Quizzical play #2: Optimising for Beauty

screenshot: Art Game, by Pippin Barr

'Quizzical Play' is a loose grouping of articles which explore what lies beyond the idea of winning and losing in videogames, and how players often subvert these ideas for themselves.

*

They say that inside every critic is a failed artist. It's true; he was delicious. But even I found it hard to resist when Pippin Barr's Art Game offered me a chance at virtual gallery stardom. Playing through it, I felt pride stirring within me, along with the urge to show off my artwork to everyone.  So what better way to analyse it than with a picture essay of my very own oeuvre?

Like so many of the games Barr makes, Art Game is set up like a joke. You pick your artist - a painter, a sculptor, or a performing duo - and try to conquer the art world with your works. The punchline is that you do so using the mechanics of classic games like Tetris, Spacewar and Snake. When you lose, your playthough so far becomes an artwork that you can title or simply trash. Soon a curator drops round and assesses your work for display in a gallery, sometimes often rejecting the best and ignorantly lauding the worst. It definitively answers Sophie Houlden's seminal question: can art be games?

Relax, don't do it: pulling the trigger in Spec Ops: The Line

There is a line that people like us (i.e. games bloggers) have to cross. It is the line which divides people who like Spec Ops: The Line from people who don’t.

On one side, its lauding as a landmark subversion and the subject of Brendan Keogh’s groundbreaking close reading, Killing is Harmless. On the other, the mocking, the eye-rolling; its indictment by J. Shea as the cake-eating adventures of Captain Obvious, by Michael Clarkson as a “gutless and cowardly critique”, and by Darius Kazemi as “a middling shooter fumbling at meaning.”

And me?

"There is a symbiotic relationship between technologies of simulation and the military": Interview with Paolo Pedercini

pic: molleindustria

This is one of a series of interviews I conducted for my article about what text can say about war that AAA games can't. You can read the other interviews by clicking here.

I contacted Paolo Pedercini about all this because he made Unmanned, which is featured in the article. Unmanned concerns an individual cog in the military machine but uses text to simulate his experience of war in quite a different way to most games. Also, he comprises the staff of La Molleindustria, which makes radical games in at least two senses of the word 'radical'.

After seizing control of a local radio tower, I asked him the following questions.