Art game
[3] Art games are interactive[4] (usually competitive against the computer, self, or other players)[5] and the result of artistic intent by the party offering the piece for consideration.
Holmes defined the art game as "an interactive work, usually humorous, by a visual artist that does one or more of the following: challenges cultural stereotypes, offers meaningful social or historical critique, or tells a story in a novel manner."
The paper stated that an art game must contain at least two of the following: "[1] a defined way to win or experience success in a mental challenge, [2] passage through a series of levels (that may or may not be hierarchical), [3] a central character or icon that represents the player.
Rather than describing the game on a surface level, descriptions focus on the artistic intent, as well as the execution and implementation of the gameplay.
For instance, Bethesda's 2008 release Fallout 3 is considered to be a role-playing game with first-person shooter elements, but it could also be considered to have elements consistent with art games[10]—it implements moral player choices for the sole purpose of provoking emotion or thought in the player.
[6] ACM SIGGRAPH opened an online exhibit "The Aesthetics of Gameplay" in March 2014, featuring 45 independently developed games selected via a nomination process, where the mechanics of gameplay are, in part, tied to the visuals and audio of the game.
"[7] This same comparison has been used by Jenova Chen in an interview discussing art games and the prominence of non-games to the artistic gamer community.
Graham and Elizabeth Coulter-Smith of Southampton Solent University and The University of Northampton respectively, define serious play as "a mode of communication that is not instrumental and not overbearingly focused on the linguistic model,"[16] a communicative medium that involves the concrete action of the participants rather than abstracts such as language.
[5] An example of such a definition is offered by Professor John Sharp: "Artgames are games in the formal sense of maintaining the experiential and formal characteristics of videogames—rules, game mechanics, goals, etc.—as an expressive form in the same way other artists might use painting, film or literature.
[18] Fluxus scholar Celia Pearce describes the art mod or "patch" as an "interventional strategy,"[19] referencing the Dadaist concept.
She argues that the art mod is an example of this pseudo-vandalism involving subversion and reflection within the cultural context of video games.
[6] In attempting to determine the earliest origins of the genre, however, art theorists including Tiffany Holmes and Greg Costikyan have identified its earliest roots in Dada and the collaborative drawing games of the Surrealist artists of the 1920s.
[6] Others have drawn still broader connections to literary games invented by the author for the reader in 19th and 20th century literature.
's "RELOAD" (1999),[12] the UCI Beall Centre's "Shift-Ctrl" (2000),[6] and several others in 2001 were among the first wave of video game exhibitions that popularized the concept.
[28] This expanded to exhibitions heavily featuring or exclusive to art game content in the early 2000s with shows like MASS MoCA's "GameShow" (2001)[12] San Francisco MOMA's "010101: Art in Technological Times" (2001), the Whitney Museum's "Bitstreams" (2001), and the New York Museum of the Moving Image's "
[29] and similar hybrid performance-art/art-games including Painstation (2001), Go Fish (2001), and Vagamundo (2002) came in the early years of the modern period of art game production.
[31] Early examples of this kind of game include Thompson and Craighead's Trigger Happy (1998), Esc to Begin's Font Asteroids (1999), and Natalie Bookchin's The Intruder (1999).
This in turn led to recognition of the game as a vehicle for ideas instead of simply an entertaining diversion.
[4] Further refinements to the definition were made by theorist Rebecca Cannon in her late 2003 paper, "Introduction to Artistic Computer Game Modification.
These considerations are generally regarded as premature, as the concept of "prestige" hasn't yet taken hold for publishers as it has for developers in the nascent industry.
This kind of reaction has in turn caused some game developers to reject the use of the term to describe their games [citation needed], instead using terms like "not-game", "un-game", or simply refusing to accept any categorical label for their work.
