about
Some still wonder whether videogames qualify as art.
GameScenes prefers to ask whether the invention of videogames hasn’t already transformed art altogether.
Launched in 2006 alongside a book and exhibition in Monza, Italy, GameScenes has been chronicling the uneasy, fertile, and occasionally absurd relationship between contemporary art and video games ever since. Over the past three decades, what once seemed like two parallel universes—art and games—have collided, blurred, and mutated into forms that defy easy categorization: video game art, game-based art, experimental game art (take your pick).
Artists have borrowed from game culture’s vernacular, its glitches and avatars, its mechanics and fictions, to produce works that are at once seductive and unsettling. At the same time, they have used the grammar of videogames to probe identity, gender, race, power, technology, and the endlessly porous line between reality and virtuality. Authorship, participation, spectatorship: all subject to play.
Institutions once allergic to joysticks now curate exhibitions of machinima, mods, and interactive environments. Museums, inevitably, have caught up, though not always gracefully. Yet this recognition has only amplified the discourse, giving artists a platform to test what counts as art when the operating system itself becomes the medium.
GameScenes is not just a website but a constellation. It extends to initiatives like the Milan Machinima Festival and VRAL, which highlight experimental uses of game engines and offer exclusive programming for patrons with a taste for machinima’s quirks and subversions.
Written and edited by Matteo Bittanti, with past contributions from Mathias Jansson, Carlo Ricafort, Domenico Quaranta, Paolo Ruffino, and Valentina Tanni, GameScenes remains a critical hub for anyone tracking how art and play contaminate each other.
Would you like to contribute? Drop us a line.
And yes, the rumors are true: we are (still) on Twitter, @gamescenes. Go figure.
This website is not produced or endorsed by Johan and Levi
History
Since its inception in 2006, GameScenes has steadily expanded its influence, finding a place within academic curricula in the United States and Italy, notably at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, and at IULM University in Milan.
At the California College of the Arts, under the direction of Maria Makela, GameScenes became an integral part of the Visual Studies program. The course offered students a framework for examining the intersections of games, art, and technology, encouraging them to critically analyse video games as cultural texts and artistic practices. Beyond interpretation, students were also given the opportunity to experiment with games as vehicles of artistic expression.
In Milan, GameScenes entered IULM University in 2016, where it became a core component of the MA Program in Game Design until 2021. The course contributed to the training of a generation of designers attentive not only to the technical dimensions of game-making but also to its aesthetic and cultural significance. Students engaged with the principles of design, the poetics of play, and the artistic potential of interactive media.
Between 2020 and 2025, the course has also been integrated into IULM’s MA Program in Television, Cinema, and New Media, under the title Videogiochi, tecnologia e arte (Video Games, Technology, and Art). This expanded version situates games within a broader media ecology, examining their convergence with television, cinema, and new media. It has also provided fertile ground for the emergence of a new generation of machinima practitioners.
The integration of GameScenes into these academic programs underscores the growing recognition of video games as both an art form and a cultural phenomenon. By offering courses that address their artistic, technological, and social dimensions, these institutions have created spaces for students to explore, critique, and create within one of the most dynamic fields of contemporary visual culture.