Games As Art

“Duchamp did a series of studies and paintings attempting to depict the inner processes of the opponents in a chess game.” ⤴️
“Duchamp started with painting and ended with games; his later work appears more and more game-like.” ⤴️
“explore phenomenon of games as an art medium, drawing corollaries and contrasts between the Fluxus movement’s neo-Dadaist passion for games, and the emerging contemporary practice of digital game based art.” ⤴️
“writing descrip- tions of game concepts being developed by a vastly multidisciplinary group of people, none of whom were game designers. I had the intuitive sense that some of these concepts were games, and some were not.” ⤴️
““What, exactly, is a game?” His characteristic response: “Why don’t you find out.”” ⤴️
“the common features that seem to distinguish games from other sorts of activities.* • Pnrometerized ploy consist ing of rules by which a group ofpfnJers a9tee to nbide or th e duration of th e 9ame. • A goal, sometimes expressed os a series of su b-gon1s tint collectively lead to • Obslacles thot creat e challenges to ochievinp tbe goal(s). • Resources, inittally provided to playere ct iandom oi symm etrtea fly, b ut Inter more often us rew0rds/or one scorning obet aches. • Consequences, which com e in theform of either rewards (som etim es as resources) or pena Ities (som ctimes obstacles.) • Infoimamion: both known and unknown to the players (individually oi en masse); progressive in/or motion thot is Sevealed one I time; and random ly generaied informaiion, such as a dice throtu or a dia I spin.” ⤴️
“The craft of making games, whether they are art games or commercial “mass media” games, can be measured in the designer/artist’s ability to create a bal- ance between these parameters.” ⤴️
“Even experimental art games have an innate understanding of this structure and its function, and so are able to undermine it by subverting, overriding or rendering the game’s parameters recursive, redundant, comical/satirical and in some cases, impossible.” ⤴️
“A game is a dynamic system” ⤴️
““hard fun.”” ⤴️
“creating something that is framed as v i s i » r e 6g a game expresses a certain attitude, a particular posture toward not only the work itself but the “audience, and the practice of art-making in general.”” ⤴️
“it requires you as the artist to “give yourself up.”” ⤴️
“locate the “sweet spot” between constraints and freedom.” ⤴️
“a conscious choice to share the art-making process, putting at least a part of the creative act in the hands of the player/participant.” ⤴️
“knowing the size and shape of space to carve out for the participant(s).” ⤴️
“the artist’s absence can be more powerful, more palpable, more distinc- tive, and in some instances, more personal than his or her presence.” ⤴️
“the artist is making a choice to invite the viewer in as a co-creator of the work” ⤴️
“It asks for the viewer’s engagement not only intellectually but literally.” ⤴️
“Game art also fundamentally questions the role and value of the art object.” ⤴️
“There is deep and tragic irony in going to an exhibition of Fluxus artifacts today. Objects whose entire purpose was to ellicit play exist now only as the corpses of their former selves, trapped in a “Mausoleum” within the object- centric commodity-based world of Art with a capital A.” ⤴️
“their object-ness represents a state of dormant play.” ⤴️
“Duchamp understood play as a process that can require at least as much intense con- centration, creativity and skill as making art.” ⤴️
“an attempt to capture on canvas the dynamic flow of thought and social transactions that occur within the domain of a chess match.” ⤴️
“trying to express the notion that you are creating a mental model of the game in your mind that combines your own moves with the anticipated moves of your opponent.” ⤴️
”“… both players have a model of what’s happening on the board, and over time those models get closer and closer and closer together until the final score.”’” ⤴️
“GAMES AREAN OFT-MALIGNED FORM OF POPULARCULTURE.” ⤴️
“Although Monopoly’s theme arose out of a particular cultural moment, it still persists as an engaging system for interaction, and its meta- phors continue to be relevant.” ⤴️
““thumb candy”” ⤴️
“Games are deeply wed to the history of computation precisely because they are procedural, or rule-based, in nature.” ⤴️
“They are based on elegant mathema” ⤴️
“ics and geometries that render not merely objects or visual representations, but dynamic, responsive systems. The only analog medium that is comparable to computational media in this regard is games.” ⤴️
I can’t articulate it right now but don’t think this is true, there are many other mechanisms
“George Maciunas and the Fluxus artists embraced games for their very lowliness. Games provided a sort of “ludus populi,” a play of the people that provided the perfect platform for bringing art to a mass audience. The making of FluxKits and FIuxGames was itself a kind of game: create play patterns from found, e.g., “readymade” objects; create kits that can be reproduced easily and sold cheaply.” ⤴️
“Digital art, by definition, is not a “thing.” It does not exist within the “art-as-object” paradigm, but exists as pure “score.” With digital art, score means code, and code is at once something and nothing. It does not “exist,” except in a conceptual sense, until played. It thus eludes the tradi- tional methods for assigning economic value to art” ⤴️
“How do we monetize a conceptual ready- made object, versus a handcrafted “work of art?”” ⤴️
“The fact that the art is itself made of pixels and code, purely instructions, pure “score,” without an overt physical manifestation, completely reframes the distribution infrastructure, the economic equation and the gate- keeping authority of the art world.” ⤴️
“game art is available via the Internet as free downloads, creating a self-prop a- c*»t•›, ii. gating distribution infrastructure. You can generate an infinite number of copies at no cost to either the artist or the player, thus rendering the industrial framework of supply and demand irrelevant.” ⤴️
“the primary crucible for digital game art is a phenomenon known as “Open Source” culture, a natural milieu for exploiting some of the fundamental values of Fluxus.” ⤴️
“Even within the commercial game industry, there is this spirit of “gift economics,” especially around making “the tools of production” available to a mass audience.” ⤴️
“Open Source culture also has a long-standing tradition of collaboration, collectivism and multiple author- i s i a r r r • » ships. Maciunas would have embraced Open Source culture as a paradigm, because it overrides some of the challenges he faced in the tension between the seductive powers of artistic individualism and a desire to form collectivist art practices.” ⤴️
“Open Source is a communal methodology for soft- ware creation which does not have any proprietary ownership, but which a community of programmers can advance collectively in various ways,” ⤴️
“Open Source philosophy is based on these premises: a) that code belongs to everyone, b) that everyone should have access “under the hood,” c) that people should be able to extend a program’s functionality and d) that those new features should then be returned to col- lective ownership so others can use them.” ⤴️
“Game companies have a slightly different though surprisingly open model, compared to their counterparts in more traditional media.” ⤴️
“many Pc games today come bundled with game editing tools. Players are free to build their own game levels, create “patches” (small programs that sit within existing games), “skins,” (textures that change the appearance of existing games, sort of like digital wallpaper), and even build their own new games from scratch to run on the underlying game “engine”” ⤴️
“use of the game engine still requires purchase of the game on which it was based.” ⤴️
“Open Source tools, engines and assets (3• models, textures, etc.) that can be downloaded for little or no money off the web.” ⤴️
“The use of consumer grade technologies seats this practice squarely in the center of the lowbrow realm of hijacking popular culture toward artistic aims.” ⤴️
“added to the populist flavor shared by Flunis is the infrastructure of a massive online community of gamers, game artists and Open-Sourcers who frequently and freely exchange code, ideas, tools and cultural contexts, all with the complicity of the game industry.” ⤴️
““autodid actic comrnunalism,” the notion of a peer-to-peer model of knowledge exchange,” ⤴️
“This methodology acceler- ates the learning process because it revolves around contextualized learn- ing-on-demand (“I only need to know what I need to know to do this task”), collaboration (“I will share this task with another and we will each contribute our knowledge”) and lateral co-learning (“When I learn this task I will make this information available to others”).” ⤴️
“more efficient means of acquiring and distributing information, knowl- edge and skills.” ⤴️
“Some have described this process as a game unto itself,” ⤴️
“Both value skills acquisition, and competition and cooperation can often work in concert to achieve individual and collec- tive goals.” ⤴️
“herein lies the challenge of mod-based art. Modding tools for first person shooter games such as Quake, Unrenl and Holf-the (the three most popular commercial modding engines) are biased towards this well-establish game genre. Yet most game artists are not content to frame their work within” ⤴️
“the “status quo” narratives of combat, good vs. evil, human vs. alien, “good guy” vs. “terrorist,” wizard vs. dragon, etc. To escape from these themes and structures means that certain biases and genre predilections of the main- stream game industry must be strategically overridden, subverte d or, in some cases, exploited.” ⤴️
“the term “patch” is used to describe a plug-in that sits on top of another game, which makes them ideal for interventional strategies. They are frequently used to make strong statements about game culture, media culture and culture in general, and do so in particular because they live inside existing popular culture paradigms.” ⤴️
“a collection of anti-combat patches for the Counter-Strike mod. Much has been made of the prevalence of militaristic themes in computer games, which have flourished in part because they have a core market (mostly males in their teens, twenties and thirties) that finds this play pattern particularly addictive.” ⤴️
“Interventions into “public” cyberspace are frequently used to call attention to its very virtuality.” ⤴️
“long tradition of leveraging both text-based and online graphical communities (such as ActiveWorlds and OnLive) as a context for public art and performance. Desktop Theater, lead by Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis, orchestrates improvisational scenarios within the graphical chat world The Palace. The group exploits an interesting feature of public cyber- space—the ability to change identify or persona in mid-stream, switching avatars (player representations) to enhance the drama.” ⤴️
“Stern created a series of autonomous characters, or preprogrammed “bots,” disguised as player avatars that perform mechanical, often illogi- i a” ⤴️
“cal actions. Later, he replaced the software bot with a mechanized keyboard that automatically presses the keys required to perform the preprogrammed actions. The intense piston-like movements of the solenoids on only a couple of keys highlights the mechanistic repetition required of players to interface with these fantastical game worlds. It also confronts the question of identity in cyberspace, in a case where a human-controlled character is technically indistinguishable from a mechanically-generated bot.” ⤴️
“Stern has also contributed to the practice of machinima (digital films made in game environments),” ⤴️
“son confronts game aesthet- ics by breaking down the illusory convention of 3n, which is the mainstay of mainstream games.” ⤴️
“other Saito chess mods also introduced new play mechanics and tactile properties. liquid Chess (aka “Smell Chess), consisted of viles of liquid to be identified by smell; Sound Chess or Weight Chess, fea- tured in the collective work “Flux Cabinet,” consisted of opaque white plastic boxes containing items to be identified by weight or sound when shaking. Spice Chess (aka “Smell Chess”) appeared in several different iterations and featured corked tubes filled with spices in a rack. These provide a beautifully articulated sense of the aesthetics of play operating on a number of differ- ent levels.” ⤴️
“the opponents’ pieces, all white, sit on each side of an all-white board, making the warring factions indistinguishable from one another. This elegantly placed anti-war statement, particularly taken in the context of the Vietnam War” ⤴️
“deeply militaristic metaphors embedded in both analog and computer games by conscientiously objecting to their implicit narratives of combat and enmity.” ⤴️
“a deck of cards composed of s2 examples of the same card, all 3^ Or àll aces — one deck consisting of all jokers (essen- tially a deck of wild cards). This was more of a one-liner than an experiment in play aesthetics.” ⤴️
“While bicycles them- » rienari‹ks, Jon. sss. selves are not games, configuring them in this fashion, thereby adding the zs oms, ius., ,s . ””‘ challenge of manueverability, turns them into one. It also highlights a really interesting point about collaboration.” ⤴️
“The beaury of this piece is that it simultaneously celebrates and satirizes the benefits and drawbacks of collectivism.” ⤴️
“Fluxus artists and their contemporaries, even those who were not compos- ers per se, integrated the conceptual notion of score as a framework for perfor- mance and conceptual art.” ⤴️
“the score as a structure for improvisation, as a schema for implementation of an art work” ⤴️
“A musical or art score, like a game, can be appreciated “at rest,” but its true power is manifest when it is activated by p1aye(s) into a unique event.” ⤴️
“Here the word “player” has multiple connotations: a musical instrumentalist; a stage actor; a performer; a person engaged with a game; and perhaps, in the deroga- tory sense, one who manipulates social situations to his advantage.” ⤴️
“This refutes the disdainful impression that play is a form of idleness, triviality or time wasting” ⤴️
“In digital game culture, there is less and less of a boundary between virtuosity as a player and virtuosity as a creator. In the dynamic of a play-based artistic domain, there is a fluidity, a continuum between play and creation, and in this way, the “player” of a game or score is also a co-creator or performer of the work.” ⤴️
“playing the game is a form of consensual performance” ⤴️
““gamifying” a process through the integration of obstacles that alter an c x o c u x c 8j activity” ⤴️
“celebrate the low tech, and also to reframe the toy as an instrument” ⤴️
“the inverted game mechanic: it is at the moment that you “lose” the game that the music itself is created. Thus the resulting work is the outcome of failure.” ⤴️
“There is most certainly an aspect of Zen philosophy to this approach, wherein the act of creation is precisely the act of letting go."" ⤴️
“In computational game-based art works ideas around chance, failure and letting go of results often takes form through harnessing the inherent unpredictability of computers.” ⤴️
“inherent failures or glitches in computational media can often lead to unforeseen results that arise out of accidental or deliberate technological anomalies.” ⤴️
“play with the dysfunctional machine, especially when the machine is pushed past its limit, as this one apparently was, can often produce aesthetic results far more interesting than those originally intended.” ⤴️
“cultivating errors,” ⤴️
““emergence,” that is, unpredictable outcomes that occur as a result of the implementation of a rule-set.” ⤴️
“The creatures, though not anthropomorphic, have distinct personalities that manifest as transformations, abstracted choreographies and sensual interac- tions with the landscape itself. The ensuing emergence and its resulting expe- rience arises from the intersection of the creatures, landscape and player.” ⤴️
“Entropy can be seen as emergence in reverse, a procedural approach to decay rather than regeneration. Procedural entropy can be used as a means of simulating or stim- ulating computational breakdown.” ⤴️
“The Internet provides a broader canvas, so to speak, for populist and collectivist strategies.” ⤴️
“ease of production and distribution provided a fantastic framework with which to question the pre- ciousness of the art object.” ⤴️
“game hacker culture has its own flavor of elitism. Access to and proficiency with technological tools are de rigeur for participation. “Nerds rule” is the new social order.” ⤴️
“As it turns out, most forms of game hacking are good for business, and with a few exceptions, they are not only tolerated but encouraged.” ⤴️
“perceived obsolescence of museums in the digital age —distribution at every level is no longer the sole domain of the gatekeep- ers —whether they be music publishers, game distributors or art institutions. We do not need curators to decide which art will be seen and which will not.” ⤴️
“rubber “porcu- 7 pine” balls at a wall of computer keyboards on which are projected annoying error messages, such as “The operation has failed. Would you like to try again? It will only fail again.”” ⤴️
“digital game art will continue to have a certain amount of unease with the constraints of the museum context. This is because the essential mission of the museum is to collect, preserve and display “things”—this is at fundamental odds with the ethos of game art, which is play” ⤴️
“they have the infinite playground of the Internet as their social, collaborative and creative context.” ⤴️
“Duchamp did a series of studies and paintings attempting to depict the inner processes of the opponents in a chess game.” ⤴️
“Duchamp started with painting and ended with games; his later work appears more and more game-like.” ⤴️
“explore phenomenon of games as an art medium, drawing corollaries and contrasts between the Fluxus movement’s neo-Dadaist passion for games, and the emerging contemporary practice of digital game based art.” ⤴️
“writing descrip- tions of game concepts being developed by a vastly multidisciplinary group of people, none of whom were game designers. I had the intuitive sense that some of these concepts were games, and some were not.” ⤴️
““What, exactly, is a game?” His characteristic response: “Why don’t you find out.”” ⤴️
“the common features that seem to distinguish games from other sorts of activities.* • Pnrometerized ploy consist ing of rules by which a group ofpfnJers a9tee to nbide or th e duration of th e 9ame. • A goal, sometimes expressed os a series of su b-gon1s tint collectively lead to • Obslacles thot creat e challenges to ochievinp tbe goal(s). • Resources, inittally provided to playere ct iandom oi symm etrtea fly, b ut Inter more often us rew0rds/or one scorning obet aches. • Consequences, which com e in theform of either rewards (som etim es as resources) or pena Ities (som ctimes obstacles.) • Infoimamion: both known and unknown to the players (individually oi en masse); progressive in/or motion thot is Sevealed one I time; and random ly generaied informaiion, such as a dice throtu or a dia I spin.” ⤴️
“The craft of making games, whether they are art games or commercial “mass media” games, can be measured in the designer/artist’s ability to create a bal- ance between these parameters.” ⤴️
“Even experimental art games have an innate understanding of this structure and its function, and so are able to undermine it by subverting, overriding or rendering the game’s parameters recursive, redundant, comical/satirical and in some cases, impossible.” ⤴️
“A game is a dynamic system” ⤴️
““hard fun.”” ⤴️
“creating something that is framed as v i s i » r e 6g a game expresses a certain attitude, a particular posture toward not only the work itself but the “audience, and the practice of art-making in general.”” ⤴️
“it requires you as the artist to “give yourself up.”” ⤴️
“locate the “sweet spot” between constraints and freedom.” ⤴️
“a conscious choice to share the art-making process, putting at least a part of the creative act in the hands of the player/participant.” ⤴️
“knowing the size and shape of space to carve out for the participant(s).” ⤴️
“the artist’s absence can be more powerful, more palpable, more distinc- tive, and in some instances, more personal than his or her presence.” ⤴️
“the artist is making a choice to invite the viewer in as a co-creator of the work” ⤴️
“It asks for the viewer’s engagement not only intellectually but literally.” ⤴️
“Game art also fundamentally questions the role and value of the art object.” ⤴️
“There is deep and tragic irony in going to an exhibition of Fluxus artifacts today. Objects whose entire purpose was to ellicit play exist now only as the corpses of their former selves, trapped in a “Mausoleum” within the object- centric commodity-based world of Art with a capital A.” ⤴️
“their object-ness represents a state of dormant play.” ⤴️
“Duchamp understood play as a process that can require at least as much intense con- centration, creativity and skill as making art.” ⤴️
“an attempt to capture on canvas the dynamic flow of thought and social transactions that occur within the domain of a chess match.” ⤴️
“trying to express the notion that you are creating a mental model of the game in your mind that combines your own moves with the anticipated moves of your opponent.” ⤴️
”“… both players have a model of what’s happening on the board, and over time those models get closer and closer and closer together until the final score.”’” ⤴️
“GAMES AREAN OFT-MALIGNED FORM OF POPULARCULTURE.” ⤴️
“Although Monopoly’s theme arose out of a particular cultural moment, it still persists as an engaging system for interaction, and its meta- phors continue to be relevant.” ⤴️
““thumb candy”” ⤴️
“Games are deeply wed to the history of computation precisely because they are procedural, or rule-based, in nature.” ⤴️
“They are based on elegant mathema” ⤴️
“ics and geometries that render not merely objects or visual representations, but dynamic, responsive systems. The only analog medium that is comparable to computational media in this regard is games.” ⤴️
I can’t articulate it right now but don’t think this is true, there are many other mechanisms
“George Maciunas and the Fluxus artists embraced games for their very lowliness. Games provided a sort of “ludus populi,” a play of the people that provided the perfect platform for bringing art to a mass audience. The making of FluxKits and FIuxGames was itself a kind of game: create play patterns from found, e.g., “readymade” objects; create kits that can be reproduced easily and sold cheaply.” ⤴️
“Digital art, by definition, is not a “thing.” It does not exist within the “art-as-object” paradigm, but exists as pure “score.” With digital art, score means code, and code is at once something and nothing. It does not “exist,” except in a conceptual sense, until played. It thus eludes the tradi- tional methods for assigning economic value to art” ⤴️
“How do we monetize a conceptual ready- made object, versus a handcrafted “work of art?”” ⤴️
“The fact that the art is itself made of pixels and code, purely instructions, pure “score,” without an overt physical manifestation, completely reframes the distribution infrastructure, the economic equation and the gate- keeping authority of the art world.” ⤴️
“game art is available via the Internet as free downloads, creating a self-prop a- c*»t•›, ii. gating distribution infrastructure. You can generate an infinite number of copies at no cost to either the artist or the player, thus rendering the industrial framework of supply and demand irrelevant.” ⤴️
“the primary crucible for digital game art is a phenomenon known as “Open Source” culture, a natural milieu for exploiting some of the fundamental values of Fluxus.” ⤴️
“Even within the commercial game industry, there is this spirit of “gift economics,” especially around making “the tools of production” available to a mass audience.” ⤴️
“Open Source culture also has a long-standing tradition of collaboration, collectivism and multiple author- i s i a r r r • » ships. Maciunas would have embraced Open Source culture as a paradigm, because it overrides some of the challenges he faced in the tension between the seductive powers of artistic individualism and a desire to form collectivist art practices.” ⤴️
“Open Source is a communal methodology for soft- ware creation which does not have any proprietary ownership, but which a community of programmers can advance collectively in various ways,” ⤴️
“Open Source philosophy is based on these premises: a) that code belongs to everyone, b) that everyone should have access “under the hood,” c) that people should be able to extend a program’s functionality and d) that those new features should then be returned to col- lective ownership so others can use them.” ⤴️
“Game companies have a slightly different though surprisingly open model, compared to their counterparts in more traditional media.” ⤴️
“many Pc games today come bundled with game editing tools. Players are free to build their own game levels, create “patches” (small programs that sit within existing games), “skins,” (textures that change the appearance of existing games, sort of like digital wallpaper), and even build their own new games from scratch to run on the underlying game “engine”” ⤴️
“use of the game engine still requires purchase of the game on which it was based.” ⤴️
“Open Source tools, engines and assets (3• models, textures, etc.) that can be downloaded for little or no money off the web.” ⤴️
“The use of consumer grade technologies seats this practice squarely in the center of the lowbrow realm of hijacking popular culture toward artistic aims.” ⤴️
“added to the populist flavor shared by Flunis is the infrastructure of a massive online community of gamers, game artists and Open-Sourcers who frequently and freely exchange code, ideas, tools and cultural contexts, all with the complicity of the game industry.” ⤴️
““autodid actic comrnunalism,” the notion of a peer-to-peer model of knowledge exchange,” ⤴️
“This methodology acceler- ates the learning process because it revolves around contextualized learn- ing-on-demand (“I only need to know what I need to know to do this task”), collaboration (“I will share this task with another and we will each contribute our knowledge”) and lateral co-learning (“When I learn this task I will make this information available to others”).” ⤴️
“more efficient means of acquiring and distributing information, knowl- edge and skills.” ⤴️
“Some have described this process as a game unto itself,” ⤴️
“Both value skills acquisition, and competition and cooperation can often work in concert to achieve individual and collec- tive goals.” ⤴️
“herein lies the challenge of mod-based art. Modding tools for first person shooter games such as Quake, Unrenl and Holf-the (the three most popular commercial modding engines) are biased towards this well-establish game genre. Yet most game artists are not content to frame their work within” ⤴️
“the “status quo” narratives of combat, good vs. evil, human vs. alien, “good guy” vs. “terrorist,” wizard vs. dragon, etc. To escape from these themes and structures means that certain biases and genre predilections of the main- stream game industry must be strategically overridden, subverte d or, in some cases, exploited.” ⤴️
“the term “patch” is used to describe a plug-in that sits on top of another game, which makes them ideal for interventional strategies. They are frequently used to make strong statements about game culture, media culture and culture in general, and do so in particular because they live inside existing popular culture paradigms.” ⤴️
“a collection of anti-combat patches for the Counter-Strike mod. Much has been made of the prevalence of militaristic themes in computer games, which have flourished in part because they have a core market (mostly males in their teens, twenties and thirties) that finds this play pattern particularly addictive.” ⤴️
“Interventions into “public” cyberspace are frequently used to call attention to its very virtuality.” ⤴️
“long tradition of leveraging both text-based and online graphical communities (such as ActiveWorlds and OnLive) as a context for public art and performance. Desktop Theater, lead by Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis, orchestrates improvisational scenarios within the graphical chat world The Palace. The group exploits an interesting feature of public cyber- space—the ability to change identify or persona in mid-stream, switching avatars (player representations) to enhance the drama.” ⤴️
“Stern created a series of autonomous characters, or preprogrammed “bots,” disguised as player avatars that perform mechanical, often illogi- i a” ⤴️
“cal actions. Later, he replaced the software bot with a mechanized keyboard that automatically presses the keys required to perform the preprogrammed actions. The intense piston-like movements of the solenoids on only a couple of keys highlights the mechanistic repetition required of players to interface with these fantastical game worlds. It also confronts the question of identity in cyberspace, in a case where a human-controlled character is technically indistinguishable from a mechanically-generated bot.” ⤴️
“Stern has also contributed to the practice of machinima (digital films made in game environments),” ⤴️
“son confronts game aesthet- ics by breaking down the illusory convention of 3n, which is the mainstay of mainstream games.” ⤴️
“other Saito chess mods also introduced new play mechanics and tactile properties. liquid Chess (aka “Smell Chess), consisted of viles of liquid to be identified by smell; Sound Chess or Weight Chess, fea- tured in the collective work “Flux Cabinet,” consisted of opaque white plastic boxes containing items to be identified by weight or sound when shaking. Spice Chess (aka “Smell Chess”) appeared in several different iterations and featured corked tubes filled with spices in a rack. These provide a beautifully articulated sense of the aesthetics of play operating on a number of differ- ent levels.” ⤴️
“the opponents’ pieces, all white, sit on each side of an all-white board, making the warring factions indistinguishable from one another. This elegantly placed anti-war statement, particularly taken in the context of the Vietnam War” ⤴️
“deeply militaristic metaphors embedded in both analog and computer games by conscientiously objecting to their implicit narratives of combat and enmity.” ⤴️
“a deck of cards composed of s2 examples of the same card, all 3^ Or àll aces — one deck consisting of all jokers (essen- tially a deck of wild cards). This was more of a one-liner than an experiment in play aesthetics.” ⤴️
“While bicycles them- » rienari‹ks, Jon. sss. selves are not games, configuring them in this fashion, thereby adding the zs oms, ius., ,s . ””‘ challenge of manueverability, turns them into one. It also highlights a really interesting point about collaboration.” ⤴️
“The beaury of this piece is that it simultaneously celebrates and satirizes the benefits and drawbacks of collectivism.” ⤴️
“Fluxus artists and their contemporaries, even those who were not compos- ers per se, integrated the conceptual notion of score as a framework for perfor- mance and conceptual art.” ⤴️
“the score as a structure for improvisation, as a schema for implementation of an art work” ⤴️
“A musical or art score, like a game, can be appreciated “at rest,” but its true power is manifest when it is activated by p1aye(s) into a unique event.” ⤴️
“Here the word “player” has multiple connotations: a musical instrumentalist; a stage actor; a performer; a person engaged with a game; and perhaps, in the deroga- tory sense, one who manipulates social situations to his advantage.” ⤴️
“This refutes the disdainful impression that play is a form of idleness, triviality or time wasting” ⤴️
“In digital game culture, there is less and less of a boundary between virtuosity as a player and virtuosity as a creator. In the dynamic of a play-based artistic domain, there is a fluidity, a continuum between play and creation, and in this way, the “player” of a game or score is also a co-creator or performer of the work.” ⤴️
“playing the game is a form of consensual performance” ⤴️
““gamifying” a process through the integration of obstacles that alter an c x o c u x c 8j activity” ⤴️
“celebrate the low tech, and also to reframe the toy as an instrument” ⤴️
“the inverted game mechanic: it is at the moment that you “lose” the game that the music itself is created. Thus the resulting work is the outcome of failure.” ⤴️
“There is most certainly an aspect of Zen philosophy to this approach, wherein the act of creation is precisely the act of letting go."" ⤴️
“In computational game-based art works ideas around chance, failure and letting go of results often takes form through harnessing the inherent unpredictability of computers.” ⤴️
“inherent failures or glitches in computational media can often lead to unforeseen results that arise out of accidental or deliberate technological anomalies.” ⤴️
“play with the dysfunctional machine, especially when the machine is pushed past its limit, as this one apparently was, can often produce aesthetic results far more interesting than those originally intended.” ⤴️
“cultivating errors,” ⤴️
““emergence,” that is, unpredictable outcomes that occur as a result of the implementation of a rule-set.” ⤴️
“The creatures, though not anthropomorphic, have distinct personalities that manifest as transformations, abstracted choreographies and sensual interac- tions with the landscape itself. The ensuing emergence and its resulting expe- rience arises from the intersection of the creatures, landscape and player.” ⤴️
“Entropy can be seen as emergence in reverse, a procedural approach to decay rather than regeneration. Procedural entropy can be used as a means of simulating or stim- ulating computational breakdown.” ⤴️
“The Internet provides a broader canvas, so to speak, for populist and collectivist strategies.” ⤴️
“ease of production and distribution provided a fantastic framework with which to question the pre- ciousness of the art object.” ⤴️
“game hacker culture has its own flavor of elitism. Access to and proficiency with technological tools are de rigeur for participation. “Nerds rule” is the new social order.” ⤴️
“As it turns out, most forms of game hacking are good for business, and with a few exceptions, they are not only tolerated but encouraged.” ⤴️
“perceived obsolescence of museums in the digital age —distribution at every level is no longer the sole domain of the gatekeep- ers —whether they be music publishers, game distributors or art institutions. We do not need curators to decide which art will be seen and which will not.” ⤴️
“rubber “porcu- 7 pine” balls at a wall of computer keyboards on which are projected annoying error messages, such as “The operation has failed. Would you like to try again? It will only fail again.”” ⤴️
“digital game art will continue to have a certain amount of unease with the constraints of the museum context. This is because the essential mission of the museum is to collect, preserve and display “things”—this is at fundamental odds with the ethos of game art, which is play” ⤴️
“they have the infinite playground of the Internet as their social, collaborative and creative context.” ⤴️