As an art game playing off our constant need for reward, Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise propels you into surreal scenarios of strutting through a landscape of explosions unharmed, collecting endless coins, and jumping inhumanly high into a digital infinity.
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BRIGHTON, UK — While laid up in Freud’s final consulting room, artist David Blandy was moved to recall a childhood trauma: “I grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side.” A hypnotherapist encouraged him to continue: “Yo, dwelling in the past, flashbacks when I was young. Who ever thought that I would have a baby girl and three sons?” Astute observers will recognise those experiences as rap lyrics, so why was a floppy-haired English artist channelling Raekwon and Ghostface Killah? And, although beside the point, just what would the grandfather of psychoanalysis have made of life on the mean streets of Staten Island?
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There’s only so much the brain can absorb in a museum, and for the 2012 Brains: The Mind as Matter exhibition at Wellcome Collection in London, the museum created an online game to keep their visitors’ brains thinking about the anatomy of their own skulls. Called AXON, it’s a surprisingly fast-pace neuron-creation game, mixed in with visually interesting science information. It’s just one of the many games that Wellcome Collection has created, and recently they addressed why exactly they are so interested in involving gaming in their programming.
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“We are not supposed to know what happens in the future,” states the first character you encounter in Year Walk, an iOS game released last month that pushes the boundaries of what experiences can be created through mobile gaming. More than just a series of puzzles or point-and-click game, Year Walk merges myths of Swedish folklore, setting you on a “year walk,” which is a tradition of going out on one’s own at midnight at the end of the year to glimpse into the future. The game itself is beautiful, appearing like layered paper art in washed out tones, but it’s the experience of unsettling, escalating horror that involves sound, confusion, and surreal moments that builds it all into something that’s different from other games out there.
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“Art Game” is a relatively recent coinage that can refer to a very artistic video game — Flower, for example. But it’s also the title of indie developer Pippin Barr’s latest creation, which takes its name extremely literally. Barr has turned the art world into a video game.
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World of Warcraft (WoW) has a massive following: in 2011, some 10 million users participated in the online role-playing game. And according to a New York Times article from last year, women comprise an increasing numbers of those players and of online gamers in general: they are, apparently, one the industry’s fastest growing demographics.
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Published on The Verge yesterday is a long feature article on the history of the American arcade, which kicks things off with this line: “The defining feature of a ‘real’ arcade, however, is that there aren’t really any left.” Photographer K. Shamlian would beg to differ. His images of an aging Soviet Union arcade in Gyumri, Armenia present an archetypal arcade frozen in time, unchanged for the past 30 years of tumultuous history.
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You may have thought (hoped?) book/media burning was a thing of the past, but this Saturday, a town some 30 miles from Newtown, Connecticut, the site of a horrific elementary-school shooting last month, will hold a violent video games drive. Organizers will collect violent video games, throw them in a dumpster, and then destroy them, probably by incineration.
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We hate to discuss art trends because it makes art sound like fashion, but, alas, they’re real and they happen. Remember that whole “prop paintings up on objects” trend last year, well, this year I\we spotted a few things we wanted to point out as the year comes to a close.
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LOS ANGELES — An 11,000 square foot warehouse in the heart of LA’s Arts District, large-scale exhibitions, exciting speakers, and interactive workshops. Residencies for some of the world’s most talented game designers. And a research lab designed to support game researchers around the world. This is the vision of Daniel Rehn, a longtime game researcher and maker, and Adam Robezzoli, a gamer and events producer.
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