's Civilization