As the final days of 1993 drew to a close, no one knew that the world was about to change and, in the process, a whole new art form was being born.
Ironically, or aptly, depending on your affiliations, the name of this revolution was Doom .
For most adults, the release of a new game passed unremarked; videogames were still generally considered the preserve of testosterone-addled adolescents, nothing for serious people to be concerned with. Sure, the games industry was growing as computing power increased and the economy grew, but few would have guessed that they were witnessing the beginning of a whole new way of making and distributing games. Even fewer would have forecast that the games industry would grow into a dominant entertainment force globally. But what no one could have predicted was that Doom 's paranoid mazes would give birth to a completely new cultural form, game art.
Doom's alien splatter-action might seem an unpromising basis for a new art medium, but its compellingly immersive gameplay, astounding graphics and atmospheric audio made it one of the most popular games of all time. In the two years following its release, an estimated 10 million people downloaded Doom . But what was truly revolutionary about Doom was a feature that most players never even used. Aware that players had tried to produce customised levels for their previous game release, Wolfenstein 3D , Id Software's lead programmer, John Carmack , designed Doom so that game data such as levels, graphics , sound effects and music was stored separately from the game engine in WAD files. (1) Just over a month after the shareware release of Doom, users uploaded the first version of the Doom Editing Utility.
Doom box art
WADs gave users the ability to customise new scenarios and meant that the game could, in theory, be played endlessly, but it wasn't intended to make players into game developers. But this is just what happened as Doom players started making completely new games built in the Doom engine. More than this, Doom put the tools to create three-dimensional spaces, virtual worlds, into the hands of everyone. Sure, it wasn't easy, but you no longer needed to be a programmer or have access to high-end computers to make your own virtual world or change the narrative of your favourite game.
Its next offering Quake further expanded the possibilities for player-producers. Soon people were using game engines to do and make all sorts of things; with levels, patches, maps, mods, skins and extensions for existing games just the beginning. Independent game mods (2)bypassed the publishing gatekeepers, flourishing, as Doom had flourished, by being distributed as shareware. Many of these explored new subjects for games, or new contexts, or invented new forms of interaction and gameplay. Some of them, like Counterstrike a HalfLife mod, went on to become commercial successes; many of them have challenged and invigorated the industry in other ways. Some have been shown in art galleries whilst others are providing new entertainment, educational and creative experiences.
Counterstrike screenshots
Increasingly, imagination seems to be the defining constraint as games engines have become powerful and flexible tools. And increasingly we are being forced to come to terms with their least predicted outcome, game art.
Game art differs profoundly from traditional art forms. In a very real way, game art is creating its own context, bootstrapping itself into existence. Unlike other new mediums, game art doesn't require an 'official' context to thrive. Video art, for example, would not exist without the contemporary art system. Game art, on the other hand, is growing out of and in response to the huge communities of game fans.
Game art, despite its occasional institutional showcase, doesn't depend on art galleries to give it credibility and exposure. It doesn't need a public funding regime or publisher deals to thrive. Game art is developing - and being developed by - a new kind of validating framework that, like the games themselves, is growing out of the creating community. These organizations are largely 'virtual' in so far as they exist online, for example SelectParks, and as loose collectives of creators such as C-Level. It is these groups that are providing the critical, theoretical and promotional roles that the traditional media and organizational apparatus cannot and, often, will not provide.
Even for many sympathisers from the established media, games art is simply too new, too rapidly evolving and too multifarious to take on. Like so much else brought by digital technologies, there's no ready language or pre-constituted theory to help us discuss and understand game art. There's no Baedeker to the new communities growing up around it and no lexicons to decode their new representational languages. There's not even a clear consensus on what game art actually is or might be. The critical apparatus we might muster from the world of contemporary art or cinema is little help in interpreting a work such as ' 9/11Survivor' or ARG ' Troy' . Likewise, the values of the commercial game review mean little in the face of the radical destruction of the form entailed by works such as Brody Condon's ' Killing Adam' or JODI's ' Untitled Game' .
There is not even unanimity about what constitutes 'game art', with various commentators and practitioners offering ad hoc definitions and categories that most often reflected the protean, rapidly developing state of the medium. We, of course, are no different, offering a tentative categorisation based on intention and affect rather than genre.
- Work that examines the formal elements of games e.g. gameplay, iconography, pixel aesthetics.
- Work that repositions traditional artistic activities into the new space of games/virtual worlds.
- Work that generates new creative situations, instruments, tools and contexts from game technologies.
- Work that examines society and society's anxieties about games.
These are in no way intended to be exhaustive and nor are they mutually exclusive; rather they are offered as 'ways in' to discussing a highly mutable and dynamically shifting set of practices.
They reflect our belief that game artists are able to use the intrinsic attributes of videogames to produce work that resonates from games to reverberate in a broader cultural discourse. We take, as a given, the blurring of boundaries between works created as serious games ( Escape from Woomera ), experimental games ( Everyday Shooter), fan art (Brody Condon's Screenshot project) and those which are identified as 'art'. Often their identification has more to do with intended context than any fundamental differences in content or discursive apparatus.
1. Work that examines the formal elements of games.
Games are artificial environments build around carefully crafted rules. These are essential for both establishing player goals and making cognitive sense of the environment. Rules govern everything from the physics and collision detection to the meaning of icons and user actions. The constructed nature of every element means that games naturally encourage their own critical deconstruction and exploration of alternative ontologies, epistemologies and aesthetics.
This kind of formal interrogation takes place on a variety of levels. The 'hacker art' of JODI and Cory Archangel intervenes with pre-existing game code. Other artists address the game interface and user experience; Julian Oliver's 2nd Person Shooter and Troy Innocents Semiomorph, for example, both present game environments that actively engage with particular areas of cognition. These works employ games as their own laboratory, experimenting with what happens when they are played by different rules.
JODI (Dirk Paesmans and Joan Heemskerk) describe their work as a "formalist exploration of reduction, opening up a view to the underlying codes to better understand our own user/player behaviour" (3). SOD (1999) is a version of Id Software's Wolfenstein 3D(1992) . The game has been stripped of all its representational elements, leaving an austere landscape of black and white silhouettes. The original soundtrack remains intact, its grungy melodrama jarring against the stark minimalism. Robbed of the familiar semantic cues, SOD is near impossible to play; the player is abandoned to seek their pleasure in the abstract 3D maze. JODI's formalist interventions reveal the mechanics of the code and, in turn, make us aware of how the games representational systems and its artificial rules and physics work to engage us. (4)
Julian Oliver's 2nd Person Shooter takes the formal inquiry of player point of view one step further. Oliver's work is not a game hack but a demo he has built purely to test the affects of the displacement of agency. To do this he takes on one of the most established of game genres; the first person shooter. Part of the pleasure of first person shooters is their simplicity. Their controls and camera are generally near intuitive and their goals are clear. Oliver's 2nd Person Shooter completely ruptures these easy relationships. In 2nd Person Shooter whilst you control one 'bot' you see through the eyes of your opponent's 'bot . You must stalk and destroy your opponent's 'bot despite depending on it to know where you are. This skewed perspective is profoundly disorienting; familiar spatial syntax is abandoned and one's sense of embodiment is entirely compromised. The game forces you to address the unnatural dislocation of your senses occurring in the game space. By asserting the primacy of the rules of the game over the rules of nature the work forces you to override your senses to simply navigate the space.
Oliver takes a certain delight in the game's frustrating difficulty; noting that first person perspective has always been "privileged with the pointillism (or synchronicity) of a physiology that travels with the will in some shape or form, 'I act from where I perceive' and 'I am on the inside looking out'. In this little experiment however, you are on the outside looking in, and to my great amusement, it's a complete pain in the arse." (5)
In contrast, Troy Innocent's Semiomorph is relatively simple to navigate; the game-world and controls obey the conventions of 3D game-space. Innocent's work instead examines the complex sign systems that exist within game worlds. Ordinary videogames frequently require players to understand and manipulate a sometimes vast vocabulary of icons, abbreviations, sounds and gestures. Extending Innocent's ongoing investigation of the semiotics of digital space and human-computer interaction, Semiomorph offers an expressive range of characters, object and icons that the player must investigate, identify, and decode. The player is intent on establishing meaning and affect within the constraints of the games internal logic. The work addresses the semiotics of electronic spaces whilst it dramatically embodies their transmutable nature.
Semiomorph icons
Seemingly far removed from the conceptual and experiential challenges offered by these works, the delightful Super Mario Clouds (2002) is pure simplicity and beauty. The work of hacker artist Cory Archangel, it was made by selectively reverse-engineering the software code of game classic Super Mario for the Nintendo NES. Archangel removed all game elements except the fluffy white clouds that endlessly scroll on a brilliant 8bit-blue background. The result is joyously simple - a hidden pleasure released from the demands of gameplay to become, like Warhol's Clouds of the sixties, a disarmingly charming display both playful and strange.
Screenshot of Super Mario Clouds
Archangel teases his art out of the hacker realm, distilling down works to an optimality informed by aesthetics. A member of the Beige Programming Ensemble (6), the basis of his practice lies in shareware and he continues to publish step-by-step instructions on the web for the creation of many of his works. This isn't a political statement by Archangel about art and commerce, it is the simply the 'way of the hacker'. Devotion to the ideal of shareware, and the use of the internet as a site for discourse, distribution and exhibition unites Archangel's work with that of JODI and Oliver.
2. Work that repositions traditional artistic activities into new space of games/virtual worlds.
Every new technology facilitates new iterations of established art practice. This commonly takes the form of remediated content (7), in which the older media - in this case, established arts practices - take on the subjects or aesthetics of the new media. Eva And Franco Mattes' works such as LOL and Portraits-13 Most Beautiful Avatars constitute literal, albeit sardonic, examples that question both the traditional role of portraiture and the nature of the new relationships between identity and public presentation in virtual worlds. Exhibited in both real-world and virtual-world art galleries, the Mattes' works reflect on the new online environments as a site to socialise and to nurture celebrity. Their glamorous, glitzy images capture members of virtual world Second Life's (8) elite inner circle. Satirically echoing the sentiments of Andy Warhol's star images 13 Most Beautiful Boys and 13 Most Beautiful Women, the images reflect the traditions of glamour photography hybridized with the brilliant colours and hardline aesthetics of the game-world. As befits the Warhol reference, these portraits are from a world in which you can customise your avatar to become as beautiful as you desire. Like the Factory's superstars, Second Life is about the creation of alternative identities, of building and living a fantasy. However, like the Factory's denizens, these avatar fantasies are more determined by media stereotypes than they are by their own imaginations.
Eva and Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.ORG)
Desire Strangelove
2006
As part of a broad practice centred on games, 
Brody Condon has worked with re-contextualising game elements within traditional arts practice. His 650 Polygon John Carmack sculpture belongs to the long tradition of memorializing cultural heroes and distinguished citizens through a rendering of their likeness. Co-founder and lead programmer of Id Software, John Carmack is widely acknowledged as the industry's greatest graphics programmer. Carmack is the god of polygons.
Condon's statue is based on the low polygon (self)portrait of Carmack that appears in Quake III (2005). In the game the discovery of the John Carmack avatar was a reward to fans. Brandishing a mega machine gun, it is a portrait of the man from within the world that he created - a world of fast action, gratuitous fantasy violence and gory fun. Within the gallery, ripped from the logic and the frenetic activity of the game environment, the low-polygon rendering is raw and cartoon-like; perhaps a reminder of how divorced from reality is this toy-world of gleeful hyper-violence.
Whilst it is now not unusual for traditional galleries to show art that utilises digital production methodologies, the 2002 site-specific work by Stephen Honegger and Anthony Hunt, Container, was an unusually incisive and elegant intersection between two spheres that often have nothing but disdain for each other. Installed in Melbourne, Australia's 200 Gertrude St Gallery (9), the audience first encountered the work as a full-sized shipping container 'impossibly' installed in the confines of the gallery. Entering the container, visitors encountered a screen on the rear wall showing a film shot in a HalfLife mod. It showed a character breaking into the gallery from the alley outside. Identical in all other respects to the physical gallery, the HalfLife simulacra lacked one thing - the container. Eventually, the character threw a hidden switch,causing the ceiling to open up and the shipping container to be lowered into the gallery space corresponding to that which it occupied in real life. (10) The character then entered the container and violently shot a figure within. The viewer suddenly became all too aware of blood stains spattering the 'real' space. Container created a unique experience of the 'real' space by providing a fictional, but immersive and compellingly real, explanation for the otherwise inexplicable. Real-space and game-space became interleaved, raising questions as to the ontological status of each.
Digital media is possibly the first medium to offer a new distribution channel for traditional media. In particular, games and 3D shared worlds offer new contexts for the construction and presentation of traditional art objects. These range from the pedestrian - sculpture gardens and 'painting' exhibitions in Second Life -- to the post-pop like This Spartan Life, a panal chat show created and hosted by Chris Burke featuring guests interviewed via Xbox Live within the online multiplayer worlds of Halo 2. Equally, it is difficult to know whether to characterise the machinima (11) Dance Voldo Dance by Chris Brandt as puppertry, moviemaking or choreography. This genre-bending work translates Soul Calibur character Voldo's unique fighting moves into a fluid and erotic dance .
3. Work that generates new creative situations, instruments, tools and contexts from game technologies.
acmipark, a shared world created by Selectparks, replicated the real-world design of commissioner's Australian Centre for the Moving Image's home in landmark complex Federation Square. Primarily a sound-park, the work highlighted the performative element of gameplay. Game engine generated acmipark proposes games as performance environments and as 'instruments' of performance themselves. The gameplay and interactivity within acmipark focused on musical or compositional play including virtual instruments as diverse as throwable lightballs and collaborative improvisation space, the 'scratch rink'. The light balls produced melodic sequences affected by the surfaces they hit, enabling an aural exploration of the space. Special sound installations like Scratch Rink and Loop Rink offered more precise control of a variety of sounds and rhythms, encouraging players to perform the spaces in shared improvisations. In the underground concert hall, a vertiginous rock chamber, live performances could be streamed from the Internet, with strategically spaced speakers allowing players to experience the sound in 3D as they move around.
Screenshot of acmipark
Null Pointer (Tom Betts) specialises in generative programming techniques; his creative output includes interactive music games, computer game modifications, installations, software, live music performances, musical composition and his experimental pop band, Weevil. His Nintendo Gameboy performances brought all of these strands together in a witty celebration of the sonic possibilities of games consoles. The Gameboy itself is transformed into an instrument which is 'played' the players performance becomes a public performance.
Alternate and mixed-reality reality games such as "The Beast" and I love bees are developing entire new ways to play. The location-based game Scoot, created by Deborah Polson, was played across Melbourne, Australia's National Gallery, its Museum, State Library and Centre for the Moving Image. Using mobile phones to get clues, players engaged with a series of interactive 'mini-games' across the sites and within an online virtual world. Scoot explored the potential for location-based games for developing relationships between people and space, and between people themselves. It encouraged collaborative player and manifested a range of unpredictable emergent behaviour. Its gameplay fostered player engagement with their local cultural institutions, their city's history and spaces.
Screenshot of Scoot component
4. Work that examines society and society's anxieties around games
A very early example of game art was the product of the in-your-face techno-feminist ensemble VNSMatrix. All New Gen (1993) was a game prototype, generally experienced as a multi-media installation, in which the player battled Big Daddy Mainframe as super-cyber-sluts who shoot paralysing goo from their armed and dangerous cunts. Celebrated at the time for its confrontational critique of gendered roles in both virtual and real space, it inspired critical response as extravagant as itself. Kay Shaffer explained its workings thus. "Within the Matrix there are no coded binaries of masculine/feminine. The 'slime in the matrix', what Sofoulis terms a 'quimessence'-- a fluid substance between liquid and gas, sliding within a feminine coded cyberspace of fluidity and mutation, an in-between world of new possibilities; a generative space of new feminist imaginings." (12)All New Gen was a satirical and confronting attack on the overwhelmingly masculine culture that surrounded computers and games in the early 1990s. All New Gen's feminist intervention found later reverberations in Anne-Marie Schleiner's Velvet Strike, a game patch that subverted the boys-own codes of popular strategy game Counterstrike. Velvet Strike caused consternation in the Counterstrike community, many players feeling its anti-war graffiti was an attack on the game's values, simply constituting an elaborate form of griefing (13).
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Screenshots of Velvet Strike in-game in Counterstrike
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Created after the Columbine massacre, Brody Condon's Adam Killer (2000) is a (bloody) meditation on the gulf between the experience of its media images and the actual trauma and meaning of the real event. This art mod features a virginally white-clad Adam, an avatar modelled on a close friend of Condon's that stoically offers itself to infinite slaughter. The work questions the meaning of agency when it is stripped to this single, repetitively violent act. It is powerfully disturbing, yet banal and perversely almost celebratory. Its elegantly abstracted violence captures the disquietingly alienating effect of the aestheticisation of trauma. Despite its relationship to traditional sculptural objects and its undoubted power in the gallery, Condon believes, it is a "therapeutic work addressed to gamers and modders and best experienced alone at home." (14)
The media portrayal of violent trauma was also the focus of the controversial 9/11 Survivor mod (2003). Made by a group of art students, Kinematic.org, using the FPS Unreal Tournament 2003 , the work was a response to the almost pornographic media repetition of footage of people jumping from the Twin Towers. 9/11 Survivor offers no gameplay, no challenges, no rewards; the viewer simply bears witness to the fate of an emblematic lone businessman trapped in the burning tower as he considers his choices before jumping from the building to his certain death. It is an insistence on the reality of the horror of the individual choice in contrast to the media's presentation of it as spectacle.
9/11 Survivor screenshots
The work provoked a fierce negative reaction. In part this was driven by the belief that videogames are an unsuitable medium for locating a discussion of human suffering. In this view, videogames are both inherently trivial and unsuited to thoughtful consideration of ethical issues. Although this work was not a game, its very existence as a FPS (15) mod disqualified it for many as a site for serious discussion. If the Right found it repugnant, the Left was no more comfortable with it. From the other side of politics, reaction was incited by the games industry's centrality to the military industrial entertainment industry.
It is this ideological position that informs Joseph deLappe's performance work Dead_in_Iraq. DeLappe logs on to networked-PC game America's Army servers and, under the name 'dead_in_iraq', proceeds to lists the name, age, service branch and date of death of those American soldiers that have died in Iraq since the beginning of the invasion in 2003. The work is conceived as both a memorial and as protest art. It was inspired by real world protests using boots or crosses to publicly memorialise America's dead. DeLappe explains how he equates the act of laboriously typing each name in to the game-chat to writing lines of punishment. Imagine, he suggests, "President Bush or Don Rumsfeld having to write all those names, one at a time. Keying in these words is like punishment, over and over again on a chalkboard: here they are. Something is wrong." (16)
Like much performance work, Dead_in_Iraq will be experienced by most through its documentation. Its live audience is the real players of America's Army, an audience who is not generally receptive to DeLappe's intervention in their shared reality. DeLappe frequently faces hostility from those who are annoyed at having their play interrupted by harsh references to the real world. Disgruntled players argue that games are fantasy environments divorced from real world constraints and consequences and those that log on without intent to play simply 'grief' other players.
DeLappe argues that America's Army is more than a game, that it is a propaganda tool for the military with direct links to recruiting. Funded by the American taxpayer, America's Army is a highly successful marketing tool for the American Defence Force. It is free to download and play and has attracted over 7.5 million users clocking over 160 million hours of play. DeLappe is trying to make a direct link between the game and the reality of war to those players immersed in its virtual battlefield. He reminds them that beyond the game there is no teen-rated warfare offering moderate (animated) violence, mild coarse language and the ability to re-spawn on death.
DeLappe's work draws attention to the Internet as the new agora and games as the new playground. The relationships between our 'second lives' in these 'Third Spaces' and our 'real lives' in quotidian analogue reality are becoming more and more complex. New social structures are forming, new communication forms are evolving and new codes of ethics and morality are being devised and fiercely debated. Game art has grown out of one (hothouse) corner of this new world to become its first native art form. In so doing, it has also interpolated itself into the traditional spaces and discourses of art and cinema, challenging their conventions and kicking down their boundaries. In opening up the spaces of what can be considered art, game art spawns not just a genre or a technology but a legion of creative and ontological possibilities.
2007 Shiralee Saul and Helen Stuckey
1. According to Doom 's initial design document , WAD stands for " Where's All the Data?". Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_WAD
2. A 'mod' a software modification to alter a computer game's appearance or play made by a player rather than the original game creator. Mods can include new items, weapons, characters, enemies, models, modes, textures, levels, story lines and game modes.
3. Baumgaertel, Tilman. "Interview with Jodi' in Rhizome.org May 19, 2001.
4. Cannon, Rebecca. "Introduction to Game Art'", Playthings Conference. October 2003.
5. Oliver, Julian. http://www.selectparks.net
http://www.post-data.org/beige/
6. Bolter and Guerin 'Remediation'
7. Second Life is the privately owned (partly) subscription based 3D virtual world that provides its users (residents) with tools to view and modify the world. The world is in a large part being built by its users who are able retain IP on their SL creations. It has no formal gameplay and is dependant on its community to provide and develop its entertainments.
8. 200 Gertrude St Gallery is a publicly-funded organisation that is dedicated to exhibiting the works of emerging and experimental contemporary artists. Established over 20 years ago, it also auspices a artists' studios and a visiting artist program. http://www.gertrude.org.au/
9. Apparently some opening-night audience members searched behind the Director's 'real' desk to find the 'real' switch.
10. Machinima is possibly the best-known creative outcome of the exploitation of games' real time environments. Rather than working with expensive camera equipment or spending months animating every element in costly 3d packages. Machinima creators act out their movie within a computer game using existing assets or use the game engine technology to build unique characters and sets.
11. Shaffer, Kay., The Contested Zone: Cybernetics, Feminism and Representation
http://www.lamp.ac.uk/oz/schaffer.html
12. "Griefers differ from typical players in that they do not play the game in order to achieve objectives defined by the game world. Instead, they seek to harass other players, causing grief. In particular, they play to make others cry, using tools such as stalking, hurling insults, extortion, forming gangs, electronic killing and looting. Viewed along the same line as n00bs , griefers also are thought of as an underclass of lesser-known undesirables." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griefer
13. Cannon, Rebecca., Meltdown', Journal of Media Practice Volume 7, No 1. 2006
14. First Person Shooter (FPS) a genre made popular by Doom and Quake in which the player's point-of-view is that of the camera. Maligned by opponents to videogames as 'murder-simultors'.
15. Quoted in Craig, Kathleen, Dead in Iraq: It's no Game, 06.07.2006,Wired News, http://www.wired.com/news/culture/games/1,71052-0.html
