LOST FUTURES 005

#005 IS THIS A GAME TO YOU?

LOST FUTURES

#005 - IS THIS A GAME TO YOU ?

“The truth is this: in today's society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not.” - Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken Machinima - a portmanteau of ‘machine’ and ‘cinema’ - is the process of using real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production. Though few use the term, artists have been experimenting with this mode for almost as long as computer games have existed. Across a series of short artists' films featuring various videogame environments, this programme proposes that just as games can be art, art can also be games.

The screening programme is split into three acts. The first section includes films that challenge the role of the avatar, using Lara Croft and Leisure Suit Larry as proxies to examine what game bodies can represent, and player's relation to the characters they inhabit. The second interrogates the players themselves, finding a culture of toxic masculinity, entrenched misogyny and reckless, senseless trolling. The final section explores the slim, slippery lines of perception between virtual violence and representations of the real world. Everything reaches a climactic point in a postscript, as various videogame depictions of devastation and destruction are blended into a chaotic, cathartic montage. All the while, a deer wanders along a moonlit beach.

For balance, three short 'intervals' are also included, intended to disrupt proceedings and offer relief. These are montages of fan-made games-media - celebrations of gaming culture created from those at its epicentre, as opposed to artists looking in. These look at games as community: themed under 'eSports', 'MMORPGs' and 'livestreaming', respectively.

This accompanying zine attempts to explore this further, with contributions under the collective theme of 'gameplay'.

Counter-Charge (Alex Hovet, 2016)

LOST FUTURES #005 IS THIS A GAME TO YOU? x Anna Bogutskaya

8.45pm, 3rd April 2019 BFI Southbank Waterloo, London

Counter-Charge (Alex Hovet, 2016, USA, 13’) She Puppet (Peggy Ahwesh, 2001, USA, 15’) ^6[#M2d,i{Pa (2’) RECKONING 4 (Kent Lambert, 2016, USA, 10’) Swatted (Ismaël Joffroy-Chandoutis, 2018, France, 21’) *>/}Fhq4qspU (2’) Post-Newtonianism (Josh Bricker, 2010, USA, 6’) Modern Warfare (Claire L. Evans, 2010, USA, 5’) J%mM=B%&U)&2 (2’) Self Destruction for Eternity (Wei-Ming Ho, 2011, Taiwan, 6’) +

San Andreas Deer Cam (Brent Watanabe, 2015-2016, USA, _')

She Puppet (Peggy Ahwesh, 2001)

Art Games Matteo Bittanti Matt Turner Kent Lambert Brent Watanabe

Counter-Charge (Alex Hovet, 2016, USA, 13’) Leisure Suit Larry, the eponymous character of the 1989 computer game, wanders the jungle of a colonized village searching for love. In an act of cathexis, Larry's energies are concentrated on Passionate Patti, a perfect and unattainable woman.

Swatted (Ismaël Joffroy-Chand

She Puppet (Peggy Ahwesh, 2001, USA, 15’) A homage to and commentary on the female action adventure game 'Tomb Raider' and its busty virtual superstar Lara Croft. I played the game on the my computer and simultaneously recorded the gameplay onto videotape. Then I treated the material as "found footage" and recut it in order to rethink the game and consider questions about women, virtual bodies, role-playing, identity issues and fandom. Ignoring the original drive of action, I make Lara explore the game environment at the edges of the programming world created for her. The limited inventory of Lara's gestures and the militaristic scenarios of the game are considered from a feminist perspective in analyzing the symbolic feminine and the popular culture that has sprung up around Lara Croft. Quotations are from three authors who philosophize the alien, 'the clone and the orphan: The Book of Disquiet' by Fernando Pessoa, 'The Female Man' by Joanna Russ and the jazz mystic Sun Ra.

Some game trolls in the Unit getting other players “swatt they find out someone’s nam caller ID, and make a bogus you know, a SWAT team armed into his house and giving hi This is all streamed live o everyone can be in on the jok exploration of this phenomen offenders, YouTube videos first-hand accounts of what Mesmerizing, almost surreal depict the strange borderland game and reality overlap—an u and swatting look increasingl the question of which is the that the trolls hiding behi phones don’t entirely underst game is, or that they’re act

RECKONING 4 (Kent Lambert, 2016, USA, 10’) RECKONING 4 is the second in a series of investigations into (among other things) 1.

2.

3.

4.

Terror and wonder in big-budget virtual worlds The fluidity, fragility and loneliness of technologically mediated social identities and friendships The queerness and malevolence of archetypal masculinity The poetics of blockbuster aesthetics

By the time I started actively editing RECKONING 4, my ambivalence about video games had deepened in multiple d couldn’t deny the escapist pleasure I often took from my game sessions, particularly during professional and pers That pleasure was tempered by the tedium of staging, capturing, transcoding and organizing footage from these s soured by the casual misogyny that permeated so many popular games and the culture surrounding them. So I looked hosted by prominent video game journalists for non-male voices, for critical and feminist discourse on game cu engaged in dialogue with several students I worked with about the pleasures, perils, and unexplored artistic poss video game forms. One of these students, Bryce, agreed to an interview with me (via headset chat) after his own brought him to a turning point. He realized that he’d essentially become addicted to video games, to the detr studies and overall well-being. We spoke for several hours and played what he’d decided would be his last g before selling his console. Our conversation figures prominently in this piece and will presumably be woven int installments. RECKONING 4 also documents my first and only (so far) attempt to talk to strangers in an online multi

If RECKONING 3 represented cinema looking at video games (Michael Douglas wandering a marble-columned virtual reali Siskel and Ebert playing with an early infrared motion game controller, Hollywood leading men and game avatar via flicker editing), RECKONING 4 presents a fantasy in which figures from cinema, video games and the “real worl and gaze at (or past) each other. TVs in video game apartments show me talking and listening to Bryce, a Night on the harassment of female gamers, and the hapless middle-aged gamer protagonist from RECKONING 3. Game scenes to be on screens in other scenes. Conventional cross-cutting and detailed sound design create the illusion of between these realms, of “life” unfolding as channels and stations are restlessly changed, of continuous ennui interrupted by menace (Kevin Spacey as politician gamer and uncanny valley villain).

RECKONING 4 reflects on toxic masculinity and the dystopia of simulation. If you walk too close to the 'GTAV' you down. You can pose your MGSV character in quasi-sexual positions with other soldiers, but you must first out. “I get what I what, when I want it” says the billionaire to his wife. “I need something more, but what else

o ARTISTS' STATEMENTS o Post-Newtonianism (Josh Bricker, 2012, USA, 6’) Juxtaposing video shot from military aircraft during the last two Gulf Wars with gameplay footage of the popular first-person shooter 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare', the video investigates the nature of images in the age of simulation.

doutis, 2018, France, 21’)

This piece is a two channel video with sound. The video on the left consists of a loop of actual war footage taken from cameras mounted on American military aircraft, from both airplanes and helicopters. Taken during the first Gulf War in 1991, and the current occupation of Iraq the footage shows the bombing of vehicles, military targets as well as the shooting of insurgents and oppositional forces. In contrast the footage on the right is from the popular video game 'Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare'.

The sound track is a mixture of audio taken from the video game and the footage released by Wikileaks approximately two months ago in which the US military killed two reporters working for Reuters as well as a number of unarmed civilians.

ted States make a sport of ted” live during the game: me and address, fake his 911 call. The next thing to the teeth is bursting im the fright of his life. on camera, of course, so ke. Swatted is a cinematic non based on 911 calls by of games and raids, and it’s like to be swatted. l animations explore and of gaming fantasy in which unreal zone in which gaming ly similar. The film raises more frightening thought: ind computer screens and tand just how serious their tually very aware of it.

cop, he guns t knock them e is there?”

Modern Warfare (2010, Claire L. Evans, USA, 5’)

ity corridor, rs composited ld” listen to tline segment are revealed permeability occasionally

"Take no prisoners, comrades!"

directions. I sonal crises. sessions, and d to podcasts ulture, and I sibilities of n ambivalence riment of his game session to subsequent iplayer game.

Read from left to right the video in which war has been presented to and white (sometimes green from hyperrealist, slightly less grainy Americans have grow up playing.

acts as a timeline, showing the ways my generation. First as surreal black night vision) grainy video, to the representation in the video games many

As the first true, real time, television war the first Gulf War was experienced by many as grainy, soundless video, devoid of people, clear representations of devastation or human loss. Instead we were confronted with this amazing, surreal, real time footage that was disembodying.

Instantly and for the first time the reality of war was primetime entertainment merging both reality and simulacrum. Each step in this binary timeline desensitized us further from the horrors of war. Through hearing the audio we experience the result of our collective desensitization in the brutally insensitive, numbed and distant language used by American soldiers in Iraq. Additionally as the audio plays we become aware of the encroachment upon reality by the media driven simulacrum. At the start of the piece we hear the audio taken from the Wikileaks video, gradually as the video plays the audio becomes entwined and merged with audio pulled from the video game. The end result is an approximately equal mix of sound from real and unreal sources, blurring the line of reality a little further.

Additionally this piece is about the power of the internet, as both a political and artistic tool. Every piece of footage and sound in this video was intentionally harvested from the internet for that purpose. My intention was to make something High Art" using the internet and YouTube, creating a work both political in content and form. Constructed using the "mash up" technique familiar to anyone watching YouTube videos it looks and sounds like a YouTube video and is made on one of the two platforms most if not all YouTube video's are constructed on (Final Cut/Premiere Pro).

Self Destruction For Eternity (2011, Wei-Ming Ho, Taiwan, 6') Who decides who is good or evil? Who decides who lives or dies? Who will be the next victim? The calm before the storm… Is it an illusion?

Or are there dark realities and tragic flaws hidden behind the scenes?

Using a game engine to record and remix the images to re-comprehend violent elements from nature and human behavior.

San Andreas Deer Cam (2015-2016, Brent Watanabe, USA, _') San Andreas Deer Cam is a live video stream from a computer running a hacked modded version of 'Grand Theft Auto V', hosted on Twitch.tv. The mod creates a deer and follows it as it wanders throughout the 100 square miles of San Andreas, a fictional state in 'GTA V' based on California. The deer has been programmed to control itself and make its own decisions, with no one actually playing the video game. The deer is ‘playing itself’, with all activity unscripted… and unexpected. In the past 48 hours, the deer has wandered along a moonlit beach, caused a traffic jam on a major freeway, been caught in a gangland gun battle, and been chased by the police.

o MACHINIMA IS NOT A GAME o Three milestones – 1996, 2006, 2016 – are particularly significant to machinima. In 1996, French curator Nicolas Bourriaud presented Miltos Manetas’s​ Miracle (Fig. 1) at Basilico Gallery in New York in a group show titled​ Joint Ventures. Manetas recorded a few sequences from a flight simulator, ​F/A 18 Hornet, burned the mona DVD, and played them in a loop. The video depicts a fighter jet sliding on the water instead of sinking. The disarming simplicity of his gesture should not undermine its sheer brilliance.

Manetas was among the first artists to recognize the importance of video games within the visual landscape.​ With this seemingly simple action, Manetas raised fundamental questions about the nature of representation, simulation, and authorship. But ​Miracle is not​a Duchampian ​readymade, an​ object–trouvé or found footage because its production and presentation required a considerably transformative effort on the artist’s part. Although the dominant interpretative and theoretical frameworks informing the history of machinima have often privileged narratives of technical prowess, the conceptual act of re–contextualizing game content is equally – i ​f not more – important. Although dexterity in programming, hacking, a ​nd modding ​ have played a crucial role in the development of this artform, the intellectual ingenuity of a gesture that transcends the often hermetic and asphyctic video game sphere should not be confused with the “de– skilling” approach discussed by critic Benjamin Buchloh (2003). Manetas did not call ​Miracle ​ “a machinima”.

Nor did Bourriaud. They could not. In fact, the term was coined only four years later. This explains why machinima is generally unacknowledged, i ​f

not openly rejected, with in the Art World, where more generic terms like “video” or more recent iterations like “digital video”, “HD video” or even “UHD video” are used. Such resistance should not come as a surprise: the mythopoesis of machinima allude​ s to practices of hacking and game fandom as far removed from the fine arts ​ as one can possibly imagine. The early practitioners were more familiar with arcades than art galleries. But while machinima was (​is) mostly confined to subcultures, in the past decade (2006–2016) the practice of making video art with games has blossomed.

Between 1996 and 2006, digital media have gone from the cultural fringe to the mainstream: the growth of the internet and the proliferation of mobile platforms such as laptops, tablets, new kinds of phones, and cheap, affordable game consoles has been staggering. This phenomenon mirrored the commercial introduction of inexpensive cameras in the second part of the 1960s, which gave pioneers or “early adopters” (an expression used by Everett M. Rogers in his influential 1962 study) like Nam June Paik and Andy Warhol new tools for artistic experimen​ tation. Manetas’s seminal series ​ Videos After Videogames (1996–2002)–which he developed with a Sony PlayStation 2 – can be compared to Paik’s works with the Sony Portapak, introduced on the market three decades earlier. ​ Both artists conceived innovative ways of playing with images, turning consumer technologies into expressive tools.

This should not come as a ​ surprise.​ As Marshall M​ cLuhan wrote in ​Understanding Media. The Extension of Man (​ 1964), “Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium to use or to re-

o MATTEO BITANTI o lease the power of another." He also added that “the serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.” When Paik died in 2006 – around the time Marisa Olson coined the expression “Postinternet” in a Rhizome panel (Connor, 2013) – a new generation of artists responded to an increasing technologically mediated environmen​t in different ways. Machinima was one of them.

Game–based video art is both a process and a product identified by a prefix: “re”. Re as in ​again or ​anew.

Hence, ​regeneration. But also r ​ ecirculation, remix, re–cycle, re–creation, re–animation, re–enactment... Artists working with machinima are committed to interdisciplinarity and to the integration of a range of different media – subsumed under the rubric of the digital – into t​ heir practice.

Machinima is thus related to such tactics as appropriation, manipulation, and subversion (e.g. ​ détournement, culture jamming) of existing artifacts. Its status is paradoxical. On one hand, it is a ​parasitic form of expression: machinima would not exist without digital games, hence the definition of “derivative work” used in the context of copyright law. Additionally, it remediates media like film, video, photography but also drawing, painting, animation, simulation, computer graphics, and theatre. As such, it is unequivocally​ recombinant – yes, another “re”.

At the same time, it is “something” else altogether. Machinima’s reworking of videogame footage is interesting: it must maintain aspects of its original meaning and context as well as

gather new meanings in new contexts.

Additionally, if it is undeniable that machinima has been influenced, we must acknowledge its influence as well. F​ or instance, one cannot underestimate the effects that th​ is “unintended consequence” had on game design and game technology, from the inclusion of video editors (such is the case with the popular ​ Grand Theft Auto and​ The Sims series) to the development of powerful capture game cards, from the DVR–like functions of modern consoles to online streaming platforms like Twitch.tv. But machinima did not simply contribute to the proliferation of game footage. Its relevance extends to the visualscape as a whole because it raises crucial issues pertaining to creativity, interdisciplinarity, new technologies, and intellectual property. For this reason, rather than providing a dogmatic and peremptory definition, in the context of the exhibition we chose to showcase the works into four thematic sections (“levels”) corresponding to four key features of game–based video art: record, glitch, assemblage, and frame.

Each machinima is a ​record, that is a documentation of a performance or an experience, but – paraphrasing George Orwell – some machinima are more documentative than others. Consider, for instance, Joseph DeLappe’s d ​ead– in–iraq for projection, in which the artist writes the names of the U.S. soldiers who died in combat within the popular online simulation America’s Army using the in–game chat system instead of “following the rules”, i.e. play as expected. ​ Or Hugo Arcier’s ​ 11 Executions, which replays a series of senseless killings in various locales of ​ Grand Theft Auto V. His work engages in a direct conver-

-sation with Alan Clarke’s infamous short film about sectarian murders in Northern Ireland, ​Elephant (1989), but also evokes the horror of recent terrorist attacks in Paris. Georgie Roxby Smith’s ​ 99 Problems [WASTED] is the machinima equivalent of Dara Birnbaum’s seminal Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978). Both videos challenge the representation of women in media by appropriating a fragment of popular culture (a videogame in the former case, a TV show in the latter) and repeating it until it becomes both mesmerizing and uncanny, amusing and unsettling, critically destabilizing their subjects. Larry Achiampong and David Blandy’s F ​inding Fanon 2 (2015) ​ investigate the postcolonial condition within the simulated world of G ​rand Theft Auto V (Fig. 2).

By recontextualizing the writings of Frantz Fanon, the artists created a multi–layered narrative which raises questions about the alleged “ideology– free” spaces of digital gaming. With​ Elegia (2015), Cuban artist Rewell Altunaga uses machinima to simulate the desperate journeys of the nameless migrants who drowned in the cruel waters of the Mediterranean in their attempts to reach the “promised land”.

Machinima is “glitchy” both literally and metaphorically. The term itself is an error as it was originally meant to be spelled as ​machinema, a portmanteau of machine cinema. Additionally, machinima looks and sounds like a video game but does not behave as such.

In fact, its producers removed the key feature of electronic play, that is, interactivity. Thus, machinima is a​ broken game, a game that does not work properly. And what is Manetas’s Miracle – the mother of all machinima – if not a (​ documentation of a) found glitch?

Any machinima is also an assemblage, i.e. ​a work of art made by grouping together found or unrelated objects​, different codes, aesthetics, narratives, and media. But then again some machin-

ima explicitly and formally address this aspect. Consider for instance, Post–Newtonianism by Josh Bricker which juxtaposes a gruesome video shot

by US soldiers on an helicopter disseminated online by Wikileaks to gameplay footage of a popular first–person shooter, ​ Call of Duty, inviting the viewer to play a comparative game (Fig. 3). Or IP Yuk–Yiu’s Hong Kong trilogy which references the medium of photography more than film or games.

Kent Lambert’s R ​ECKONING 3 culls images of Hollywood movies, television shows, and video games, creating an anthropological and performative exploration of the contemporary mediascape. Phil Solomon’s take on a seminal work by Andy Warhol (​Empire, 1964), is a machinima remake set in Liberty City, itself a virtual replica of New York City. Tom Richardson’ T ​he Author is a video montage of stock photos, computer graphics, web pages, music, and narration. In this context, machinima is considered a digital collage. As such, it belongs to a long tradition which began more than a century ago with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Collage is to the early 20C what machinima is to the early 21C. Finally, machinima is inextricably linked to the notion of ​frame, which refers to the rigid structure that surrounds something, like a picture – including a ​moving picture. The term also refers to the single complete picture in a series forming a cinema, television or video film. Additionally, “frame rate” indicates the frequency at which an imaging device displays consecutive images called​ frames. Such expression applies equally to film and video cameras, computer graphics, video games, and motion capture systems. Last but not least, “to frame” means to express something, to give expression to. Two works in particular allude to the complexity of this notion: Claire Evans’s ​Modern Warfare and Michiel Van Der Zanden’s Pwned Paintings #1 and # ​ 2. The formerr

documents the systematic destruction of every television set and computer screen in the controversial “airport level” of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Fig. 4). The latter shows the systematic destruction of every painting hung on the walls of a museum and in the private homes of a quiet Italian village. As Anne Friedberg (2006) reminded us in her groundbreaking examination of the window as metaphor, as architectural component, and as an opening to the dematerialized reality we see on the screen, “​how the world is framed has become as important as ​what is in the frame” (p. 5).

Machinima’s position within the field of visual culture is ambiguous, as it belongs simultaneously to different contexts, including contemporary art, experimental cinema, and game fandom.

A practice once limited to a subculture has now become a global phenomenon, as a ​ conjunction of interests coalesced around the idea of digital gaming as a space for visual experimentation. A ​n increasing number of artists who do not necessarily associate with electronic entertainment – or even reject its overt and implicit ideologies – treat video games not to amuse, but as a resource that can be used, abused, and discarded. They question struc-

tures of surveillance and control; sex, gender, and class representation in media; political and/as personal issues; authorship and originality; memory and loss; the utopian promises vs. the dystopian consequences of technology. From art schools to online forums, from video sharing sites to live streaming platforms, machinima is evolving both conceptually and aesthetically in unexpected, and therefore interesting, ways.

This essay was originally written to acccompany 'GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY', the largest exhibition of digital game-based videos ever staged in Italy. An official event of the XX1T Triennale International Exhibition.

21 Century. Design After Design, the exhibition was curated by Matteo Bittanti and Vincenzo Trione with the collaboration of the students from the Master's Degree Program in Arts, and took place between May and June 2016.

Matteo Bittanti is an artist, writer, curator, publisher, translator, and scholar with a particular interest in new media art, especially game art.

He lives in Milan and San Francisco.

Find more about his work at www.mattscape.com, or at www.gamescenes.org.

Post-Newtonianism (Josh Bricker, 2010)

o ART-GAMES / GAMES-ART o Machinima – a portmanteau of machine and cinema – is a term used to describe the process of using real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production. It’s a practice that has existed for as long as ingame recording has been possible, the first generally attributed work being United Ranger Films’ Diary of a Camper – a minute-and-a-half long fanfilm made within first-person shooter Quake (1996) – though some claim examples that pre-date it. Miltos Manetas’ Miracle, for instance – shot using flight-simulator F/A-18 Hornet (1993) – was made in the same year.

Both of these films use their source material in different ways, to different ends; and while one of them was exhibited on the wall of a major gallery, the other was released online for free as a downloadable demo-file.

Indeed, two histories of the practice of machinima run concurrently, with little crossover. The first includes the sort of films made by game-players themselves, a tradition

into which Diary of a Camper fits.

First arising through experiments from early in-game recording options offered by games such as Stunt Island (1992), Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) that allowed players to capture and export individual stunts or kills, or record entire matches or speed-runs, this sort of machinima was made by gamers, for gamers.

Before long, creators were orchestrating narrative scenarios of increasing complexity, entirely in-game, and dubbing computer-mic-recorded dialogues over the edited materials.

Several years after that, a term to describe this practice, ‘machinima’, was coined and a scene was born, one that grew sizeably in the years following. Works such as Rooster Teeth Productions’ Red vs. Blue (2003-present) or Jon Graham’s Arby n’ the Chief (2008-present) showed how polished and professional the practice could be, and also how sustainable: those two examples alone generating more than 500 episodes and alShe-Puppet (Peggy Ahwesh, 2001)

o MATT TURNER o -most one million subscribers on YouTube. Like gaming itself, a niche pursuit became popular entertainment.

Parallel to this, artists have adopted the method, making films within videogame environments that, as a rule, take a more critical position – offering reflections on the medium and its mechanics; how games work; and what they can show, or fail to. Besides the aforementioned Miltos Manetas – whose series Videos After Videogames (1996-2002) extracts idle moments from games including Super Mario 64 (1996) and Tomb Raider (1996) and situates them as standalone works of video art – artist Cory Arcangel has long seen the artistic potential of videogames. An artist who appropriates various aspects of popular culture, Arcangel counts NES cartridge hacks among his best-known works. Both Super Mario Clouds (2002) and Super Mario Movie (2005) present modified versions of Super Mario Bros (1985) as video installations. The former strips the game of everything but its scrolling vista of pixelated white clouds and blue skies; the latter revisions it beyond recognisability as a colour-shifted, graphically warped surrealist modification. Both pieces take the familiar iconography of one of the world’s most recognisable videogames and morph it into something else, exemplifying the credo of creating something new from found sources that is central to machinima.

As Manetas writes in his accompanying manifesto for Videos After Videogames: “artists after videogames don’t play videogames but relate to them”.

Artists often deconstruct game-worlds from a distance to see what they reveal about the real one they reflect.

In Angela Washko’s Free Will Mode (2013-14) – a series of videos made within sandbox life-sim The Sims (2000) – the artist tests the limits of the autonomy of the characters in the game by setting them to ‘selfplay’. She finds that while they will make certain choices to survive (eg eat, sleep, defecate), they can never alter the external environment they are placed within. Across the videos, the characters drown in pools without ladders, starve in rooms without doors and burn to death in house-fires that they are too exhausted to extinguish. These elaborately staged torture environments expose humanity’s own sometimes unquestioning relationship to the built environment. Working along similarly anarchic lines, Brent Watanabe’s San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam (2016) was a live-stream (now archived as a recording) of a modified version of Grand Theft Auto V (2013) that spawns an AI deer into the game’s city, and leaves it to play itself.

It’s a game without players: thousands tuned in to watch the critter wander its open-world expanses. A total inversion of the game’s intended parameters, it proved to be a surreal, strangely compelling experiment into the unpredictable capabilities of ingame artificial intelligence systems.

These sort of experiments sit adjacent to a wider tradition within artist’s machinima, the idea of ‘game interventions’, a videogame version of performance art that sees artists interacting directly with game worlds and their players in order to make statements or provocations. Georgie Roxby Smith is an artist who regularly makes work in this mode, much of which explores game violence, exposing how regularly it is gendered.

Her jarringly fatalistic intervention 99 Problems [WASTED] (2014) sees a semi-clothed female avatar repeatedly and ritualistically killing herself within the world of Grand Theft Auto V, the surrounding non-playable-characters barely registering a response as she blows her brains out beside them. Each death is an empty death, and results in an automatic respawn. Similar in approach is Joseph Delappe’s straightforward but pointed dead-in-iraq (2006-11). Started on the third anniversary of the start of the Second Gulf War, this longitudinal memorial-slash-performance sees the artist enter America’s Army (2002) – an online multiplayer first-person-shooter built as a recruitment and training tool by the US military – and type the “name, age, service branch and date of death of each service person who has died to date in Iraq” into the game chat.

Other films link war-game violence with real-world realities. Josh Bricker’s Post-Newtonianism (2010) features two channels. One shows a video released

by WikiLeaks of US attack helicopter footage from Iraq, the aircraft’s pilots audible on the soundtrack as they fire upon civilians. The other displays similar imagery from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2007). As audio from both sources mixes across the two frames, the origin of its source becomes indeterminable, the two videos increasingly indistinguishable from each other. Videogame representations rarely achieve verisimilitude, but here, the distortion of the real-world footage renders both depictions equally unreal, showing how easily we are desensitised to images and the meanings behind them. Claire L Evans’s Modern Warfare (2010) is set within the airport level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), controversial at the time of release for allowing the player to partake in a terrorist attack and slay non-combat-

ants. In her film, Evans chooses to attack no one, turning her character’s assault rifle on the various video monitors that scatter the airport. By diverting the game design’s intended play-path and instead wreaking destruction on the screen-apparatus, the film seems to almost be destroying itself, the game’s first-person avatar – only ever seen as a pair of hands grasping a gun-barrel – trying to escape from the confines of his existence by breaking the rules of the creation within which he is trapped.

The avatars that game-players control have been a perpetual source of interest for artists. Peggy Ahwesh’s She Puppet (2001) looks at Lara Croft, the protagonist of Tomb Raider (1996). Using quotations from Fernando Pessoa, Joanna Russ and Sun Ra, Ahwesh weaves an oblique verbal essay on “women, virtual bodies, role-playing, identity issues and fandom”, while the Croft character is seen moving around the game world distractedly, her body under near-constant attack. An equally unsettled expression of the player’s relation to (or rather, alienation from) their avatars is in Alex Hovet’s Counter-Charge (2016), which takes the semi-explicit oddity Leisure Suit Larry III (1989) as its source. In this dreamlike, delusory film, the eponymous character wanders the game’s tropical environments, frustrated in his attempts to pursue the subject of his attentions by a remixed game-world that seems to resists his goal at every turn. As Hovet explores the game’s peculiar gender dynamics, his role as controller of the Larry character seems to be in a battle against his own innate, relentlessly libidinal drives.

The game’s strange text dialogues falter when faced with an unexpected female player with an agency of her own.

Some artists are interested in games as a cultural phenomenon: what gameworlds mean to the players who are

immersed in them. Larry Achiampong has made several works that involve videogames, but Ph03nix Rising: The 3rd Son (2014) is particularly connected to games as a culture. Splicing in images from a wide selection of games including Streets of Rage (1991) and Street Fighter II (1991), alongside other pop culture sources, the film explores how Achiampong shaped his identity from the media that he and his brother consumed. More than just escapism, games were spaces “where solutions to everyday realities could be achieved”, test sites for working out who they were and what they might become. Jon Rafman’s Codes of Honor (2011) has a similarly reverential tone, a nostalgic ode to New York’s classic arcade, the Chinatown Fair, which closed in the year of the film’s making. Like Ph03nix Rising it mixes sources, blending in-game materials with documentary footage of the arcade and the players that frequented it. Rafman’s voiceover describes the specific pleasures of hardcore gaming, the positive feedback loops that come from skill-improvement, the thrill of close competition and the furtive sense of community present within the fighting genre.

into the phenomenon its title refers to, whereby gamers call in fake threats to the police on behalf of their online-gaming opponents who are live-streaming, resulting in armed officers kicking their doors down in full view of the still-broadcasting webcam.

The film mixes narration from individuals who have been subjected to this dangerous and occasionally fatal prank with artistically glitched wireframe landscapes from the games they play.

While artists of all descriptions have been using videogames as source material, few would call their work ‘machinima’, and fewer still would claim any affinity with the community that grew around the term. Making distinctions between ‘popular-machinima’ and ‘artists-machinima’ isn’t necessarily productive: not all the above makers would describe themselves as artists, and to deny artistic value to the machinima being made online would be doing it a disservice.

Other artists are keen to acknowledge gaming culture’s darker sides.

Kent Lambert’s RECKONING series (2006– present) looks at the points where gaming communities, popular culture and contemporary politics bleed together, with results that are as strange as they are unsavoury. Both RECKONING 3 (2014) and RECKONING 4 (2016) have soundtracks featuring disembodied, depressed-sounding voices lifted from online multiplayer games, whilst the images (a collage of various videogame environments and manipulated clips from blockbuster movies) seem similarly alienated.

The community’s hub, multichannel network machinima.com, amassed more than 12 million subscribers before its latest owner AT&T shut it down earlier this year, deleting all of its users’ content in the process. It is easy to forget how impermanent the web can be, until a corporation wipes out an entire subsection of it without warning.

Machinima is one of the most democratic forms of filmmaking, requiring only a computer for its creation, but without an equally independent archival infrastructure it might easily end up forgotten. Cinema has had more than a century to get where it is, whereas games have only really had half of that, depending on where it is agreed they started. It would be a shame if something involving the convergence of these two young media did not get its fair chance to grow too.

Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis’ SWATTED (2018) goes a shade darker, looking

This article was originally published online at Sight & Sound.

KENT LAMBERT - GAMEPLAY

BRENT WATANABE - PLAYING ITSELF

Personal Journeys Counter-Charge (Alex Hovet, 2016)

Hannah Woodhead Ben Nicholson Charlotte Ashcroft Jessica Bishopp Matt Mansfield

( FARMING IS CALMING ) Hannah Woodhead on mental health and simulation games, on the healing properties of getting lost in farm-sim games like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley.

I have a quaint farmhouse, two cows, seven chickens and a cat. In the spring I grow green beans. In the autumn I grow pumpkins. There are seasonal festivals in the town square and spooky mines in the mountains just waiting to be explored.

I have spent, according to my Steam account, 68 hours making myself at home in Stardew Valley. Before that, there were different iterations of Amccus’ Harvest Moon series, spanning right back to my preteen days. These genteel farming simulators have always appealed to me, an outlier in my otherwise standard fair of violent RPGs which usually involve killing zombies. I’ve always felt sheepish when discussing videogames because I engage, more often than not, with the ones that offer me an opportunity to do something quite mundane: exist in a pure and uncomplicated environment, where the stakes are low and the people are pleasant.

The goal in these games is straightforward: prosper as a farmer. your character procures a smallholding, possibly from a deceased relative, and they relocate to a sparsely-populated but invariably charming and tight-knit community.

These places don’t exist anywhere in reality - they are the sweet, sleepy towns, where the shops open and close like clockwork and everyone knows your name. You run errands, you water your crops, you feed your animals. And somehow, when you look up to check the time, the whole day has gone.

It’s a simple form of escapism compared to more lavish video games, but the

beauty of these games lies in their ability to slow the world down. As someone who struggles greatly with my mental wellbeing, it’s necessary for me to find ways to distract myself; there is nothing more comforting and more serene than tending to a delicately configured virtual garden. By the same measure, it’s a manageable responsibility. If I am too unwell to load up the game and feed my virtual cat, that’s okay. The cat will not go anywhere.

There’s an old adage that states that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” In games like Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon, you do the same thing over and over again, broadly expecting the same results, in order to reach an ultimate goal. You sell enough potatoes to afford the barn extension; you cultivate friendships through smalltalk and giftgiving. These delicate approximations of the real world are simplified but safe, a respite from the often overwhelming reality. What’s more, they are so lovingly rendered, so detailed and meticulously realised, it really feels like there is a whole miniature world in the palm of your hand or in the harddrive of your computer.

And I am living my best tiny life fishing for bass, or cavorting with elves at the Midsummer Solstice - my time management on virtual farms is far superior to that in reality. My anxiety is alleviated by these rituals, by knowing the lifespan of crops or witnessing the changing of the season. Everything is just fine in Stardew Valley.

Harvest Moon (2003)

Stardew Valley (2016)

Assassin's Creed (2007) The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002

24

| PLACE MAPPING | Ben Nicholson on location spotting in the Assassin's Creed games, on cybergeography as psychogeography.

When I first played the demo for Shadow of the Colossus it wasn’t the defeating of giants that captured my imagination, it was raiding across grassy plains on horseback. A couple of years later, when I was umming and ahing over whether to stump up for a PS3, I watched a friend galloping through the countryside bet ween Damascus and Acre on Assassin’s Creed. Even without the bustling cities, rooftop getaways, and stealthy assassinations, I was completely sold. The parkour was fun, sure, but the aerial views of the Holy Land from the top of a tall building were better. I’d never been to Jerusalem so while I knew that the game recreated historical landmarks, the details remained as tangible to me as seeing them in a film. When I played Assassin’s Creed II things shifted slightly.

The second game follows a young Italian assassin and takes place primarily in Florence and Venice where you hang out with Machiavelli and da Vinci. However, the last level takes you to Rome, a city that I had an academic past with. I was surprised, as I headed towards The Vatican on foot across a bridge over the Tiber to recognise the mausoleum of Emperor Hadrian standing before me. Without loading the game map I knew where I was and where I was heading and it’s kind of a strange feeling.

Harun Farocki said that: “A computer animation is less a reproduction and more a production ... or creation of a model world.” The geography of the Assassin’s Creed series suddenly became a model version of actual geography and there was an addictive real-world dimension to this already compulsive open-world adventure.

I foolishly never get around to playing the next iteration of the game - I was once again riding horses in Red Dead

Redemption - so missed out on climbing one of my favourite buildings, the Pantheon. I didn’t return to the series until much later, when I found myself in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution. I recalled a school trip when me and some friends obnoxiously keep running and climbing up and down the steps beneath Sacré-Cœur. I imagined this was probably the closest I could come to merging my real experience of a place with my Assassin’s Creed one and went off in search, only to realise that the construction of the basilica wouldn’t begin for several decades.

Athens had a similar effect when I arrived there in the latest game, Odyssey.

The Acropolis holds a special place in my heart and while the experience of visiting it IRL was moving, walking through the Propylaia in the game and casting an eye up at the coffered ceiling was a thrill. I walked to the edge of the sanctuary and looked over to the east and saw the Temple of Zeus from way up high, at almost the exact angle as a photo my partner took on that holiday.

Then we’d been looking at its ruins, now I was looking at the first columns being built. I’ve still never seen it whole.

Perhaps the apex of navigating these virtual worlds from real-world memory was during Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, which is set in Victorian-era London.

It’s hardly an exact replica of the place that I live, but the landmarks are in the right directions and it’s easy to orientate yourself - even during a heart-pounding chase - when you intuitively know which direction the Thames is in. I suppose the only down(?)side is that every time I pass St Mary Le Strand Church now, I’m tempted to try to scale its wall and hide out from Templars on the roof.

~ PASSING THE TIME ~ Charlotte Ashcroft writes about finding safety and solace in slowness in The Legend of Zelda series, and on ambient zones in videogames and the moving image.

You know, when most people go to the movies, the ultimate compliment—for them—is to say, “We didn’t notice the time pass!” With me, you see the time pass. And feel it pass. - Chantal Akerman1 I am bad at gaming and I die often. My reflexes and nerves are no match for a foe that shifts around the screen or replicates or resurrects. I was good at playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in reverse: assuming Link’s childish form and retroactively traversing a Hyrule now full of liberated characters offering platitudes; swimming, fishing, horse-riding, drifting downstream and jumping off things.

The holographic fractals of the Fairy Fountains had bewitching allure and I idled there, summoning the gigantic fairy-woman with her hovering block of magenta hair and uncanny shriek, calculating how I as a human child could configure a future in which I chill in a crystal pool for eternity to a glittering MIDI soundtrack and then vanish into the 64-bit ether. Donna Haraway’s call for kin-making 2 with all earthly, digital and mythic creatures manifests in the myriad weirdos and wanderers I encountered in endless hours mapping Wind Waker’s entire ocean.

Even better was a total surrender of autonomy, watching somebody else play.

I would perch on the edge of the bed, dictating from the official guidebook with my brother at the controls. During a recent bout of flu I spent a few hours watching a stranger manoeuvre through Breath of the Wild on YouTube comforted by somebody moving, somewhere.

Animal Crossing offered solace as a game in which every character is a benign critter, pottering the entire objective, the gravest danger the ire of a grumpy neighbour. After a few bountiful seasons I abandoned the game, eventually returning months later. Time had carried on without me; the sky was grey and the land plagued by weeds and ghosts.

Wracked with guilt at what I had let the town become and with the spectre of a sad-eyed and possibly even dead Tom Nook haunting my conscience, I switched off the GameCube and let it gather dust.

I got into cinema, drawn to the same aesthetics but gripped by my own crippling inertia. Studio Ghibli films were signifiers of a world beyond my mostlyhorizontal existence in which gesture and journey evoked vicarious kinetic pleasure; hand-rendered, purposeful acts of cooking, delivering, taking the train, cleaning and eating holding some sacred significance. A wash of lilac horizon between sea and sky hinting at an autopoietic plane where Haruomi Hosono’s Watering a Flower plays on a loop (I played this at my vacuum cleaner's funeral.3).

The thrill of a singular image or scene held on screen for an indeterminable span of time in the films of Akerman and Ozu (one taught me patience, one taught me pain4). Total attention and suspension of the self, inhabiting liminal spaces between screen and body, perpetual motion without moving. In my head, where all the world’s angst and tumult churned, a strange new calm set in.

I tuned in to temporality; the length of a day, an hour, felt joy from posting a letter or taking a photograph, bought a plant and a bookcase. Considered the humble snail or a view from the train, stopped being afraid of traveling and people, boiled an egg – felt the time pass.

I slowly learned to render IRL the same ambient spaces I had cultivated on those formative screens. I still retreat into digital realms daily and crave the weightless expanse of after-school, time away from myself, but I no longer want to disappear entirely or inhabit alternate bodies. Maybe I 'm swimming in Haraway’s thick present5 alongside every video game character I ever met; swimming in the dense mass of living and

dead and cyber-materials, beings and histories from which new futures sprout.

1

Miriam Rosen, In Her Own Time: An Interview with Chantal Akerman (https://www.artforum.com/

print/200404/in-her-own-time-an-interview-withchantal-akerman-6572) ² Donna Haraway, Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene (https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/ tentacular-thinking-anthropocenecapitalocene-chthulucene/) ³ YouTube user ‘David Coulter’ (https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=34UutDrXV2Q) ⁴ Ariana Grande, thank u, next ⁵ Donna Haraway, Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene (https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/ tentacular-thinking-anthropocenecapitalocene-chthulucene/)

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002)

The Sims (2000)

+ ATONE FOR YOUR SIMS±+ Jessica Bishopp on the enduring appeal of The Sims - on creative replication, mirror-images and murder.

I was only allowed to play for 20 minutes every evening after school. At that time, health experts said that children should not spend any longer than that staring at a computer screen. We only had one computer in the house and it was the same one that my dad used for work.

I was allowed on it before my younger sister; she would get her 20 minutes after mine. Each day, I would rush home from school to spend my 20 minutes playing The Sims.

At first I just replicated my real life.

I created my family, then my cat and my dog (once The Sims: Pets expansion pack had been released). Then I added benefits: I made myself as an adult, who lived in a shared house with adultsim versions of all my twelve-year-old friends. Next, I made all our crushes into sims as well, who (with the arrival of The Sims: First Date expansion pack) became properly dating couples. I imagined how adult life might be, through the lens of The Sims. Each new game mechanic offered a new possibility for the replication of real-world imagined scenarios. Anything that I imagined, I could bring into being.

As I grew older, my architectural ambitions flourished. I would attempt mansions with elaborately shaped island swimming pools, and houses on stilts with endless staircases and lavish balconies. All this was made possible by the numerous hacks and codes that I would pick up from friends at school, gifting new items and unlimited funds in the game. I became obsessed with

creating multiple generations and ageing families. I was no longer content with the here and now, I wanted to control the past, present and the future too.

I wanted a family tree. I discovered a small glitch in the game and exploited it to create this tree.

If I put tired and grumpy sims into the kitchen and told them to cook, they would inevitably cause a fire. When a fire started, the game would pause and the fire brigade would arrive and save the sims, seen in a small windowed animation. I noticed that if you first instructed the sims to cook, then immediately paused the game and removed all the doors and windows in the kitchen, once you pressed play again and the fire occured, the fire brigade would arrive but couldn’t gain access into the room. The sims would be trapped and would died in the fire.

This was the quickest way to create an extended and complex family tree.

Reminiscing on The Sims I realise that I spent so much of my time creating just for the sake of creation, enacting imagined lives just for the fun that these possibilities provided. None of my sims exist any longer; none of the worlds and lives I created have been recorded or archived in any way. As someone who does creative things for a living, more and more of what I make creatively has to have a reason to exist. Its hard for me to make work without consideration for where it will go after I’ve made it. The Sims was something I did when no-one was watching, something just for me.

% CATCHIN' THEM ALL % Matt Mansfield on a youth spent in the long grass of the Pokemon games - a franchise that inspired in a generation an obsessive, unshakeable collectomania.

Pokemon (1996-2013)

In the year 2000, like everyone else my age, I spent my summer holidays playing Pokemon Yellow from morning to night.

I loved Pokemon. I loved the anime, and I loved the trading cards. I leafed through my copy of the Official Pokemon Handbook so much that the binding wore out and the pages fell apart. The only other book I’ve ever owned that fared similarly was an illustrated catalogue of British wildlife that my aunt bought me, a book that inspired me to spend all my time after school searching in the garden for grasshoppers and shield bugs and caterpillars. Years later, I read that Satoshi Tajiri created Pokemon to celebrate his childhood love of insect collecting, but as a nine-year-old I

had no idea why this series excited me so much. I had dreams of my own pokemon adventures. I designed my own pokemon, and I drew my own trading cards. I couldn’t get enough so I had to make more of it for myself.

I’d never played a video game before Pokemon Yellow came out. I put hundreds of hours into the game, from an attritional gym battle against Brock’s Onix with a Metapod that only knew Harden to beating the Elite Four again and again just to max out my team to level 100. I soon found that playing this game and vicariously living the pokemon life was all I’d ever wanted. Grinding wild encounters, navigating caves and

Pokemon Yellow (1998)

Pokemon Yellow (1998)

oceans, learning type advantage charts and building well-balanced teams quickly became second nature. But the thrill was always in finding something new: a hidden item, a strong move, or, most excitingly, an unknown pokemon to catch and train. I always wanted more, and the time I spent searching every pixel of the map always felt like time well spent.

I didn’t drift away from the Pokemon games like my friends did. While they’d moved onto Grand Theft Auto and The Simpsons: Road Rage, the kind of traditionally grown up (meaning violent) games for kids that everyone at my school seemed to rave about, I was secretly researching Feebas spawning patterns during I.T. lessons. Pokemon

Yellow, and later Gold, then Sapphire, and so on and so forth, satisfied the same desire that made me walk around my garden for hours on end looking for bugs. The game was a good place to be alone while also finding some kind of joy. I was always playing Pokemon alone but I never really felt lonely. I was never into trading or battling with my friends. I just wanted to tick the boxes of my own mini-missions within the game. Once I’d completed one challenge I just started another, and my interest never waned once during the hundreds of hours I put in. To me, the best games feel like places, somewhere away from the real world, where the rules are entirely your own. In the summer of 2000, I lived in Pokemon Yellow from morning to night.

Digital Communities RECKONING 4 (Kent Lambert, 2016)

Matthew Atkinson Daniel Cockburn Kurt Walker Matt Turner Rami Ismail Caspian Whistler Robert Ashley

I spent a great deal of my early teens playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 (2001). I sluiced countless hours into the game, across weekends and school holidays, attempting to unlock every last achievement and gold medal.

I am not sure I ever got them all, but on 3 June 2018 an internet user named 'dodthedod’ did so in 8 minutes and 6 seconds — a world record. dodthedod is a speedrunner, a player who tries to reach the end of a videogame in the shortest possible time. The considerations of a given speedrun differ — one might require the completion of 100% of a game’s objectives as another tries for ‘Any%’; some attempts are legitimate if they exploit loopholes or flaws in a game’s design, while others must be accomplished ‘glitchless’ — but the ultimate objective is always the same: to finish as fast as possible.

It would be tempting to interpret speedrunning as an enterprise of pure acceleration: the deepening of a game against itself, its mechanics hurtled towards nothing but its own end, a telos of sheer pace. Indeed, with speedrunners streaming their progress via Twitch or uploading completed attempts to YouTube, little seems to differentiate their labour from the already rapid mass circulation of image-making online, precisely beyond its almost immanent relation to quickness.

This is not quite the case. For one thing, while it is true that speedruns are often over in a matter of minutes, many take much longer to finish: the Any% world record for Final Fantasy IX (2000) currently stands at 8 hours, 43 minutes and 21 seconds, for example. The form of spectatorship demanded by playthroughs of such duration, then, rejects a visual culture of speed for speed’s sake, as it requires an

investment of time and concentration precisely disavowed by the quick-cut videos favoured by the wider gaming industry and culture.

Fur thermore, a speedrunner does not reach a world record from inside a vacuum. dodthedod’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 time improved on the previous world record, set

by FaytetLT three years earlier, by 9 seconds; FaytletLT’s achievement was an increase on the two prior world records, by George and rmdelany, of 34 and 54 seconds respectively.

For each second’s progress, a speedrunner spends dozens of hours in game, weeks of their life, repeating each button input, cutscene skip, and hard reset. What appears on screen as an excitable, unbridled race to the finish line is, on the contrary, the result of attentive research and careful practice, in which a game’s speedrunning community and history contribute, collectively, to the improvement of its time.

In ‘The Desire for Philosophy and the Contemporar y World’, the philosopher Alain Badiou describes speed as “a mask of inconsistency”, a veneer of fluidity and coherence across the face of an increasingly confusing and confused society. What is required of philosophy, Badiou avers, “is a slowing down process. It must construct a time for thought … a time of its own”. Badiou’s demand of philosophy here is not too dissimilar from the leisurely, cautious engagement with games practiced by speedrunners. Through cooperation, mutual knowledge, and deliberate, patient play — “slow and in consequence rebellious” — speedrunners shave off seconds, render coherence from chaos, and offer a radical demonstration of how to confront life’s ever-increasing tempo.

RUNNING OUT OF TIME

The Dreamed Path (Angela Schanelec, 2016)

Matthew Atkinson on twitch, speedrunning, and record-setting, on vicarious viewings and the joy of watching others play well.

OLD HABITS, NEW HARDWARE Daniel Cockburn on playing Dungeons & Dragons over webcam, and keeping cross-continental friendships alive.

We started at a wooden picnic table at a lakeside cottage in Ontario, because that’s where we were at the time. We keep it going via the internet, because that’s where we are now – actually no, of course not, I hate the idea that anybody might ‘be’ ‘in’ the internet, but given that I’m in the UK and the three of them are in Canada, if we want to get together anywhere, the net’s the place.

Who we are is a quad of old friends: a square composed of fortysomething dudes, one to a side. What we started was a game of D&D (Dungeons & Dragons). It was the first time three of us (Matt, Demetre, and I) had ever played an RPG (Role-Playing Game).

The fourth (Dave) is a seasoned pro – at least so far as we noobs can tell – and, as such, our DM (Dungeon Master).

When Dave introduced us to the game, by the lake in 2016, we thought it’d be a pleasant enough way to pass some cottage time. A few things dawned on us that weekend: the game is (in its best moments) an exercise in pure collaborative storytelling; we were hooked; and this was going to take forever. Getting the four of us together was already a rarity – now, with me moving to the UK (and Demetre doubling down on fatherhood), even more pressing than the in-game cliffhanger that ended the weekend was the meta-cliffhanger: not just what will happen next, but how will we continue?

The answer: at a glacial pace. A free Sunday every three months seems to be what our schedules have in common, so we meet on those lucky Sundays via an online interface called Roll20.

net (video chat, maps, and character sheets all included). And now here we are 30 months later, still yet to complete The Lost Mine of Phandelver. But Dave assures us we are getting close!

Still, ‘getting close’ is a relative matter, especially when we spend the better part of a quarterly session debating whether our next move should be to leave the tavern and go buy some supplies, to query the barkeep about local goblinery, or to order another round of ale. It’s like Inception’s nested dreams, where a minute on one level is telescoped into a year on another… which makes the prospect of it suddenly coming to an end for any of our characters all the more disturbing. It wasn’t until, besieged by nasty beasts on a dusty road, I cheated death by deploying a combo of idiot-savant derring-do and sheer blind luck – it wasn’t till I’d narrowly escaped death that I realised I could die.

What I mean of course is, it wasn’t till my character had narrowly escaped death that I realised she could die. To my own mortality, I remain oblivious.

But the ongoing struggle to schedule, and that telescoped temporal sense, nudge mortality month by month nearer my field of vision, as I feel the tension between what I want to do and the time I have to do it in.

The nice thing about this is that it’s not just about what I want to do; this tension is between the story we have to tell and the time we have left to tell it in. And the lovely/sad thing about all this is that, as infrequent as our online D&D get-togethers are, we still see more of each other this way than we used to.

37

RANDOM ENCOUNTER Kurt Walker on the legacy of massively multiplayer online role playing game Ragnarok Online - on love, loss, community and virtual sociality.

Despite millions of players having invested countless hours in the MMORPG (“Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game”) worlds, the format (or “genre”) is now in a slow fade. Back in 2003 this was unimaginable— the MMO format seemed like a frontier of which many superior iterations were to soon come. Little did we all know that on November 23rd, 2004 a video game would drop which would at once progress (mechanically), regress (politically) and conclude the entire genre in one drop: Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, which was at once a virtual hotbed for alt-right radicalization and a tireless execution of world building—which tempts the question—which worlds did these games build?

But this won’t be about that video game, instead I’d like to focus on an encounter I had in a smaller, more inclusive video game known has Ragnarok Online (directed by Kim Hakkyu of South Korean video game studio Gravity). An aesthetical antithesis to Lineage, the reigning Korean MMO of the time (and endures to this day!), Ragnarok was released in Korea on August 31st, 2002 and rolled out internationally soon thereafter. Struggle and kinship were always part of its DNA, even at a developmental level, the game was nearly destroyed at launch by a overthrow led by hacker-players upset by the freshly introduced “Pay to Play” monthly subscription model.

The devs rebuilt from scratch—presumably driven by nothing but passion for a world they believed in—the significant elements of the game destroyed by their attackers.

Ragnarok is a video game of calming dulcet rhythm’s and a soft, open world (known as “Rune Midgard”) which has no one linear narrative compressing its boundaries—it

often looked and felt like the the emotions of youth most all of its (largely) young player base was deluged in at the time. Distinct from its competitors with an aesthetic which placed 2D sprites upon a 3D world, a formalisation likely derived from Final Fantasy Tactics (Yasumi Matsuno, Squaresoft), which was released a few years prior to Ragnarok’s development. Resplendent with avid, warm, and involved players, for most of whom Ragnarok, or “RO”—as it is fondly referred to by its community—was a lush online realisation of the worlds and adventures found in the JRPG masterpieces of the 1990’s, which were otherwise singular video games founded upon narrativising experience in a linear, designed, and offline form.

Meanwhile, MMO’s also have a exploitive, sometimes contradictory problem at their center. In replicating elements of our world and varying societal bodies, this genre naturally also requests different forms of labor of its player: extensive hunting of monsters to gain “experience points” (or “leveling” or “grinding”), monetising arduous item collecting, and navigating (surviving) an economy. These systems would not only demand countless hours of its player, they would also install the video game into the average player’s mind even when they are offline. Yet, there was sublime fun still to be had, and most exhilarating of all was the capacity for undesigned play— experience which is neither anticipated or born from the design path set by the authors. RO upset this norm primarily through an emphasis on socialisation, in contrast to most MMO’s wherein players are intoxicated with their character’s progression, a vast portion of this game’s community was simply there to hang out and meet likeminded people.

The most remarkable instance of undesigned play that I encountered took place on iRO’s (International Ragnarok Online) Loki server in, approximately, January of 2004. I was a member of a guild (a system for players to form a community in an organized form) named “Ambient”, which belonged to an alliance of guilds—a commonplace strategy for success in the video game’s “PvP” (Player vs Player) system known as War of Emperium.

Briefly: this system facilitated large scale battles between guilds which took place on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, wherein the limited number of guild castles (the game’s equivalent of property) became vulnerable by way of their crystals (“Emperium”), which were located deep within a castle’s inner sanctum and could only be attacked by a player who belonged to a different guild. Guilds would thus collect themselves into said alliances, which would in turn typically claim the 5 castles housed on a map neighboring one of the 5 major cities.

Within said cities rest the ecosystem of the servers: social hubs wherein players hung out in their favorite spots, the virtualphysical marketplace of the server economy, players seeking other players to form groups, communities and socializing which could lead to deeper connections, etcetera. Notably, RO was something of an epicenter for online dating—for many players, this game would facilitate their first romantic experience.

Virtual love and friendship, whilst within the boundaries of RO, could become tangible

through the primary pathways of play: leveling, socialising, exploring. Furthermore they could even become revolutionary, as in my encounter, wherein during an otherwise quiet interim between “War of Emperium” windows, one member (“Player 1” for the sake of storytelling) of “The Shiny One’s” guild (which belonged to the alliance my guild was member to) with a female avatar, and another male avatar (“Player 2”), whose guild name I now forget, broke up on a Tuesday night before the scheduled wartime. The next day, this tightly bound alliance of guilds spiraled out of control: Player 2 (who had been dumped) and their guild invaded and claimed The Shiny One’s castle as their own. Subsequently, this castles and its neighbours were soon claimed by lower and middle-class players belonging to guilds divergent from the server’s now defeated monarchy. What existed for but a few days shattered the economy and leveled the playing field of progression and communion, yet by the following Sunday the status quo, now fragmented and weary, was restored.

This brief virtual liberation and its relationship to the non-vir tual realm still remains indecipherable to me, so I have no choice but to reject reaching for a conclusion besides standing by the belief that the act of sharing play: the many uncharted online histories that the MMORPG manifested (and continue to write) and its unique commingling of societal forms with human connection/disconnection are surely worthy of greater dissemination.

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that, last time I checked, iRO’s Loki server is still running.

Frames from the author's untitled MMORPG set film, currently in production.

39

MEDITATIONS.GAMES Rami Ismail on Meditations, a launcher that, every day, loads a small game and an accompanying text as a distraction, lesson, or inspiration for that day.

How did this project begin, and how long did it take to get from inception to launch?

It started when I played Tempres, by a developer named Tak, on itch.io. The site has a randomiser that shows you a random game, and I found it through that. It was smart, small, simple, and had a profound effect on the rest of my day.

I decided I wanted a game like that for every day, and started the project by e-mailing Tak to ask for permission to use Tempres for January 1st.

Logistically, how did you manage to find and organise 350+ different creators?

Did you have any criteria for selecting contributors, or was it just to make sure it was varied as possible?

At first it was just trying to be as diverse as possible, but as we neared the end of the year I brought aboard

different curators to widen my reach. I realized that even though I know a lot of developers, there are always many more that I can’t see.

How did working on curating this project affected how you will make (or think about) games going forward?

I’ve always loved ephemeral games, or games that play with access or availability. Michael Brough’s VESPER.5, Zach Gage’s Temporary.cc, or GlitchHiker, which I worked on during the Global Game Jam of 2010 - they all left an impact on me.

What apprehensions did you have during the planning period? How have you found it since it launched? What has the reception been to the project?

My main worries were coordinating 350+ creatives, and then ensuring that Tempres (Tak, 2017)

the games all worked and were free of viruses.

We obviously wanted to make sure nobody put tons of work into these games, because they’d be made for free - so we set limits to the amount of work anyone could do.

What is the value of a temporary creation, something that disappears after a day? Does the speed of creation, and short duration of the games existence make it a special space for experimentation?

Was there any guidance on content? Are the games supposed to be meditative and calming, or just short?

I’m not sure about the availability, but I think the 5 minute rule, and the fact that people couldn’t explain anything through text, definitely created a special space for experimentation with simple mechanics or abstract art.

• The game is inspired by the day it is meant to played on, in 2018 or any year before it.

• The game has to be fully controlled through keyboard or mouse.

• The game cannot have more than 30 seconds worth’ of interaction, and no more than 5 minutes of normal gameplay.

• The game features no text beyond the name of the creator, preferably in their original script (ie. “John Doe” or “‫ةنلاف ةينلافلا‬.“) • The game starts immediately at first input, and does not have a pre-game dialogue, a menu, or a start screen.

• The game does not feature an end-screen, and shuts itself down after completion.

• The game does not feature any load or save functionality.

• The game binary is under 120MB (exceptions can be discussed), and does not require any dependencies that require installation.

• The game can run on Windows and OSX. • The game is created in under 6 hours of work, total.

I saw that each game is supposed to relate to its launch date in some way. What does this mean in reality?

It differs per person, but it ensures that whatever work is created is personal - even if just in how the rule is interpreted.

Do you think 5 minute rule also creates an unpressurised space? A game usually requires a conclusion, levels, or to lead somewhere.

This is more like a chunk in time.

I think the fact that the games have a common space of experimentation, knowing your game will be amidst 365 other experiences, having limited time and room for mechanics, and and having a shared ‘end’ experience - ie. the Meditation shuts itself down - it creates a space in which you’re kind of free to do whatever you want, as long as you can do it within those parameters. It makes creativity lateral, instead of vertical.

How did you ensure that the games were accessible in other ways? 5 minutes isn’t very long to get to grips with a concept, controls, or mechanics?

By limiting control space and requiring games to not feature text, all games had to be intuitive. That created a very interesting creative space in which you need to do as much as you can with very little.

Rami Ismail is a independent video game developer and spokesperson, online at ramiismail.com and @tha_rami. Meditations is free to install and play at meditations.games

41

A PROFOUND WASTE OF TIME Caspian Whistler talks about A Profound Waste of Time, his magazine celebrating gaming as an artform and emerging culture.

Can you describe the origin of this project? Why did you decide to make this publication?

Actually playing games has fallen by the wayside ironically, but I still try to make time to play.

So, A Profound Waste of Time (APWOT) started as a student project I did during my course at University of the Arts London. As a graphic design student, we were tasked with a small press magazine (zine) project in our second year.

I was thinking about zines and their history with the punk movement, and that rebellious energy which drove them into being such a popular medium, and how to apply that to something I was interested in.

A lot of the games in focus in APWOT are indie games, rather than AAA titles. Was this intentional, or does it speak more to who you are in contact with, and who was contributing?

When I settled on videogames as a subject area, I realised that I couldn’t channel quite the same energy as a lot of those punk zines.

The videogame scene already felt particularly caustic and aggressive, so the way I rebelled was by making something calm and approachable as possible. Something that spoke about games in a way that felt tailored to me as an audience member. I think it’s interesting that games are so popular, making more that film, music and TV combined per year, that they’re still dismissed in a lot of wider creative circles. My hope is that APWOT represents games and the industry around them in the most positive light possible.

What is your relationship with videogames, and more broadly with video game culture. How and what do you play, and how do you engage (or not) with the wider culture?

I’ve been playing games since I was little, but only since making APWOT have I really got involved properly with the wider scene around them. That’s the thing about zines, they end up connecting you with people related to whatever it is you’re writing about, and in my case that was game developers and writers. The culture around game development is one of loads of independent creative individuals collaborating and organising together. I even have started doing little bits of art for games beyond my graphic design work, so I guess I’ve become part of the industry (albeit in a very small way). Beyond that I’m constantly keeping my ears to the ground by reading up on games news via the big outlets and social media.

That’s more just due to who I was able to reach out to. I’d love to have more AAA devs involved, but I also don’t really see the distinction between them and indies as important. I try to focus more on what would make for an interesting piece than how massive the game is. I suppose with indie games there’s more space to do that as AAA games are covered so extensively!

How do you feel this project fits within traditional games journalism? It’s more like an edited volume / essay collection than a magazine with previews, reviews and a tie to release cycles / relevancy. Do you read video games magazines, or does your inspiration come from elsewhere?

Yeah, APWOT is certainly not about news and reviews. Ultimately if that’s what people want to read about they should go online, it’s more a more immediate, convenient way of getting a sense for how a game runs. With APWOT we’re not releasing often so it’s important to me that the content in it is as timeless as possible, and has value beyond breaking news to you. Our focus is usually on how games make people think and feel, rather than how they rank on a metric scale.

I actually deliberately didn’t look at game mags as inspiration, and focused much more on what Elephant does for arts and culture or what Little White Lies does with illustration and film. It’s important to look beyond games for inspiration.

The art design is on another level. What was your objective with the art, and how did you develop that?

Thanks for the kind words! Well this follows on from the last point really. APWOT has a pretty clear ‘no screenshot’ philosophy, because in my mind it’s content that’s very easy to generate and

42

ultimately people will be able to get those images in a more convenient way online. I think having the mag be almost entirely unique illustration helps on a bunch of fronts: It makes the mag feel bespoke and valuable, it allows us to work with more people, and it demonstrates that focus on how we respond to games rather than just the games themselves.

Can you comment more on your experience of the ‘videogames culture’ that this publication engages with? it seems to me that the world of independent or art-orientated games is in a really good place, in terms of the quality and diversity of the games being made, and the widening of the pool of voices writing / thinking about them.

Do you agree, and if not what needs to change?

What was the editorial direction that you wanted the publication to take? Were there guidelines you gave writers, or prompts to ensure that the texts fitted together well? How did you select contributors?

I agree with that, I definitely think things are increasingly looking up! It certainly feels like we’re at a pivotal moment in the wider zeitgeist where games are really breaking out into wider spaces, with the recent V&A show being a good example. When it comes to the broader topic of games being taken seriously, I think the battle has already been won in a sense, and the more we see a variety of games from different people the more true that will be.

For me, I wanted to move away from pageantry and focus more on looking at games as an artistic medium. This meant honing in on what games do for people on an emotional level, and getting writing that views developers and their games through the same lens as an artist and their paintings. That might sound pretentious, but really what it means is that we’re trying to talk about games with long from writing that explores plenty of different themes and perspectives.

With writers, there isn’t really a universal approach. I try to ask people who I admire to write, and then we talk back and forth until we can find something they feel they can write about.

I think it’s hard however to see if this course will stay, the recently announced google Stadia could jeopardise the ability of independent creatives to make money on their games depending on how popular the service becomes and how the monetisation model works out. We’ll have to wait and see, hopefully it will have the opposite effect.

A Profound Waste of Time can be purchased at apwot.com or found online at @APWOTmag

A LIFE WELL WASTED Robert Ashley on his podcast A Life Well Wasted, an internet radio show about videogames and the people who play them. As told to Matt Turner.

A Life Well Wasted is a podcast that ran irregularly between 2009 and 2013 (with a surprise new episode on the way) developing a small, but extremely dedicated fanbase. As its website describes it, A Life Well Wasted is “an internet radio show about videogames and the people who make them.” But like so many things that need to be neatly surmised for the sake of quick comprehension, it is also so much more.

In a space (podcasts about videogames) where the standards are not necessarily the highest, the show was a miracle, a remarkably well-researched, intelligent and imaginative show that treated games (and gamers) with a respectful, critical eye, effectively deconstructing the various ways in they work, what they do, and what they can mean. The show’s maker, journalist, radio producer and musician Robert Ashley, talks about its history and how it came to be.

I discovered EGM right around middle school. In a time with no internet, the personalities in that magazine really resonated with me and made me feel less alone. Working there was a childhood dream, and I still kind of can't believe I actually did it. That whole group, which became The 1UP Network, were really great people. Smart, funny, with excellent taste. Many of them crossed over to the games industry and still leave a big mark today.

"When I started working on the show, I had been making my living as a full-time freelance writer for various video game magazines based in the SF Bay area.

Around 2008 the bottom started to fall out of that market, and the magazines I wrote for closed one by one. I've always been a big radio listener, and I was also an amateur audio engineer, recording my band (I Come to Shanghai) in my bedroom loft space in Berkeley.

It's kind of ridiculous how many things share the umbrella term of "video game." A shape puzzle on your phone, a massively multiplayer online community, a branching text story, a flight simulator, a VR experience. Anything that can happen in real life can be represented in videogames, so it's wide open. But, when it comes to big-budget, mass market games, not much has changed. The emergence of mobile games and other so-called casual platforms definitely brought more women and older people into the space, though. And on the creative fringes of game development, you can find games made by and for almost any kind of person from any kind of background. But I'm still waiting around to see a "Black Panther" moment in the world of mainstream games. To me the white-maleness of that space is super boring.

When the last big magazine I wrote for (Electronic Gaming Monthly) closed in 2008, I took a field recorder to a party/ wake for all the employees. I grabbed people and took them up to the roof to interview them and spent a couple of weeks banging out the first episode of A Life Well Wasted: 'The Death of EGM'.

I’ve been a game-crazed weirdo since I was old enough to pull a stool up to an arcade machine. For most of my adolescent and adult life, I kept one foot in the latest and one foot in the classics. At the height of my game journalism work, I was probably playing 6-8 hours a day. These days I have

two young kids and not a lot of quality game time, but I keep up with the stuff I'm interested in. As far as the culture goes, I find myself getting further and further away from whatever it means to be a "gamer." The reactionar y "gamergate" crowd made it extremely unattractive.

The show happened whilst I was running away from games journalism, and I really just wanted to learn how to make radio.

My biggest influence was probably This American Life, which I had listened to religiously for years. And Jad Abumrad's early seasons of Radiolab and all their sound experiments. To me games were just a way to focus the show. I just wanted to tell relatable, human stories. I had also come away from the games journalism world feeling like the focus on products was boring. I wanted

to tell stories with emotion and human connection, not just rattle off all the new features in the next big budget game. I wanted to focus on people.

Each episode has a broad theme, (e.g. ‘work’, ‘help’ or ‘big ideas’) that shapes the stories featured, but these often developed naturally. I wish I could say I started with themes and investigated them fully. That only really happened in the first couple of episodes. Later on, when I realized that material was everything, I just tried to find the best stories and best interviews I could.

When I had enough to cram into some kind of theme that made a marginal amount of sense, I made the episode."

All 7 episodes of A Life Well Wasted can be found at alifewellwasted.com. An 8th episode is currently in production.

45

POC In Play

POC in Play is a racial e and inclusion movement with a to improve representation an provide events and initiative people of colour either worki the industry or thinking of joi

Girls Make Games Girls Make Games is a series of summer camps, workshops and game jams designed to inspire the next generation of designers, creators, and engineers.

The initiative was begi jo u r n alis t C h ell a R a m a developer Adam Campbell, Sword Games co-founder Moo Yu Teazelcat Games CEO Jodie A It is being supported by Games, the studio responsibl Monument Valley. #POCInPlay @pocinplay

Launched in 2014, the program has reached over 5,500 girls in 51 cities worldwide.

GMG was created by Laila Shabir and Ish Syed, founders of LearnDistrict, an educational company committed to creating educational access through video games and enrichment programs. girlsmakesgames.com

Read-Only Memory

Read-Only Memory publi document great moment books recognise the pi that have shaped the readonlymemory.vg

Wild Rumpus

Part arcade, part club night, part something wild we can’t quite put into words. Wild Rumpus events in all that is bizarre, playful, mischievous and a videogames today. thewildrumpus.co.uk RAID A group exhibition turned magazine at the halfway point between games and design.

Code Libe

The original brief was: “RAID is a group zine/publication thing that joins graphic design (bad) and video games (good). The idea is to ask a bunch of my fav designers (you) to come up with an imaginary game and then design the logo for that game. Then I’ll (me) put all the entries into a booklet and send it out to everyone who participated.”

Code Libe creative identifyin around 30 have had wave of w Sinders, A Alice Case

raid.community

codelibera

quity an aim nd to es for ing in ining.

in by a n a n, Foam u, and Azhar.

UsTwo le for

RESOURCES Some additional available resources, initiatives and activities related to videogames and gaming culture.

Now Play This Now Play This is a festival of experimental game design running at Somerset House in London from 6-14 April 2019, showcasing interactive and playful work as part of the London Games Festival. In 2019 we'll be looking at games that relate to our theme of community and communities. Expect everything from quiet reflections you can sit with, to colourful installations that get people playing together. nowplaythis.net

Heterotopias

ishes high-quality books that ts in videogame history. Our ioneers, milestones and titles industry.

d and untamed that s are the pinnacle absurdly amazing in

Heterotopias is a project focusing on the spaces and architecture of virtual worlds. Heterotopias is both a digital zine and website, hosting studies and visual essays that dissect spaces of play, exploration, violence and ideology heterotopiaszine.com

ITCH itch.io is a website for users to host, sell and download indie video games. Released in March 2013 by Leaf Corcoran, the service hosts nearly 100,000 games and items as of February 2018. itch.io

eration

eration catalyzes the creation of digital games and technologies by women, nonbinary, femme, and girling people to diversify STEAM fields. We have reached 000 women since 2013. I have mentored, worked with and the privilege of calling my friends a pioneering new women in video games including Nina Freeman, Caroline Adelle Lin, Jane Friedhoff, Saskia Freeke, Kiona Niehaus, ey and Charlie Ann Page.

ation.org

47

#005 - IS THIS A GAME TO YOU? LOST FUTURES x Anna Bogutskaya 005 - IS THIS A GAME TO YOU? LOST FUTURES x Anna Special Thanks to: Bogutskaya

Alex, Anna, Ben, Special Thanks to: Brent, Caspian, Charlotte, Claire, Daniel, Hannah, Ismael, Jess, Cornelia, Josh, Kent, Kurt, Matt, Helena, Matteo, Matthew, Ben, Bingham, Danny, Graiwoot, Ivana, Patrick, Phil, Maren, Matthew, Nicholas, Nika, Sander, Simon, Steph, Theresa.

Michael, Nick, Peggy, Rami, Robert, Wei.