Game-based art is part of a continuum of static, reactive, and interactive art. In static art, an observer responds to an object; in reactive art, an object responds to an observer; in game-based art, observer and object respond to one another. Game-based art is strongly interactive, and this mode of art recognizes that there is a stated or assumed “etiquette” to interactivity.1 Interactivity entails a constrained give-and-take between the art and the observer. The user must “play the game.” This distinguishes game-based art from other forms, for engagement requires rule-based participation and operates within a coded environment; there is a framed relationship between the observer and the observed, between the inter-active art and the inter-actor. The boundaries for game-based art are not rigid frames, of course, but rather encompass a framework of explicit and implied rules. A coded environment and a set of rules define and govern engagement with the art, and because the rules of games and the rules of art are rooted in social matrices, conventions, perceptions, and ideals, game-based art tends to be activist art. Interactivity is inherently activist, for in both people realms must get involved. Exposing rules of engagement exposes society and social issues, and exposure provokes cultural awareness and critique.
Game-based art, one may reasonably assume, invites a measure of reflection on life’s games. Francisco Ortega-Grimaldo’s game, Observance, reflects the game of cat-and-mouse that immigrants and border guards “play” in trying to gain or to bar entrance to a country. Playing the game provokes reflection on the realities of border politics. Molleindustria’s The Mcdonald’s Videogame recalls the dynamics of business and the lure of profiteering, for the object of the game, like the object of corporate life, is to make the most money at the lowest possible cost. Board games such as The Game of Life and Monopoly are transparent examples of art imitating life, the structured relationships, expectations, and obligations that order life within society. The game titles themselves suggest a connection between the games that are played and a game that is lived.
In the game of Monopoly, the player assumes the role of an investor who uses money to acquire deeds to properties and to accumulate wealth. The game is all about business. In the game, however, there is no real property. The player moves small game pieces around a board, the money and property of the game are fake, and the role of property tycoon is imaginary, but money and property and business magnets do exist in the social worlds of the game’s players and the game’s maker, and their social worlds overlap. The overlap is not simply two dimensional, since three worlds collide: the worlds of the game, the game’s creators, and the game’s players, who may change over time. Monopoly originated in the America of the Great Depression, and the social world of the 1930s established the rules of the game, but the social world of a player in 2007 generates a different perception of the game.2 Contemporary revisions of Monopoly (e.g., the Star Wars edition) are one evidence of the complex intersection of the three worlds of game play, and the intersection of game, provenance, and player continue to evolve with technological innovations, the impact of new media, and social changes.3
Milton Bradley’s multiple-player game, The Game of Life, Conway’s single-player game, Life, and life itself have distinct rules and codes. The rules in Milton Bradley’s games are printed in the lid of the box and are clearly defined and idealist: to attain a successful life, one must go to school, get married, find a job, raise kids, and retire—all from the seat of a tiny plastic automobile. Player’s navigate the world of the game by spinning a wheel of fortune and moving a tiny plastic automobile on a colorful printed roadway. Spins and moves effect the course of the player’s life. They are, in fact, the player’s life within the game and in an idealized world envisioned by the game’s creators. That world and the game are utopian, for death is not an aspect of Milton Bradley’s Game of Life. Conway’s Life, on the other hand, is not utopian and has a “genetic” code that encompasses birth, survival, and death.4 The player first creates a pattern of blocks on a checkerboard, and then Life’s code plays out to the end, either in patterns laid out by players manually on the board or automatically on a computer screen. Depending on the pattern, life continues, reaches stasis, or perishes. Golly, a computer adaptation of Conway’s Life, has the code but few rules to guide player interaction; they do not need to be known because the computer is programmed to play the game to its conclusion.5 Players are free to create any initial pattern of cells, but once the pattern is entered, it takes on a life of its own and grows, changes, and either survives or dies in an “unbounded universe.” In Golly, the computer applies the rules in an encoded environment, but interactivity is minimal; the player moves only once, then watches.
Games reflect ideals and simulate realities, and the encoded environments of the game, its creators, and its players have rules that intersect. The intersection of these worlds is a locus of interactivity that artists and players can experience, observe, engage, and exploit, though some modes of interactivity are more promising than others.
In an article entitled, “Narrative, Interactivity, Play and Games: Four Naughty Concepts in Need of Discipline,” Eric Zimmerman discusses four modes of interactivity: cognitive, functional, explicit, and meta.6 The first mode, cognitive interactivity, involves interpretive participation: the observer reads a text, observes an object, or hears a sound, and reacts intellectually, emotionally, psychologically. In this mode, virtually any engagement can be deemed interactive. The second mode, functional interactivity, is utilitarian and relates to the material nature of the piece: how a person experiences its design, texture, and operation, and how one navigates from one point to another within the work. The third mode, explicit interactivity, entails an immediate or direct contribution to the design, operation, and procedures of the work. Explicit interaction is overt participation: clicking hypertext links, pulling a joystick trigger, following rules, or moving objects. Most importantly, the participant makes choices in this mode of interaction, and the choices effect and can be effected by random or programmed events. The fourth mode, meta-interactivity or cultural participation, the viewer’s experience extends outside the original work to its appropriation, promotion, subversion, or deconstruction. The new media artist can create interactive works that exploit the potency of any of these modes or all of them in combination, but the aesthetic and activist potential of each varies.
“Making and appreciating art,” according to Dominic Lopes, “are always interactive activities,” and this complicates notions of interactive art.7 As an artist working in new media, I am intrigued by the complications. Lopes categorizes art as weakly or strongly interactive. Art that is weakly interactive allows users to explore the content of the artwork in various sequences or to experience only a part of the work. In strongly interactive media, users experience the work as a whole, and each exploration determines the state of the work and the experience of the user. For Lopes, the paradigm for interactivity is the game, and a game is strongly interactive because “the course of the game depends on the players’ choices.”8 Likewise, in strongly interactive art, the properties of the work are determined by the user’s actions.
Noah Wardrip-Fruin also sees similarities between interactive art and interactive games, but finds it more useful to discuss qualities of interactivity than categories.9 In describing his experiments with textual instruments, “interactive” serves as an “accurate, but overly broad” term, and “game” is too narrow. He does not distinguish interactive games and interactive art but recognizes ambiguity and continuity and applies the term “playable media” to “things that we play (and create to play) but that are arguably not games.” Instead of asking, “Is this a game?” Wardrip-Fruin asks, “How is this played?” He pursues art that invites and structures play.
In “Art games: Interactivity and the Embodied Gaze,” Graham and Elizabth Coulter-Smith explore traditional and performative interaction in contemporary new media art. Like Lopes and Wardrip-Fruin, the Coulter-Smiths see a shift in the viewer’s relationship to new media. They describe the traditional role of the viewer as “looking and respectfully appreciating” and refer to this “mode of interaction as ‘reading.’”10 The reading gaze in traditional fine art is “distanced” and “disembodied,” and the status of artist (as genius) and artwork (as precious) alienates and is an obstacle to interaction.11 Art that limits itself to “reading” but not “writing” is, on my continuum, static; art is static when the observer responds to the art, reactive when the art responds to the observer, and interactive when art and observer respond to one another. Interactive art is, so to speak, “written” as well as “read.”
Interactive art is what one does, not merely what one sees. Game-based art reifies experience. The participant engages the work and in turn is engaged by the work. The game is art, with all the potential of art. The Coulter-Smiths write, “The notion of a creative game that can interpenetrate everyday life leads us to the concept of serious play.”12 They conclude that “the creative game is potentially a powerful strategy that will enable deconstructive art to escape its current assimilation into the traditional values of the precious work of art and the apotheosis of the artist as genius.”13 The interactivity of the game-based art is paradigmatic, and the paradigm can be exploited.
Game-based art is ruled-based, and the rules can be exposed and exploited by the artist. To play a game, a player, of course, must follow a set of rules, and the rules always have real-world analogs. War, for example, has waged on real battlefields throughout history, and it is played on game boards on kitchen tables. The board game is understood because its analog is known. The artist can exploit the analogy in several ways. The artist can borrow or build upon what is known (e.g., about war and warfare, military personnel and chain of command, weaponry and tactics, geography and history). Or, the artist can expand or challenge what is known (e.g., historical defeats as well as victories, collateral damages, political and humanitarian costs). The rules can be borrowed, bent, or broken for aesthetic or activist purpose.
Game-based art is rhetorical. In the book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games, Ian Bogost proposes that games have a procedural rhetoric that develops an argument. In a video game, the rhetoric is visual as well as verbal, and the rhetoric logically encompasses aural and tactile cues. The argument unfolds through the process of playing of the game, and the very rules that define the game also shape the argument. Bogost states that “procedural rhetoric is the practice of using processes persuasively, just as verbal rhetoric is the practice of using oratory persuasively and visual rhetoric is the practice of using images persuasively.”14 Bogost uses Molleindustria’s The McDonald’s Videogame to illustrate the point. The video game exposes some of the business practices of the fast-food giant. The player controls four aspects of the McDonald’s enterprise that need to be managed simultaneously: the third-world pasture, the slaughter house, the restaurant, and the corporate offices. In each of the four aspects, players must not only make difficult business decisions but moral choices as well. The player may use varying tactics—including bribery of government officials, bulldozing rain-forest, and use of growth hormones—to achieve the goal of making the highest profit. Unsavory tactics, however, will provoke consumer complaints and lead to health safety violations that only lobbying and public relations campaigns by the corporate offices can “fix.” By playing the game, one encounters the argument that it is impossible to make a 99¢ hamburger and turn a profit without adverse impact on society and the environment.
The rules of a game guide the players, and playing creates the argument. The rules generate the rhetoric. The rhetoric of a game need not defend or attack a position or institution, though it certainly can. The rhetoric can simply inform (though bias is always operative). Observes play the game and in doing so discover something they may have missed, and learn about the rules of life by experiencing a microcosm. The microcosm reveals. As Marrhew Ritchie asks, “Maybe the rules are just another way of asking what will happen next?” 15 With game-based art, as I envision it, the rules are essential to the art, and the artist can make, borrow, bend, or break the rules of the game. Which game? The game that is being created and will be played, but also the realities that are being exposed (i.e., the game of life). Art at its best exposes, and the rhetorical power of games and new media lend seriousness to play and imply that games are indeed art.
With the rise of the digital revolution, increasing attention has been given to video games, art, and the relationship between the two. The revolution has stimulated debate over the question, “Can a video game be art?” Manifestos and calls for better and more serious games have even rekindled interest in an eight-bit aesthetic as mice, keyboards, and code have supplanted card and board games.
Ernest Adams challenges game makers to create better and more innovative games in his “Dogma 2001: A Challenge to Game Designers.” 16 He advises designers to break the standard game mold by avoiding cliché tricks such as bullet time, power-ups, and predictable characters (e.g., elves, knights, Nazis, vampires, and mutants). Adams forbids common game types (e.g. first-person shooters, role-playing, jump-and-shoot side scrollers), as well as a reliance on hardware and other input devices. Victory and defeat, winning and loosing remain important, but in his approach, there cannot be good versus evil. Many of Adams’s rules could be adopted by artists and designers, and game players would benefit. As a designer, I would follow all ten of his rules; however, as an artist, I would ignore some.17 First, I would not limit the type of game, for limiting type limits modes of expression and means for commentary. By subverting violent first-person shooters, side-scrollers, and RPGS, artists are able to exploit familiar control systems and to bend rules. Making the guns shoot paint instead of bullets creates new challenges for players and would shift the goals of the game from killing to less violent and more constructive actions. For example, Cory Arcangel’s I Shot Andy Warhol, a hacked Nintendo game originally titled Hogans Alley, removes characters of gun-toting bad guys and replaces them with the Pope, Flava Flav, Colonel Sanders, and Andy Warhol.18 Feng Membo’s Q4U and AH_Q exploit the first-person shooter genre through manipulation of the graphics. In Q4U and AH_Q, Membo becomes the main character in the computer game, DOOM.19 Second, hardware should remain a very important factor in art games. The hardware is a crucial element which can enhance the interaction of the game. Hardware can enable players to use their whole bodies and to move within physical space to control avatars in virtual space, or it can confine them to a small intimate space of a board or table game. Art games are generally not designed for mass-consumption, so they should not be designed for the lowest common-denominator as some commercial games are—unless, of course, doing so adds necessary context to the artwork. Input devices should also be well considered. Are mice and keyboards the appropriate mode of interaction for a game about collaboration? Mary Flanagan’s giant Atari joystick requires two people to move each axis of the joystick and one more to push the button, and the interface forces collaboration.20 Mice and keyboards do not have the same presence nor do they invite more than one user at a time. Maintaining or bending hardware rules will also change the rhetoric of the game.
Nic Kelman’s “Video Game Arts Manifesto” calls for the development of games that are not merely entertainment. He pushes for emotional involvement that is not just thrills and excitement, and he insists on better visual design and writing. Like Adams, Kelman calls for unique and original visuals instead of reliance on other established styles, such as, “graffiti, anime and French comic books.”21
Francisco Ortega-Grimaldo advocates the Ludoztli Movement, which uses board games as art and social commentary.22 Ortega-Grimaldo’s urges “artists to stop making non-interactive art, and break the wall between the art object and passive viewer.”23 He hopes that participation in the movement, through the interaction with artful games as well as with fellow participants, that players will experience changes of heart and will develop new perceptions of their worlds. Ortega-Grimaldo concludes that it is through games that the viewer actively engages a social statement, injustice, or opinion, and plays ideas out.
Whether a challenge, manifesto, or movement, each of these have similar goals for the creator/artist and viewer/player: namely, to create a moving work of art.