Given the
history of rich cross-pollination between gaming and art -- represented best by
the figure of Marcel Duchamp, who both incorporated games into his art and
approached the artistic process as a game in itself – it seems natural for a
vast middle ground to emerge, as artists use games or game-like processes as a
vehicle for expression. These
“alternative” games typically subvert one or more of the elements comprising
the traditional definition of a game, while still remaining, unambiguously,
games in their own right. I will
examine three examples of alternative games – Earthball, White Chess,
and Spacewar – which, in my mind, can
be identified as “game art,” and which each occupy a different position on the
spectrum between pure art and pure game.
Some traditional
features of a game, as listed by Pearce in “Games as Art: The Aesthetics of
Interactivity,” are parameters, goals, obstacles, resources, consequences, and information. A game that incorporates
all of these elements would be classified as a traditional or “pure” game (as I
see it, at least – the boundary between games and art is notoriously blurry),
as opposed to a work of art. White Chess, created by Yoko Ono as part
of the Fluxus movement, is a classic example for subverting several of these
features while adhering to others -- creating an expressive piece of art that
is still, fundamentally, a game. In
essence, White Chess is a standard
chess game between two players, the only difference being that both sides are
white, and completely indistinguishable.
Play proceeds as normal – both players still attempting agon, competition on equal terms, and
still adhering to the normal rules of chess – but quickly find that the game
cannot be finished, as it becomes impossible for the players to determine which
pieces are their own. As “Games as Art”
points out, White Chess is
unplayable; its combination of goals, rules, and obstacles is
self-contradictory. Its unplayability is
a vehicle for the anti-war message it carries: namely, that conflict becomes
impossible when two sides recognize each other as equals. As an alternative game, however, it skews far
closer to “work of art” than to pure game. DeKoven, for example, would not approve of the changes to the game; in The Well-Played Game, though he recognizes that games are a form of art, he makes it very clear that the purpose of a game is the fun and wellness of its play community, and White Chess primarily causes feelings of futility and frustration among its players due to its unachievable goals. Interestingly, White Chess would not meet deKoven's definition of a "changed game" as he defines it (that is, "a variation which requires the development of a new strategy" [61]), simply because there are no possible effective strategies. In becoming a work of art, it nearly ceases to be a game at all.
A game that
skews closer to “pure game” than “pure art” is Spacewar, as described by Stewart Brand. (While not part of any specific movement that
we discussed in class, Brand’s description of Spacewar clearly posits it as an alternative game, and I think of
it as belonging to a “hacker” movement among early computer programmers.) Being digital, most of its features are
encoded into the program itself, and may therefore seem unalterable; it has
clearly-defined rules, goals, resources (torpedoes, ships), obstacles, and all
the other features of games, as well as having plain start- and end-points and
being based on the pursuit of fun. Its
subject matter is also quite standard among digital games: a violent
science-fiction dogfight among spaceships.
However, the interesting feature of Spacewar
is its play community: programmers of the 1970s and 80s, and, more broadly speaking, a group of people who have come together for the purpose of having fun (as deKoven would describe a play or fun community [15]]. As a
consequence of the “hacker” culture these players inhabited, their game demonstrated a direct sense of shared ownership: mutability, spontaneity,
and community between players. The features
of the game, although encoded into the program, could be changed by anyone with
the necessary technical skill (which provided an impetus for developing these
skills), and these adaptations were spread freely among the programming world
at large in an open-source model. (DeKoven writes, "Once this freedom is established, once we have established why we want to change a game and how we go about it, a remarkable thing happens to us: We become the authorities" [62]). As imagined
in “Games as Art,” the code is treated as a “score,” which can be played like
an instrument by a talented programmer, or interpreted in a variety of ways. The play communities form spontaneously and
organically -- the game is typically local, and always multiplayer, unlike most
traditional games today -- and the changes arise spontaneously as well, as
technical skill and appropriateness allow (this flexibility being one of
DeKoven’s ideals for gaming). It’s also
worth noting that, unlike the original New Games movement and Fluxus, the
hacker movement very much continues to flourish: open-source games such as Nethack and Battle for Wesnoth
continue to be distributed and spontaneously changed today.
A third
alternative game, which sits closer to the halfway point between “pure game”
and “pure art,” is Earthball, one of
the New Games developed by Brand and the New Games movement. The game is notable for subverting a number
of traditional features: most intriguingly, a player’s goal may constantly be
in flux, since a given player can spontaneously switch teams. Taken more broadly, there is both a stated
goal (trying to push the ball between a set of flags) and no goal at all – or,
specifically, a recognition that the stated goal is only an excuse to keep
playing. The developers of Earthball worked from the same model as deKoven in The Well-Played Game: the rules and goals are less important than the experience of the players. While there is competition in
some sense, it is dynamically handicapped as players switch teams to prevent a
victory by either side. The fact that the ball is painted like the Earth (though this can be improvised) makes a gentle statement about the universal need for community, understanding, and fairness. In other respects,
however, the game is very traditional: it is based primarily on fun (though it
also makes a statement about competition and fairness), it has a clear, if
dynamic, end point (players will allow one team to win when they want to stop
playing), and on some level it speaks the common “pure game” language that
everyone can understand (there is a stated goal, specific rules and obstacles,
etc.). Like many of the New Games, I
take Earthball to be a successful
piece of “game art”: it is used as a medium for expression and subverts
traditional game elements while remaining an enjoyable, highly-playable game in
its own right.
The distinction
between “games” and “art,” to be found hotly debated in any
technically-oriented Internet forum, is in my mind a false dichotomy. There is in reality a vast middle ground – “game
art,” or games that are used as a medium for expression – inhabited by the
alternative games discussed in this class, and by many others. There is a spectrum between “pure art” (art
that is clearly not game-like in any way) and a “pure game” (a pursuit
of fun without other goals), and it is this rich area of synthesis that will provide the most
interesting material for discussion among game theorists and designers.
Works Cited
Lucidia (Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C.) (2005). "Sustainable Play: Towards A New Games Movement for the Digital Age." Digital Arts & Culture Conference Proceedings, Copenhagen, December 2005.
DeKoven, Bernie. The Well-Played Game: A Playful Path to Wholeness, 3rd Edition. San Jose: Writers Press Club. 2002
Pearce, Celia.
"Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Interactivity." Visible Language:
Special Issue on Fluxus. January 2006.
Brand, Stewart. "SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," Rolling Stone, December 7, 2001. http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html
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