GAMESCENES

BOOK: LEONARDO MAGRELLI'S WEST OF NOWHERE (2021)

In 1987, Italian photographer Fabio Ponzio embarked on a photographic odyssey across Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. He began his journey in Istanbul, Turkey and later made his way through Romania, Hungary, and other countries, equipped with a Leica, three Nikons and 100 rolls of film, as the Soviet Block started to crumble, first slowly then suddenly. His travelogue was eventually published in a book titled East of Nowhere. 

In 2020, Italian photographer Leonardo Magrelli collected a series of images of Grand Theft Auto V's Los Santos from the web. He found these images on Instagram, Flickr, blogs and so on and then edited, cropped and turned them to black and white. In April 2021, these images - the outcome of another kind of travelogue, one that didn't require any physical movement - were published in a book titled West of Here: LA Landscapes and Grand Theft Auto. Interestingly, Magrelli's blatant and ironic act of appropriation and recontextualization was criticized by several game photographers that found their images reproduced in a book without their consent or even knowledge. And yet, all in-game photography is, itself, an act of appropriation and recontextualization as photographers do not own the rights of the digital spaces they are reproducing. In short, the game photographers got pwned by Magrelli, the Richard Prince of virtual photography. 

Interestingly, the official book page features the following disclaimer, casting the project as "fandom":

This book represents a tribute to the well-known Grand Theft Auto V video game, published by Rockstar Games, the legitimate owner of all rights. As a fan artwork, all the profits deriving from the sale are exclusively intended to cover the production costs of the limited run edition.

West of Here: LA Landscapes and Grand Theft Auto is now available from Yoffy Press featuring essays by Britt Salvesen and Mirjam Kooiman.

Born in Rome in 1989, Leonardo Magrelli holds a BA in Design and Architecture from “La Sapienza” university in Rome. In 2010, he began collaborating with Rome’s International Photography Festival and with the photography publishing house, Punctum Press. In 2014, he began primarily focusing on his own personal work. His works have been published in several printed and online photography magazines, and they have been displayed in collective exhibitions and festivals. In 2017, he became part of the collective, Vaste Programme, together with Giulia Vigna and Alessandro Tini.

LINK: Leonardo Magrelli

BOOK: EDDIE LOHMEYER'S UNSTABLE AESTHETICS GAME ENGINES AND THE STRANGENESS OF MODDING (2021)

Eddie Lohmeyer
Unstable Aesthetics Game Engines and the Strangeness of Modding
Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

Description:

Throughout the 1990s, artists experimented with game engine technologies to disrupt our habitual relationships to video games. They hacked, glitched, and dismantled popular first-person shooters such as Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) to engage players in new kinds of embodied activity. In Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Art Modding, Eddie Lohmeyer investigates historical episodes of art modding practices-the alteration of a game system's existing code or hardware to generate abstract spaces-situated around a recent archaeology of the game engine: software for rendering two and three-dimensional gameworlds.

The contemporary artists highlighted throughout this book-Cory Arcangel, JODI, Julian Oliver, Krista Hoefle, and Brent Watanabe, among others –- were attracted to the architectures of engines because they allowed them to explore vital relationships among abstraction, technology, and the body. Artists employed a range of modding techniques-hacking the ROM chips on Nintendo cartridges to produce experimental video, deconstructing source code to generate psychedelic glitch patterns, and collaging together surreal gameworlds-to intentionally dissect the engine's operations and unveil illusions of movement within algorithmic spaces. Through key moments in game engine history, Lohmeyer formulates a rich phenomenology of video games by focusing on the liminal spaces of interaction among system and body, or rather the strangeness of art modding.

A must read!

LINK: Unstable Aesthetics

LINK: Eddie Lohmeyer

BOOK: ERON RAUCH'S SUCH IS THE POWER OF THE EMPTY LOT (2020)

Artist and curator Eron Rauch's latest project is Such is the Power of the Empty lot, a companion volume to the recently released Heterotopias 7, a wonderful publication on architecture and video games by Gareth Damian Martin. 

As Rauch write, "The book uses a wide mixture of real and virtual photographic methods (including multiple types of video game screenshots) to link the fictional versions of Tokyo, real estate bubbles' effects on urban landscapes, the weirdness of video game historical recreations, and photography's nebulous role in the age of screens." Rauch contemplating a limited physical run of the 100+ page book. Text is by Justin Reeve.

Some highlights:

Eron Rauch is an artist, writer, and curator based in Los Angeles whose projects bridge the shadowy hinterlands between fine art, fandom, digital imaging, landscape history, and video games. Among his game-photography work is Glitchscapes and A Land to Die In. He received his MFA in Photography and Media at the California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches an inter-media photography course. His projects often repurpose platforms and spaces outside of traditional fine arts venues to bring disparate audiences into new conversations. His writing has been featured in eight languages and his artwork has been shown in the United States, France, and Japan. Eron is a collaborating curator for the contemporary photography section of William's College Art Museum's upcoming Repro Japan exhibit, and has worked with Glitch City in curating at IndieCade West’s 2019 Night Games.

LINK: Eron Rauch

EVENTS: NOW PLAY THIS: A FESTIVAL OF EXPERIMENTAL GAME DESIGN (2020, LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM)

The 2020 edition of NOW PLAY THIS: A festival of experimental game design at Somerset House in London curated by Marie Foulston features all kinds of artworks looking at games that relate to a theme of ‘Breaking Point’. “Games are the aesthetic forms of systems, and we were looking at works that break or subvert them in interesting and creative ways.” The IRL festival could not go ahead because of the pandemic and it has been postponed. The amazing lineup features, among others, Paolo Pedercini, A.M Darke, IP Yuk-Yiu, Ian MacLarty, Studio Oleomingus, Alistair Aitcheson, Danielle Udogaranya, Patrick LeMieux, Stephanie Bouk, and Matteo Bittanti whose How to get rid of homeless is featured in the selection.

LINK: NOW PLAY THIS 

CFP: WELL PLAYED JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUE CFP: PLAYABLE THEATRE (MAY 31 2020)

Well Played Journal Special Issue Cfp: Playable Theatre 

Edited by Celia Pearce & Nick Fortugno

The rising popularity of immersive theatre works such as Third Rail’s Then She Fell and Punch Drunk’s Sleep No More, has given rise to new hybrid forms of live entertainment that combine aspects of games and theatre. These “playable theatre” works draw extensively from digital games, Big Games, tabletop and live action roleplaying (LARPs) combined with theatrical conventions and methods to create fully immersive, participatory live theatrical events in which the audience plays a substantive role in the experience. We use the term “playable theatre” to distinguish works that engage meaningful audience agency from more passive forms of “promenade” theatre where the audience’s role is strictly navigational. Works of this type include a wide range of genres, scales and contexts, from highly theatrical “Nordic larping” traditions, to theme park experiences, to “puzzle plays” that integrate aspects of escape rooms and performance, to site-specific and pervasive/progressive live events. They can also draw from a variety of theatrical methods such as improv, process drama, and devised theatre. The rise of these works has been accompanied by a rediscovery of Pine & Gilmour’s concept of the “Experience Economy,” spurred by scientific research that people who spend money on experiences are happier than those who spend it on goods. The aim of this special issue is to explore critical and practical aspects of this emerging form and develop a shared vocabulary across disciplines to advance both scholarship and innovation in this emerging art form. 

For this special issue we invite experiential play-throughs, theoretical papers, critical analyses, and post-mortems by practitioners, across domains from around the world, that explore the many facets of live, interactive experiences. As an interdisciplinary issue, we welcome researchers and creators from theatre, digital and analog game studies, performance studies and related disciplines.

ETC Press is accepting submissions for this special issue of the Well Played journal.

All submissions are 31 May 2020

All submissions and questions should be sent to:

well-played (at) lists (dot) andrew (dot) cmu (dot) edu

The Well Played Journal is a forum for in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing a game. It is a reviewed journal open to submissions that will be released on a regular basis.

 

Contributors are encouraged to analyze sequences in a game in detail in order to illustrate and interpret how the various components of a game can come together to create a fulfilling playing experience unique to this medium. Through contributors, the journal will provide a variety of perspectives on the value of games.

 

The goal of the journal is to continue developing and defining a literacy of games as well as a sense of their value as an experience. Video games are a complex medium that merits careful interpretation and insightful analysis. By inviting contributors to look closely at video games and the experience of playing them, we hope to expand the discussion, and show how games are well played in a variety of ways.

 

The ETC Press is an academic and open-source publishing imprint that distributes its work in print, electronic and digital form. Inviting readers to contribute to and create versions of each publication, ETC Press fosters a community of collaborative authorship and dialogue across media. ETC Press represents an experiment and an evolution in publishing, bridging virtual and physical media to redefine the future of publication.

 

LINK: Well Played Journal

ART GAME: AND-OR'S PLEASE DONT TOUCH ME! (2019)

Please, Don't Touch Me! is a new artgame by Swiss collective AND-OR. The project begin in 2012 but was never exhibited or released. It can be "played" here  or freely downloaded for mac/win. According to the developer, it is about an artificial intelligence on the screen awaiting our input and attention. Below is the official description:

"Please, Don't Touch Me!" makes the dilemma of bullying in social media and in video games immediately perceptible. The user harasses the avatar with every touch (of his cursor) and triggers emotional restlessness that cannot be avoided. Like the analog world, the digital world ultimately is about control. At some point, the annoyed AI has enough and commits suicide - and thus becomes a submissive game ball. A fun slave and new avatar is born.

As René Bauer writes, "The meta question is: Where the npcs and avatars come from, what is the relation between real ai and avatars/npcs - our funslaves. and at the end: this is only a debate about yourself in society - our lives embedded  in rules and game mechanics."

Speaking of which, Beat Suter, Mela Kocher, and René Bauer have just released a game studies book titled Games and Rules. Game Mechanics for the Magic Circle. It's an open access publication so you can get the full pdf by clicking here. 

AND-OR is an artgroup specializing in media art and gameArt. The group consists of René Bauer, Beat Suter and Mirjam Weder. The group has been operating since 2001 and its HQ is Zurich, Switzerland.

LINK: AND-OR

BOOK: TRAVELOGUE

TRAVELOGUE

by Matteo Bittanti
Release date: May 15 2019
Features: Softcover, 148 pages, color illustrations
Format: 6×9 in, 15×23 cm
Language: English and Italian
ISBN: 9780368668197
Price: $22.99

I'm very happy to announce that my latest book, TRAVELOGUE, is now available from Concrete Press in bilingual edition (English/Italian).

TRAVELOGUE is a survey of audiovisual artworks made with or inspired by video games. Using machinima and interactive installations, fifteen artists examine the virtual automobile as medium, message, technological commodity, status symbol, interface, and prosthetics. Created through a process of appropriation and remix, these works lie at the intersection of fiction and documentation, performance and simulation, video art and experimental cinema.

This book is an extended catalogue of the exhibition TRAVELOGUE that I curated between September 7- 11 2016, in Mantua, Italy as part of Festivaletteratura 2016, featuring artworks by Max Almy and Teri Yarbrow, Hugo Arcier, Dave Ball, William Beaudine, Bob-Bicknell Knight, COLL.EO, Clint Enns, Matthew Hillock, JODI, Kristin Lucas, Victor Morales, Leonardo Sang, Palle Torsson. Available in bilingual edition (English and Italian) TRAVELOGUE is the follow-up to MACHINIMA. 32 conversazioni sull'arte del videogioco, which was released in 2017.

You can purchase a copy of TRAVELOGUE on Blurb orAmazon US It will soon be available on Amazon Italy.

TRAVELOGUE è una rassegna di opere audiovisive – machinima ed installazioni – realizzate per mezzo dei videogiochi. Quindici artisti internazionali esplorano l’automobile virtuale, ivi intesa come mezzo e messaggio, tecnologia e status symbol, interfaccia e protesi. Frutto di appropriazione e remix, queste opere si collocano all’intersezione tra narrazione e documentazione, performance e simulazione, videoarte e cinema sperimentale. Questo libro è il catalogo ampliato della mostra TRAVELOGUE curata da Matteo Bittanti nel settembre 2016) a Mantova, nell’ambito di Festivaletteratura 2016, con opere di Max Almy e Teri Yarbrow, Hugo Arcier, Dave Ball, William Beaudine, Bob-Bicknell Knight, COLL.EO, Clint Enns, Matthew Hillock, JODI, Kristin Lucas, Victor Morales, Leonardo Sang, Palle Torsson.

LINK: TRAVELOGUE

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