The Long-Awaited. I’ve been digging now, researched and resurfaced, and I got the goods. Do try out Final Fantasy VI The Opera [cliquE] as a soundtrack for what follows.
Video Games fascinate me from a thousand perspectives, and I intend this memo to encapsulate just a few of the viewpoints and theories with which they can be approached. In Neil Stevenson’s The Diamond Age he presents his vision of a cross-modal book-game that acts at the ultimate educational nurturer for the book’s protagonist, who goes on to apply the critical thinking she learned ostensibly from this “game” to lead and save-the-world. The precept of the Educational Game as a tool with political relevancy by itself is titillating as is the question of powermongering, control, and achievement that gamers produce/have produced onto them in the action of gaming, along with considerations of the game as a narcotic conduit. Some off-center psychoanalyst somewhere [?] wrote once that video games are capable of fulfilling all sexual, physical, and emotional needs – can they be producers of love? Games are frequently attacked as “Wastes of Time,” while thousands spend equal care on Final Fantasy Fan-Art (Fan-Art!!!!) as I do carefully crafting miniature literary dioramas [1]. I am interested in considering video games also from a cultural studies perspective, as a heterogeneous border-space, where Japan meets Europe meets Korea Meets USA millions of times every day – also examining national internet insulation – in a Culture of Gaming, where “Nerd” and “Geek” diplomats negotiate and are implicated in wider polemics. What can be lifted and cross-disciplined from these? Making sequels, updated artworks in conversation with the “original versions”- cross-modal incarnations – creation in layers, with avatars, sprites, emulation systems – considering the automatic pornography of Games… What fertilizer can video games lend to more removed art modalities, what models of viewing, theorizing, knowing, seeing? To some extent I want to consider this post as a syllabus for a horizontally dynamic Web-University course – and as always I welcome collaboration.
Play; And we are always/are we always At Play in art. Much of contemporary Art Gaming evolved from basic aesthetic hacks to make Lara Croft show her all [x], or produce infinite gold for a tribe of Orks, and to a certain extent I think that the mass of Art gaming remains informed by a transgressive rebelish history that culminated in a new Renaissance with the Hero6 project [2]. But where is the divide? We can consider a well-executed the Quest for Glory series or Half-Life [3] Performance Art Gaming – it can be an enormous, multi-faceted performance of Gaming-Acculturation. What about the commercial front? Representations of Imagination in gaming advertising push envelopes like none other – from Tetris as a Tsarist Propagana Document to the first commercials for Mario Brothers, packaging and box-art is nothing to be overlooked or under-indulged as a generative space for imaginary realisms and theoretical reinterpretations [4].
Capitalism and Video Games, however, has a more nefarious face. In 2008, an economist crunched some numbers and realized that after players had begun to sell in-game items on ebay and a dollar exchange rate developed with Norrath, the online fantasy RPG Everquest ranked 77th in world economies, on a par with Angola. Second-Life and other games have been generating Virtual Entrepreneurs, one of whom bought an asteroid for $1m and had broken even on it in eight months. [5] A side effect of this has been the creation of sweat-shop style factories in Mexico and China where workers are paid minuscule sums to perform the redundant in-game tasks that generate the base-line of the online economies, which even further complicates the line between art and politics, among that burgeoning genre ranging from Third World Farmer to The McDonalds and Shell Oil mini-games. The best of my discoveries are as follows:
CACTUS [!!!!] is an amazing freelance gamer/developer from Gothenberg Sweden, who works on really diverse, envelope-pushing stuff. Here’s quirky a half-hour lecture [6] he gave on making a game in four hours, and the accompanying commentary [8]. Another article [7] featuring CACTUS equates contemporary diasporic DIY programming to 90s zine culture.
Samorost [9] is a pretty thrilling piece from Amanita Design [10] which plays between film, gaming, and puppeteering (Where does cinema cross paths with interactivity? Where are we specative, where participatory?); There’s a cool interview with developer Jakub Dvorsky here [11] and I found this on his blog:
I’m also captivated by the reversion to “primitive” graphics in contemporary games like Dwarf Fortress, which allude to the original online role-playing game structures, and even more recent hacks and add-ons that allow visualizations of the basic code-built fortresses [12].
Reams of gorgeous pixelated iPhone games, like Sword & Sorcery [13] and Eliss [14] are arriving hand in hand with sexy returns to pixel media in other fronts – like BEIGE, the artist who removed everything but the slowly drifting clouds from Super Mario [15], entering the discourse of the unplayable game, the explosive or unapproachable nostalgia, the metaphoric placement of the video game as a fundamentally nihilistic premise – and Ben Fry’s equally brilliant mapping of the Nintendo Cartridge genome.
Mario is, of course, the bar, and it’s pleasant to bring about troubling conflations of the virtual with the “real” as Antoinette J Citizen’s Landscape [16]. And in a similar vein: Painstation [17] which affects its players quite bodily, and these Welsh men who play sheep (wasn’t there a pretty post-modern game about sheep-herding? Cat-herding?)
Play Pac Mondrian [18] if you have the plug-ins. It kept crashing me, but looked also like en exciting conflation of mapping canonical arts against cityscapes that lent me towards a rethinking of the world-map phenomena central to so many games, the panoramic zooming-in-and-out and easy formulation of cohesive world-views – is this a tracing? Do we have to share basic cartographical lexicons to engage with these worlds? [19] [20] 
Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist is another gorgeously sarcastic comparative project I hope some day to be able to critically approach. You can find it for free on a number of abandonware databases [21].
Also, do make sure to take Matt’s advice and look into Monachrom [22] too. They still have some of the most avant takes I’ve been able to find.
Again, the untouched information is legion [23], and there’s mad more Art Game Ranking Countdowns: [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29], and Jason Rohrer [30] [31], Paolo Pedercini [32], and Cory Archangel [33] all want huge exploration. And lastly, the Wikipedia Software Art Article [34] is overflowing with a bounty of delectable links.
EDIT: another beautiful game is The Marraige [35], a very abstract piece about relationships.