Art and Gaming

According to an article on BBC.com this summer:

“Artwork for video games is being displayed in an exhibition that is being transported around the world.

The Into the Pixel gallery has been on display at the E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles and will move on to Europe, starting in Germany in August.”

The curator has a nice 4:00 minute-ish presentation which explicates and contextualizes a few of the pieces in the gallery.

In other news, I played Jim Andrews’ game Arteroids. It occurs to me that the game, at least according to the essay on it written by the designer/author, is post-critical in the Ulmer-ian sense.

Josh’s post considers what video games should be/do if they lose the “reality drive” which makes them increasingly approximate real life simulations.

In light of my post-critical revelation, perhaps *that’s* what they should do: be art(ful). Be critical of themselves. The authors of Video Games and Art nearly say this when they note,

If we are looking for art in videogames, then it is not in the surface gloss of videogames. It is found, instead, in the way in which people–whether they consciously define themselves as artists or not–use videogames as a medium. (11-12)

When done well (and there’s a lot of “art” out there on the Interweb which is simply remixing/mashing up stills of characters from classic games), video game art is a critique not only of the medium of games themselves, but also of particular genres within the larger media, such as FPS and “god games” like the Sims and Civilization.