GAMESCENES

EVENT: VIDEO GAMES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN QUEER (MARCH 18 2019, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA)

Video Games Have Always Been Queer

Bonnie Ruberg, University of California Irvine

March 18 | 12:30 PM — 2:00 PM | BCNM Commons, 340 Moffitt Library, UC Berkeley, California, United States of America

While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. Video Games Have Always Been Queer argues that the medium of video games itself can—and should—be read queerly.

In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive narrative that games are only now becoming more diverse. Revealing what reading D. A. Miller can bring to the popular 2007 video game Portal, or what Eve Sedgwick offers Pong, Ruberg models the ways game worlds offer players the opportunity to explore queer experience, affect, and desire. As players attempt to ‘pass’ in Octodad or explore the pleasure of failure in Burnout: Revenge, Ruberg asserts that, even within a dominant gaming culture that has proved to be openly hostile to those perceived as different, queer people have always belonged in video games—because video games have, in fact, always been queer.

Bonnie Ruberg, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of digital games and interactive media in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Their research explores gender and sexuality in digital media and digital cultures. They are the author of Video Games Have Always Been Queer (NYU Press, 2019) and the co-editor of Queer Game Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), as well as the co-lead organizer and co-founder of the annual Queerness and Games Conference. They received their Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in conjunction with the Berkeley Center for New Media and served as a Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar in the Interactive Media and Games Division at the University of Southern California.

LINK: VIDEO GAMES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN QUEER

Art Game: Alistair Aitcheson's The Book Ritual (2018)

 

UPDATE (Feb 4, 2019): The finished version of The Book Ritual is now available. The new version also comes with instructions on how to build your own USB-connected shredder (although you can also play it with a normal shredder or just a bin!) The game was nominated for an award at PLAY18 in Hamburg last year, and this year it'll be a part of the Alt-Ctrl exhibition at GDC.

 

The Book Ritual is a long-term game project by Alistair Aitcheson, an artist and game designer. Development began in 2010 and focuses on the interplay between digital technologies and physical objects, in this case, books. The Book Ritual is played with a tangible, actual printed book, and during the game the player must deface it (OMG!) and tear pages out. The player writes about herself and perform what Aitcheson calls "creativity exercise" in its pages, but in order to play, the player must also  destroy pages. The Book Ritual is about 2 hours long.

 

It's a free download from Itch.io.

As Aitcheson explains, 

 

it currently says "beta" on it, and that's because I'm waiting for more feedback before I decide "this is the final version!" - once it's final, it will continue to be a free download

 

I love the Dada nature of this project, but I don't think I could ever deface a copy of BEE's American Psycho... Nonetheless, the designer's rationale for creating this game is fascinating. Here's an excerpt:

Indeed, to destroy books is taboo, and there’s a solid historical precedent for why. I’m certainly not trying to say that destroying literature is a good idea. What I am trying to do is tell a story about guilt and loss. If the player feels guilty in the process of destroying their book, if it feels like they're losing something with innate value, it means they are acting out the emotion I want them to explore. 

Alistair Aitchenson is a game developer and has developed games since 2001, starting up as a one-man studio in 2010. In 2010 he graduated with a first class Masters degree in Mathematics with Study Abroad from the University of Warwick. During his degree he spent one year studying at the elite Ecole Normale Supérieur in Lyon, France. As well as his own projects he works as a freelance designer-developer. He has worked on web game projects for the BBC, and regularly produces games for the education technology company Sparx Limited. Alistair frequently exhibits his gamesat exhibitions in the UK and abroad, and regularly gives conference talks about his experiences.

 

LINK: Alistair Aitchenson (all images and videos courtesy of the Artist)

 

Book: Virtual Cities: An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities (in progress)

Konstantinos Dimopoulos, a game urbanist, writer, and designer with a Ph.D in urban planning and geography with significant experience in game design (e.g. Seed MMO, The Sinking City), is collaborating with visual artist Maria Kallikaki to create a comprehensive encyclopedia of video game cities: Virtual Cities: An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities. This ambitious project will take the shape of a massive book published via Unbound. The project is currently accepting pre-orders/being crowdfunded here.

 

 

Virtual Cities: An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities is a richly illustrated atlas documenting the deep and exciting history of game cities via a combination of original maps, ink drawings, and insightful commentary and analysis. The book covers over 40 game cities across literary and gaming genres, including detailed entries on Half-Life 2’s City 17, Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos, Yakuza’s Kamurocho, Fallout’s New Vegas, Silent Hill, Ant Attack's Antescher, and Shadowrun's Hong Kong. Dimopoulos's goal is to produce a 200-page tome with over 40 original maps, and more than 100 drawings.

 

You can read an excerpt here.

 

LINK: Game Cities

Magazine: Heterotopias #4

The latest issue of Heterotopias (#4) focuses on the theme of landscape in virtual worlds, its contraction, simulation, and exploration.

Below are the highlights:

004’s cover piece is on the forests of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which in this issue are shown in all their glory in an original photo series. In an accompanying feature Lewis Gordon explores how the game’s depiction of real-world landscapes connects to Polish and European folklore, as well as a history of political struggle. A new interview with core members of the CD Projekt Red team completes our series on this exceptional game.

Elsewhere in the issue Miguel Penabella explores the influence of scenography, in particular the work of Adolphe Appia, on Cardboard Computer’s tale of debt and decay: Kentucky Route Zero. Meanwhile Sam Zucchi looks at the relationship between depictions of landscape and colonialism through the lens of the classic Oddworld game, Stranger’s Wrath.

Other features include a photo series exploring the virus-like patterns of No Man’s Sky‘s procedural landscapes, Rosa Carbo-Mascarell’s beautiful watercolor maps of Proteus as well as features on the long forgotten proto open-world of Lego Island and the ecohorror of Night in the Woods.

Also featured are Eron Rauch's haunting glitchscapes, part of his World of Warcraft landscape photography.

LINK: Heteropias #4

RELATED: GARETH DAMIAN MARTIN on the aesthetics of analogue game photography

Interview: Gareth Damian Martin: The Aesthetics of Analogue Game Photography

GameScenes is conducting a series of interviews with artists, critics, curators, and gallery owners operating in the field of Game Art, as part of an ongoing investigation of the social history of this artworld. Our goal is to document and examine both the origins and evolution of a phenomenon that changed the way game-based art is being created, experienced, and discussed today.

We are currently running Season 7, which began in 2017 with a conversation with Alex Hovet. 

This episode features a broad/deep conversation with Gareth Damian Martin, a British artist, game designer, scholar, and writer whose practice focuses on the aesthetics, phenomenology, and logics of contemporary video games. Trained in puppetry and theatre, Martin subsequently moved into graphic and video design, literature, and architecture. His writing can be found on some of the most interesting game publications, including - but not limited to - Kill Screen and Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Fascinated by the intersection of architecture and photography in simulated environments, in 2017 Martin launched Heterotopias, on online publication entirely devoted to photographic practices in games. His most recent project, The Continuous City (2018), is a book about game photography available from InBound Publishing. 

The following conversation between Matteo Bittanti and Gareth Damian Martin took place via email in March 2018. As usual, the text features embedded links. 

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GameScenes: What is your background? Can you please summarize your trajectory as a game designer, writer, and artist? 

 

Gareth Damian Martin: I have a very multi-disciplinary background, having originally trained in puppetry and theatre, before moving into graphic and video design, and then studying literature and working in games journalism and design. For the past three years I have been working on a practice-based PhD in experimental literature, specifically focusing on procedurally generated narrative and resolving the supposed conflict between conceptual and expressive forms of writing. Meanwhile I have been working as a games journalist, focusing specifically on the intersection of games with other cultural forms, and more specifically, game spaces and architecture. The Heterotopias project emerged out of this approach, and a need to make a space in which my work on games and architecture might be able to develop freely alongside the work of others. After starting the Heterotopias project I also was offered the change to work at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, lecturing and tutoring on the intersection of urbanism and games. in addition to this, this year I funded my first commercial game, In Other Waters, where the player takes the role of an AI guiding a xenobioloist as they dive an Alien ocean. 

 

Gareth Damian Martin, Outskirts (Dishonored), 2017, digital still.

 

GameScenes: Can you describe the genesis of your project, Heterotopias, and its latest iteration or evolution, The Continuous City?

 

Gareth Damian Martin: Heterotopias came from a desire to create a specific space in which I and other writers might be able to explore game spaces and architecture without operating within the limits of mainstream games journalism and criticism. Originally a column on the now defunct site Kill Screen, I expanded it into its own publication in February 2017. In the first year we published three zines, each focusing on long form analysis of game spaces supported by game photography, maps and diagrams. At the same time I have been editing and commissioning a series of online studies which focus tightly on a single game or space. Since the beginning game photography has been a big part of Heterotopias approach and identity, guided by a want to transform the screenshot into a critical tool. The Continuous City, our first book, expands on that idea significantly, consisting of over 200 photographs of urban spaces in games. Structured around a loose typology of urban space, The Continuous City is also unique because of the technique I use to capture the images: a 35mm analogue camera. This technique, which involves projecting the game via a DLP projector and then photographing the image using a black and white, high ISO film stock, is one I developed during the first set of Heterotopias zines, and lends the images it produces a surreal, unreal quality.

 

Gareth Damian Martin, Outskirts (Grand Theft Auto V), 2017, digital still.

 

GameScenes: In the last few years, game photography underwent a significant transformation: from a fringe activity, it has been endorsed by major hi-tech companies like nVidia, which are actively both facilitating it with powerful tools. This particular Silicon Valley company is not simply recognizing this practice but de facto legitimizing it. In a sense, this shift seems to mirror the evolution of machinima in the late Nineties, which moved from the periphery to the center of gaming culture, when corporations endorsed some machinima makers (Rooster Teeth Productions comes to mind), at least for a while. What's your take on this phenomenon? 

 

Gareth Damian Martin: While I am very muchin support of the increasing visibility of game photography, and the growing number of accessible tools that are being provided by games as well as hardware manufacturers like nVidia, I think in order to develop the form must step beyond the advertising and publicity focus that this context currently affords it. The support of game photography by major tech companies is a reflection of how useful they see players taking, uploading and sharing screenshots is to their advertising and publicity. The replication of "beautiful" images from high-budget games supports their claims to photo-realism and serves to elevate their position, not that of game photography. However, the tools that come with this commercial support of game photography are introducing the idea to many new practitioners, and I believe many will go on to make work that steps outside of "screenshot" territory.

 

Gareth Damian Martin, Pathways (Dishonored), 2017, digital still.

 

GameScenes: ...Meanwhile, the number of exhibitions focusing on game photography has increased significantly in the past few years, signalling that the initial resistance by the artworld ("...But is it art?") has been partially overcome. What do you make of the increasing attention by critics, curators, and scholars on the topic of game photography? Where do you see game photography heading?

 

Gareth Damian Martin: My use of game photography is very particular, and is more informed by conceptual photographers than it is by other game photographers. But I think precedents set by, for example, the brilliant work of  Harun Farocki's Parallel series have firmly cemented games as a viable subject for video art and photography. If I'm being honest, I don't really see game photography as divergent from photography in general - rephotographing artworks, using the camera as a conceptual or critical tool and photography as an form which is able to create images, not simply take them are all well developed aspects of art photography. Game photography engages with all of these, and doesn't exist within some privileged border. 

 

Gareth Damian Martin, Towers (Kayne & Lynch 2), 2017, digital still.

 

GameScenes: Let's talk a little bit about terminology and vocabulary  Does it make sense to use the term "photography" for a quintessentially post-photographic practice? Shouldn't it be simply called screenshooting?

 

Gareth Damian Martin: I think photography is a useful term as it connects the work to a heritage and history of conceptual, still-life and object photography that stretches all the way back to the beginning of the medium. Screenshotting connects the work to a history of commercial interest, product showcases and advertising, and I think only serves to limit how we might think of this work. In my case the term photography is essential - the use of an analogue camera is a core part of the image making process. 

 

Gareth Damian Martin, Nests (Yakuza 0), 2017, digital still.

 

GameScenes: By combining a traditional, pre-digital technique like 35mm cameras and video games you are simultaneously resuscitating a "dead medium" (Bruce Sterling) and remediating photography, that is, incorporating a medium into another (Bolter & Grusin). You're also updating an evergreen photographic genre - street photography - into virtual environments. How does the genre of analogue game photography fit into the ever expanding medium of game photography tout court? 

 

Gareth Damian Martin: As I've mentioned I don't personally frame my work within game photography, and am more interested in the reference points of art photographers like Hiroshi Sugimoto and his photographs of wax works and dioramas, Thomas Demand and his images of cardboard models that replicate press photography, and even Man Ray's famous photograph (Dust Breeding) of Duchamp's Large Glass. In this context I don't see analogue photography as a "dead medium" at all - Sugimoto uses large format cameras and roll film for example. In my influences from street photography too, most notably the work of Daido Moriyama and the incredible pinhole camera pieces of Takashi Homma from his book The Narcissistic City, analogue processes are part of an art practice which is very much contemporary. In terms of incorporating one medium into another, I would see it as incorporating games into photography as a subject, but again not as a privileged, unique subject, but instead one closely associated with the history of rephotography, and photography engagement with illusion and the virtual. To me games and photography share a particular quality - they are both images of spaces, rather than spaces in their own right, and so the way they process, and relate to spaces and architecture through virtuality and illusion seems to me to be a strong point of connection. 

 

Gareth Damian Martin, Sanctuaries (Dark Souls 3), 2017, digital still.

 

GameScenes: A remarkable number of game photographers strive for hyper-realism, trying to blur the already porous borders between realistic depictions of reality through photographic means and their video game counterparts, and, by doing so, they are merging representation with simulation (one example is Duncan Harris). At the same, since technical images are by definition third level abstractions (Flusser), one wonders how (or even if) digital photographs and game screenshots are substantially different: they are, after all, pure code, that is, software (Manovich). What's your take? I'm asking because you write that The Continuous City is "a travelogue of the digital made real", which seems to imply that, by simulating photographic representations, you're attributing ontological consistency to fluid, transient, immaterial practices such as gameplay. Conceptually, this reminds me of a project by Benoit Paillé, Crossroads of Realities, although aesthetically, you have chose a very different style... Am I completely off?

 

Gareth Damian Martin: I think what is key here here is that I am not in fact simulating photography as Benoit Paille does, but photographing the game as an object with an actual "true" photographic process. While I ultimately scan my negatives into my computer in order to print them and insert them into the book, each part of the process up to this point is a photographic process like any other analogue photographic process. For me this a key part of the "expansion" or "transformation" of the game I am staging. When I say "a travelogue of the digital made real", I am pointing to the contradictory way in which these images, by abstracting the original subject, grant it a strange veracity - just as a statue beside a static human, when photographed, gains the same limited life as the human within the resulting image. The "reality" of the analogue process grants the unreal spaces of the game a kind of passing connection to the real, and the two become inseparable - the real image and the unreal space. This is especially effective for those who do not recognise or have no experience of the original game space - their first response is often to approach the image as if it is an image of a real space, and then to slowly try to resolve this with the increasingly obvious falsity of the space that becomes more and more evident over time. Even those who have experienced the original game space lose their footing in reality sometimes, and I have had comments pointing out that my images "look just like" the spaces from the game - the viewer unable to resolve their own memories of the same space with the strange image in front of them, therefore separating them to two different planes of reality. 

 

Gareth Damian Martin, Sanctuaries (Dishonored), 2017, digital still.

 

GameScenes: ...Black and white is a marker of photographic artistry: by deliberately renouncing the vibrant colors of simulated worlds, you're explicitly invoking a photographic tradition with overt artistic ambitions. My question - which has no polemical intent - is this: why looking at the past to capture the essence, the spirit of a (relatively) new medium such as the videogame?

 

Gareth Damian Martin: To me the connection to the history of conceptual and object photography is the one I wish to evoke, I have no desire to evoke a nebulous "future" that might be suggested by the technological superiority of games. I would also maintain that black and white is no longer able to be considered a historical practice, as many photographers continue to use black and white photography in contemporary work, especially as it has the effective ability to distance the resulting images from their original referent. I also think one of the least helpful myths around games is that they are contingent on a linear technological progression - that more powerful computer produce better images, and that the aim of games aesthetic  is to reach a point of impossibly accurate image quality. This same myth is one shared by photography - that the "best" cameras are those which produce images at the highest fidelity. By photographing games using a camera built in the 1960s, using a film stock whose process has remained unchanged for decades, I am seeking to destabilise this logic - reality is subjectively judged by the viewer based on learnt and replicated signifiers not on an objective standard of photorealism. It might be more accurate to say I am aiming to distort or shift the spirit of games (if there is such a thing) rather than capture it. 

 

Gareth Damian Martin, Ruins (Dark Souls 3), 2017, digital still.

 

GameScenes: The Continuous City combines flaneur-like obsessions with photographic compulsion - as Susan Sontag wrote in the 1970s, taking photographs is a way to collect the world, to own it, and to miniaturize it. Do you believe that game photographers obsessively document their journeys in exotic lands in order to claim the spaces they visit? Is game photography just another post-colonial practice? Or should it be considered as a decontextualizing activity, that actively reframes the image, and thus its meaning and effect?

 

Gareth Damian Martin: I think both of these concepts - the image as ownership of digital space / the image as reframing of digital space - are actively true. Certainly my project is a kind of obsessive documentation, a pursuit of some quality that I feel is impossible to describe in any other way. However I think the multiplicity of game spaces makes it difficult to see game photography as a process of colonising virtual spaces - these are, after all, spaces designed to entrap, manipulate and engage the player. For that reason I think game photgoraphy leans more towards reframing, and even rebelling against the systems of engagement in games. What I find fascinating in games is the way in which they are starting to show resistance to their own structures internally - photo-modes and features like the "Discovery Tour" tourist-mode of Assassin's Creed Origins point towards a future of games where spaces are hollowed out within compulsive systems to actively subvert or undermine them. I see game photography as engaging with these processes. 

 

Gareth Damian Martin, Entrances (Mirror's Edge Catalyst), 2017, digital still.

 

GameScenes: Stephan Mallarmé famously wrote that "Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book". It appears that this wish applies to the virtual world as well: is the book, as a medium, a legitimizing strategy? Why did you choose static images to document virtual worlds instead of pursuing different multimedia formats, such as video essays or playthroughs?

 

Gareth Damian Martin: My intention is not pure documentation, and such a project would find itself crowded out by the huge volume of documentation of game spaces that already exists. To me the images are the work, they don't stand-in for the spaces they depict. This book is a work within the long tradition of artists photo books, and frames itself as such. I'm in no way adverse to video or multimedia projects, in fact I have many in mind for the future of the Heterotopias project, but this project in particular is exploring the relationship of game spaces to photography in particular, and its form follows that intention. 

 

Gareth Damian Martin, Pathways (Grand Theft Auto V), 2017, digital still.

 

GameScenes: The literary tradition is explicitly evoked in the very title of your book, which alludes to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Both projects are linked by the wish to catalogue and archive the imaginary, the fantastic, and the exotic. Is your ultimate goal to produce a 1:1 map of the digital ludic?  

 

Gareth Damian Martin: Not at all, in fact I think Invisible Cities suggests the opposite - it is a document that points to maps and descriptions as expressive not objective tools. Calvino isn't cataloguing all the imaginary cities of the world, he is instead describing one city, Venice, from a multitude of perspectives, ones that include what Venice is, what it was and what it might be. He combines all the fantasies and dreams, all the nightmares, with the ideologies, arguments and characters of the city in order to try to describe something real through fiction. This too is my intention - after all the book is called The Continuous City - it points to a singular urban body, united in its disunity. It is a book of fictions too, but ones that equally point to some real place we might once have visited. 

 

LINK: Gareth Damian Martin

 

LINK: Heterotopias

 

LINK: The Continuous City

 

ARCHIVE: GAMESCENES Interviews - contemporary practitioners 

Book: Giochi video. Performance, spettacolo, streaming

I'm delighted to announce the release of Giochi video. Performance, spettacolo, streaming, a new collection of essays on the rise of game videos edited by Enrico Gandolfi and I. Released in Italy, the book features contributions on machinima, videoart, live streaming, speedrunning, let's play videos and much more. It's the follow up to Machinima. Dal videogioco alla video arte and, once again, features a jacket design by Italian illustrator Marco Goran Romano.

Below is the synopsis in Italian:

Oggi, il game video è importante tanto quanto il video game.

Termine ombrello che indica le pratiche di produzione, distribuzione e consumo di audiovisivi inerenti al videogioco – dai live stream di Twitch alla videoarte del machinima, dai walkthrough ai Let’s Play, dagli speedrun ai tutorial – il game video oggi rappresenta un importante fenomeno culturale, artistico ed economico. Giochi video. Performance, spettacolo, streaming propone, per la prima volta, una mappatura di un territorio dai confini fluidi grazie ai contributi di studiosi internazionali. Applicando un approccio innovativo alle metodologie di ricerca e di analisi, gli autori esaminano numerosi nodi teorici, con una forte attenzione all’evoluzione del medium. Tra i temi portanti spiccano le trasformazioni delle modalità spettatoriali, le influenze crossmediali e le contaminazioni estetiche, a conferma che oggi il videogioco si configura innanzitutto in chiave performativa e spettacolare. Il libro si rivolge agli appassionati di nuovi media e a quelli di cinema, televisione e arte contemporanea. L’orientamento pluridisciplinare e il prisma dei punti di osservazione applicati ai fenomeni considerati offrono spazi di riflessione originali all’interno dei game studies contemporanei.

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Titolo: Giochi video. Performance, spettacolo, streaming 

Curatori: Matteo Bittanti e Enrico Gandolfi

Editore: Mimesis

Collana: Eterotopie

Data di pubblicazione: 15 febbraio 2018

Lingua: Italiano

Pagine: 220, con illustrazioni in bianco e nero

ISBN-10: 8857540952

ISBN-13: 978-88-5754-0955

Prezzo: 18 euro

LINK: Giochi video 

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Call for Papers: Video Game Art Reader (Deadline: February 28th, 2018)

VGA Reader Call for Papers—Issue 2: SURVIVAL STRATEGY

"IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS." - Old Man, The Legend of Zelda

In an era of ecological, social, and political crisis, when contemporary media inundates us daily with apocalyptic scenarios, video games can act as a valuable means of psychological escape. However, video games— as unique, participatory works of art— can also model both individual and collaborative means of survival through the experience of play. Video games offer opportunities to navigate both historical and fictional conflicts, traverse landscapes devastated by climate change or nuclear holocaust, and manage the limited resources of individuals, or even whole civilizations, on earth and beyond. They offer players a dizzying array of dystopian scenarios in which to build and invent, cooperate to achieve shared goals, or sometimes merely learn how to survive another day. Video games focus attention, hone visuospatial skills, and shape cognitive control and physical reflexes. How do video games, through these unique methods, participate in the larger context of radical, activist artworks that challenge destructive norms and structures of power? How can we harness the skills we develop through play— or “game the system”— to imagine our best possible future(s) in trying times?

The VGA Reader (VGAR) is accepting submissions that critically analyze video game art as a means of survival. Though “survival strategy” exists as a defined gaming genre, all video games can be considered as methods of human conditioning, coping, and creating.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

● How video game artworks development, design, and play are uniquely situated to explore personal, social, or ecological crises.
● How video games participate in larger activist and radical art communities/collectives.
● How video game art prototypes collaborative approaches to survival.
● How video games explore the long-term implications of human activity in relation to ecological crisis.
● How the history of games engages with dystopias and utopias themes of the past and present.
● How video games provide methods of constructive and collaborative play.
● How we might develop a critical discourse of “casual” games through psychological and physiological conditioning.
● How might we investigate the relationship between survivalist subcultures and resource management games.
● How video games can work as systems for mediating or mollifying conflict.
● How the economies and cultures of world simulators and Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) can be viewed as models of real-world growth or collapse.
● How video games create, reflect, or critique current apocalyptic real world tragedies, crises, and political upheaval, as well as the media narratives that surround them.

Deadline for Submissions is February 28th, 2018

All submissions and questions should be sent to: tfunk (at) vgagallery (dot) org.

Submission Guidelines:
The VGA Reader is a scholarly electronic and print journal. It is blind peer-reviewed, invitational, and open to submissions in the form of theoretical papers, interviews, practitioner statements, and reviews on video games and video game-related events. The journal is published annually as a singular summer edition. The electronic and print versions differ in format but are similar in content.

There are four types of articles the VGA Reader publishes. Each have a distinct focus and designated word count:

1) Essays - 2,500 to 5,000 words
The VGA Reader welcomes essays pertaining to any investigation of video games, be they historical, theoretical, instructional (dealing with the hardware or software involved in creating games), or experimental in nature (manifestos, essays proposing new kinds of games, equipment, or approach to gaming in general, etc.). We welcome writers of all kinds, be they practitioners (game designers, writers, etc.), academics, or enthusiastic gamers with novel ideas and information to share. Manuscripts must be under the 5,000-word count limit (including references and figure captions) before it will be considered for review. Because of the length of these essays, they must be accompanied by a 100-word abstract.

2) Practitioner (Artist/Designer/Writer) Statements - fewer than 2,000 words
The VGA Reader welcomes practitioner statements, constituting articles detailing the video game-related work of the author, be it a video game, video game-themed artwork/performance, multimedia work/event, etc. These essays can take the form of longer artist statements about conceptual and narrative-driven concerns, but we also encourage details regarding issues of game play, troubleshooting during production, user testing, and anecdotes about the creative production process.

3) Reviews of video game-related events (gallery shows, multimedia events, etc.) - fewer than 2,000 words
The VGA Reader welcomes reviews, selected by the VGA Reader’s Editor and Editorial staff. This section of the journal offers opportunities for authors to report on a variety of video game-related events in brief, exploratory essays detailing the experience. These essays must be accompanied by media (images, video) of the event as illustration, provided by the author.

4) The VGA Reader will also publish selected interviews; however, these submissions will be by invitation only.

FORMATTING FOR SUBMISSION:
All submissions must be formatted as follows:
-In Microsoft Word .doc or .docx
-Font: Times New Roman
-Size: 12
-Styles: Normal
-Alignment and Spacing: Horizontal, Left aligned, Single space
-Endnotes: Do not use automatic formatting. Place any endnotes after the main text of your essay but before your Reference/Bibliography list. Place the endnote number reference in parentheses in the left margin, using the same number as in the text of the paper. All references/citations are written in the format of the Chicago Manual of Style. For more information, see: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html.
-Media (images, video, and/or sound files) should be submitted as attachments via email. DO NOT embed images onto your Word doc. After acceptance, the editor will send copyright permissions documents.

Submissions should contain the following information, in this particular order:
1. Essay title
2. Author’s name
3. Author’s affiliation/academic position/affiliation/ etc.: (e.g.: Collective/company name, independent designer/artist, researcher / Assistant Professor / Professor)
4. The body of the essay
5. References (in Chicago Manual of Style format)
6. Author’s Bio – 50-word count. Email and/or www. can be included at the end of the bio.

SUBMISSION FOR ACCESSIBILITY:
Keeping articles accessible to a large, but interested audience is a primary goal of the VGA Reader. While general “good-writing” practices demand attention in your use of language, style, and organization, writing video game scholarship and practitioner statements should also avoid too-specific jargon, acronyms, and other specialized language, unless defined specifically in the article. Include subheadings and bullet points along with section introductions when necessary for organization purposes.

Paying attention to these tenets will ensure a fair critique of the work, and will greatly improve your chances of publication.

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Published through the Video Game Art Gallery, the Video Game Art Reader is a peer-reviewed journal for video game audiences and video game practitioners interested in the history, theory, and criticism of video games, explored through the lens of art history and visual culture. Its primary aim is to facilitate exploration and conversation of video game art, documenting and disseminating discourse about the far-reaching influence of video games on history, society, and culture.

LINK: Video Game Art Reader

RESOURCE: When Art Is Put Into Play (Dissertation)

 

Artist and researcher at Gothenburg University Arne Kjell Vikhagen has just completed his dissertation about game art.

 

Title: When Art Is Put Into Play: A Practice-based Research Project on Game Art Language.

 

English Keywords: Game Art, Computer Games, Video Games and Art, Play, Artistic Research, New Media Art 

 

ISBN: 978-91-982421-5-7 (printed version) ISBN: 978-91-982421-6-4 (digital version) 

 

Full-text: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/53864 

 

Description: When Art Is Put Into Play: A Practice-based Research Project on Game Art is a practice-based research project that aims to contribute to the understanding of the relation between play and art from the specific perspective of computer-based Game Art. This is done firstly through the production of nine works of art that through their means of production all relate to Game Art as it has come to be known in the last twenty years or so. Secondly, the relation between games, play and art is discussed from a Game Art perspective. This project as a whole aims to map and exemplify cases where Game Art successfully inherits rule-systems, aesthetics, spatial and temporal aspects from computer games. This work has in turn resulted in a provisional response to the question of the possibility for Game Art to successfully create a state of play, whilst still maintain agency as a work of art. The claim is that the friction between art and play makes it doubtful that art can maintain its agency as art through play. This claim is made as a result of the artistic process leading up to the works of art that were made as a part of the thesis. It has been strengthened through the study of the concept of play and how it relates to artistic practice.

 

LINK: Arne Kjell Vikhagen(via Mathias Jansson)

 

Book: Machinima, dal videogioco alla videoarte

 

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I'm happy to announce the release of my new book, Machinima, dal videogioco alla videoarte [Machinima. From video game to video art]. Published by Mimesis Edizioni in the Heterotopie series, the book investigates the relationship between art and video games from a variety of perspectives. Featuring eight contributions from international scholars, Machinima. From video game to video art introduces new ways of looking at game-based video art.

The book is available on Amazon. 

Here's more information [in Italian]

Book: Domenico Quaranta's How to Play Eddo Stern (2017)

Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age has just released How To Play Eddo Stern, a critical monograph on the avantgarde artist and game designer Eddo Stern written by critic, curator, and writer Domenico Quaranta and co-produced with Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel.

The digital version can be downloaded here.

The print version will be available soon through Link Center for the Arts + Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel.

Below is the full synopsis:

Artist and game designer Eddo Stern explores the uneasy and otherwise unconscious connections between physical existence and electronic simulation, surrounding the subject matters of violence, memory and identification. A game manual, a catalogue, a making of and an archive, "How to Play Eddo Stern" revolves around a selected body of works developed with di(erent media that can be understood as “games”. Featuring an essay by Matteo Bittanti entitled "Radar, Envisioneer, Artist. Two or Three Things I Know about Eddo Stern", the book is a deep dive into the massive amount of small bits and pieces that make up the folders of Stern’s game projects: 3D models, texture maps and atlases, backdrops, animation frame sequences, code snippets, circuit diagrams, as well as emails, design documents, meeting notes, and installation diagrams. Co-produced with Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel.

LINK: How to Play Eddo Stern