Blips: Historically Low-Poly

Source: A Comprehensive History of Low-Poly Art, Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3
Author: Tim Schneider
Site: Kill Screen

If you haven't had the time to read through Tim Schneider's extensive treatise on low-poly art, I'd like to humbly suggest that you carve out some time to do so. It's a 3-part essay, but reads like one long piece broken into three sections, so I'd recommend taking in as much as you can in one go as possible. Schneider's main thesis here is the exploration of why so many contemporary game makers are opting for the low-poly art style, and the answer in most all cases comes down to emotional resonance. Low-poly art, like the bear shown above, doesn't try to exactly replicate real world objects, but reveals the material of its making while also leaving gaps for viewers to fill in. Schneider relates these artistic moves to Modernist painters, who when faced with extinction at the hands of the photograph, took a turn toward painterly-ness as expressiveness.

Schneider references so many great examples from the contemporary games space and from Modernist painting, and really captures the thinking behind these methods now while grounding them historically. Still, my mind kept wandering toward the actual construction process of low-poly art which has the most in common with sculpture, a medium that goes unmentioned in the article. When I look at the low-poly bear at the top of this post, I think of the subtractive processes of whittling. The flat surfaces mimicking the cuts made by a handheld blade given quick, gestural strokes. It's interesting that low-poly art aesthetically looks most similar to wood-carving when the act of 3D modeling more directly relates to wireframe armatures and applying skins on-top of them, a notably additive method of sculpting.

There's probably another whole essay that could be written here juxtaposing low-poly art with sculptural movements, and I actually credit Schneider's work with spurring this line of thinking in myself moreso than me pointing out that something was missing from his own. I can't recommend strongly enough giving the entirety of his essay a read.

Blips: Previously On...

Sources: Charting the edges of avant-garde videogames, Keeping the Cold War quiet in CounterSpy, Twitch gears up to conquer the final frontier: mobile
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

Just wanted to pop in and quickly plug three (!) articles of mine that popped up on Kill Screen the past couple days. First is a feature on DePaul professor Brian Schrank's new book Avant-garde Videogames, which frames experimental games in an art historical context. The chart above is an image from the book, detailing the categorical field that serves as the basis for many of the book's chapters. As you'll find out from my article, I think it's a tremendously useful book, especially for someone looking for that art context. I have so many avant-garde games to seek out now that I had never even heard of before.

Next up is a review of the Cold War-inspired side-scrolling stealth game CounterSpy. It's a game I quite enjoyed, but found the design to be pretty unforgiving if you don't play it very well going into the final run-up. It's stylish as all get out though, and now that I've got a handle on what to watch out for, I'm actually pretty eager to dive back in and play through again. I do wish that you could hide incapacitated guards and avoid firefights more frequently that the game allows. It is supposed to be a stealth game after all.

Lastly is an article about Twitch's mobile broadcasting aspirations. This article was written a while ago, but other bigger Twitch news kept popping up. Glad it finally got out the door because mere hours later, the Amazon buyout news hit. I think the challenges of bringing broadcasting tech to mobile platforms is pretty interesting, but I wholly expect the story to get buried amongst all the other news surrounding that company. Ah well, maybe someone will click it by accident.

Bonus Feature: Interview with Ian Cheng

Kill Screen magazine Issue #8 is currently available for purchase over here. The theme this time around is virtual reality; probably the most narrowly focused subject the magazine has tackled, but it does offer the chance to examine the technology from past, present, and future perspectives. I've contributed a piece to this latest issue as well, about how the Oculus Rift VR headset could potentially be a democratizing force for creators, the same way Sony's Portapak camcorder was for video art.

For my article I interviewed artist Ian Cheng, who works in a variety of media, digital and physical. I was particularly drawn to Cheng's work because of his use of the Oculus Rift for his piece Entropy Wrangler Cloud in which viewers don the headgear and look around in a world full of floating debris, each with its own weight and momentum, among other characteristics. As a viewer you can only exert minor influence on the objects as they bounce off of and around you. I spoke to Ian over email about Entropy Wrangler Cloud and how the Oculus Rift could fit into the art world. You can check out the full transcript of our conversation below.

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LOW CUTOFF: For starters, just looking to confirm that "Entropy Wrangler Cloud" was the title of the piece you showed at Frieze that used the Oculus Rift. Have you done any work with the Rift since then?

Ian Cheng: Yes, it is called Entropy Wrangler Cloud. The work grew out of a larger series of live simulations I have been making called Entropy Wrangler. It's a set of objects and beings each with assigned with basic properties and behaviors and left in a closed system to influence each other. Entropy Wrangler Cloud takes place within the Entropy Wrangler simulation, but instead of seeing the simulation from an overview perspective, you are within it, one object among the many. The head tracking native to the Oculus is used by a viewer to assert some influence within the ecosystem, but unlike a hero-centric video game, you are an extremely minor influence among many other influences that are out of your control and affect your VR perspective.


LCO: Are there other artists that you know of, specifically outside of the "game" sphere, using the Oculus Rift in their work?

IC: No but I'm sure someone is making a 360 degree live action movie, or a 360 degree porn orgy, or a concert film. I can imagine artists, architects, and landscape designers using the Rift to previsualize an exhibition layout or space. I'm sure the Rift is being used for virtual reality therapy to treat PTSD.


LCO: I'm trying to get a feel for how widespread the influence of the Rift is in the art community, and whether or not it's the sort of device that could explode in popularity the way the handheld camcorder did for video art, or if it's too niche and destined for a quick burn. Any thoughts on this?

IC: The Rift, Avegant Glyph, and other VR devices will have to prove themselves on their own terms in their own markets to simply sustain themselves. As for the world of contemporary art, I believe more and more its task is to develop and act as interface to allow humans to relate and feel non-human experiences. The best art invents inside of us new patterns of feelings that exposes us, beyond rational consciousness, to ecosystems and abstractions that we have no other way of feeling. VR for me is an innovation to facilitate this. Whether Oculus Rift the company evolves to stay in the game or quickly burns in hype fire I have no idea. But as an innovation idea, the idea of sensorially entering a subjective perspective that is not your own, this is here for us to finally use and grow from.


LCO: Also, you hinted at this in the dis interview but it does feel like there's this window of opportunity for Oculus Rift creations prior to it's official launch that won't exist in the same form once it's commercially available. How do you reconcile the novelty of the gallery VR experience with the ideas you seek to convey in the piece itself?

IC: VR as an idea has been marinating inside us for a long time. People are conceptually ready for it. At Frieze London last year, I presented a Entropy Wrangler Cloud using the Rift. Beyond the Rift's novelty, the real trick was designing a comfortable neutral couch, very low to the ground, that helped remove the psychological barrier of stepping into the Rift. Like the way massage tables are designed, or how Freud covered his therapy couch in blankets to allow his patients to feel immersed in comfort and open. By making the Rift experience surrounded in comfortable normality, it was much easier for people to just focus on the experience of the work. The field of normality is really important with any new technology because it is what allows us to relate to its otherwise alien newness. This is usually the job of a marketing department, interface designers, and app makers, but since the Rift has not been officially launched yet and there is so few apps available for it, how this normality field is defined and who defines it is up for grabs.

LCO: It's interesting that you spoke about the couch you used for Entropy Wrangler Cloud and the idea of establishing "comfortable normality" because the Rift is such an enveloping experience that overtakes much of your real-world sensory awareness. Would Entropy Wrangler Cloud lose something essential if it were made widely available for Oculus Rift owners to download and interact with in their homes instead of within your particular installation?

IC: No, not in terms of experience of the actual work. The installation at Frieze was specific to setting the scene and luring one into the experience of the work within the context of the peak attention crisis one is subject to at an art fair like Frieze. At home, comfort and privacy are not a problem. Although it is fun to think about what the ideal furniture for VR really is and how it smells. Your body primes itself before going blind to its context and it continues to sense even when you are consciously engaged in something else.


LCO: Because of its interactivity (even if that just means putting on the headgear), art that uses VR seems very viewer-centric. While it's a long way off from the experience of a video game protagonist, viewers are still given a certain degree of agency to activate virtual spaces. Would you consider those who experience Entropy Wrangler Cloud "viewers," "players," or something else entirely?

IC: With Entropy Wrangler, people experiencing the work are also influencing the work. They are not players like in video games-- where all the action is designed around the experience of the player -- but more agents or influences. The difference is when no one is using the Rift, Entropy Wrangler the simulation continues on. You are then just dead matter to be played with in the eyes of all the other influencing agents inside the simulation.


LCO: It seems like the Oculus Rift has granted a large number of people access to VR development that hadn't dabbled in the field prior. Do you feel that the Rift provided you with an opportunity to work with VR that wasn't otherwise easily available? Was the technology easy to work with?

IC: Yes, both the cultural and technical conditions of entry into VR were too quarantined for me before. Two years ago there wasn't the same ecosystem of support--Unity, a growing audience for VR experiences, the Oculus itself -- to justify the energy and time cost to work with VR. I'm not an engineer, and I've seen too many artists get absorbed into building a technology from scratch that they lose sight of what really matters. As an artist, I have to create a situation for myself where I cannibalize and setup the tools needed with some sweat and effort, and then play can happen with relative fluidity. Whoever invented the idea of APIs had the potential of creative play in mind.

Blips: Drop the Vase

Source: This Vase Is A Mirror
Author: Tim Schneider
Site: Kill Screen

If you've ever been bewildered by the art market's ever-inflating auction value headlines, consider Tim Schneider's debut piece for Kill Screen an excellent introduction to what the hell is happening there, helpfully framed in the context of video games no less. I won't go into the whole backstory since Schneider does so in the article but there was an incident earlier this year where an artist (un?)ceremoniously broke an Ai Weiwei painted Han dynasty pot while it was on display in a gallery. Everyone in the press seemed eager to note the proposed value of the pot in their assessment of the situation –supposedly about $1 million. As a response, another artist, Grayson Earle, created Ai Weiwei Whoops!, a game which allows players to similarly drop facsimiles of said pots while racking up an obscenely escalating damage assessment in dollars. That's all there is to the game, and Schneider argues that's, in a sense, all there is to the current art market.

The experience of playing Ai Weiwei Whoops! is worth noting here, which Schneider goes into elaborate detail to explain. It's a game that you'll probably play for 30 seconds, maybe a minute tops; not something that is particularly thought provoking out of context. But in conversation with the smashing incident and the larger art market, the "throwaway" nature of the play experience means something all on its own. Ai Weiwei Whoops! isn't a particularly fun game; the pot crashing doesn't even grant a destructive satisfaction, just the matter-of-fact uptick of the perceived dollar amount lost to the void.

Blips: VR, KRZ, G4C, etc.

Source(s): When will Games For Change actually change / Road to Two5six: Tamas Kemenczy
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

This has been an active week for me on Kill Screen. First off, there was the piece that I wrote about this year's Games For Change Festival, a conference in the midst of self-critique. This was my third time attending G4C and found that some of the more critical talks and opinions were the ones that resonated with me the most. It was my hope that I presented this information in a way that seemed like a fair critique of a system that appeared open and welcoming of critical feedback. I'm also glad I was able to include some quotes from G4C President Asi Burak and I'm thankful for his willingness to contribute.

Next was a short profile of Kentucky Route Zero developer Tamas Kemenczy. Having just completed Act 3, I was extra excited to dive into what exactly makes KRZ tick. While some of my original speculation about the game being grounded in studio art practice did not end up bearing fruit, the rejection of these formalized categories was enough on its own. I'm a recent convert to KRZ, playing it for the first time in preparation for this piece, but I've come out of the experience a staunch advocate for what it's doing with the video game form.

I was assigned the Kemenczy piece because he's speaking at Kill Screen's Two5six conference on Friday, which will also see the launch of Kill Screen's latest print issue. I'll write a separate post once the magazine is freely available for purchase, but the theme is virtual reality, and I wrote a piece for it comparing the democratizing potential of Oculus Rift to that of the original video camcorder, the Sony Portapak. It will be Kill Screen's most focused theme so far, so I'm curious to see how it all turns out (I'm optimistic). They're having a free launch party after the conference where they'll be giving out copies, if you're interested.

Blips: Making an Impression

Source: Echoing Histories: Impressionism, Indie Games and Artistic Revolutions
Author: Eron Rauch
Site: Video Game Tourism

Let's take a step back from the convoluted arguments about what constitutes a game and what that has to do with art, and instead, let's look at cultural movements in art and games that seem to play out in a similar fashion. That's precisely what Eron Rauch has done in his latest article for Video Game Tourism, comparing the onset of Impressionism in the 1870s and the rise of indie games in the past few years. It's an approach that can really only be made by someone who knows their art history, which Rauch most certainly does, offering insight into the mindset of the typical Salon du Paris patron when confronted with imagery that shakes up the system.

I won't recap the whole thing because I'd rather you check it out for yourself, but I'll tease some of the lines from the opening which are meant to sound like they could be said in reference to indie games now as much as they could have been of uttered of Impressionist paintings back during their time.

“They didn’t even have a jury, that means anyone can have their work seen! How will anyone know what is good?” one man says sloshing his drink slightly in the night air. “Yes, their work is so modest in scale. It’s hardly worth paying attention to.” Gruff nods mingle with the smoke of expensive cigars. “I mean, their subject matter is so banal. They don’t seem to have any grasp of the grand themes of myth and history that tie us all together!” “Yes, they just depict everyday life. People won’t pay money for that!” Each looks to the other, somewhat uneasily, as though they are trying to sniff out a traitor. “Yes, I could respect them more, but it looks so bad, so unfinished - almost like sketches - nothing more than impressions!”

Blips: Defining Doorways

Source: Threshold
Author: Claire Hosking
Site: Claire Hosking

Some really interesting thoughts on how we define "games" from Claire Hosking this week. In a post on her Tumblr page titled "Threshold," she begins by comparing games formalism to art formalism, positing that instead of taking art's approach, that "art" is to a certain degree undefinable, in games, everyone has their own definition of what a game is. While this leads to a nonetheless fractured definition, at the very least it avoids art's elitist mindset of needing to be granted membership into a secret club before being allowed to "get" what art is. Though gaming's gatekeepers could end up similarly halting progress depending on how the lines end up being drawn.

Hosking goes on to then compare this existential debate in games to evolutions in architecture, which in many cases have blurred the lines between "inside" and "outside." In fact, these middleground spaces in architecture are evocative of a similar situation with games where perhaps a game isn't simply inside or outside of an exclusionary criteria, but something that contains various percentages of game-like structures among elements from film, drawing, or any other media. Some would even say this is inherent to games as hybrid structures or logic and expression.

There are many more fascinating ideas in Hosking's full piece, including the consideration that maybe some of the fringe software that gets lumped into the ever-expanding definition of games should actually be thought of as some new category instead. As you might imagine, it's not a simple yes/no answer. My only criticism of Hosking's piece is that when she debunks games as a medium (a really interesting consideration) she's only speaking of video games, referencing the medium of code, instead of considering video games and physical games together. Perhaps physical games can be seen as programs too, just ones with different methods of enforcing rulesets. After reading Hosking's post, I'm extra eager to hear Charles Pratt's formalist defense Thursday at NYU Game Center.

Blips: Islamic Artgames

Source: How Islamic Art Can Influence Game Design
Author: Dave Owen
Site: Kotaku UK

Despite a formal art education, I know very little about Islamic art other than it being aniconic and often spoken of in mathematical contexts. Without illustrative imagery of people or really anything taken directly from nature, line, shape, and pattern become primary tools. The results can be quite breathtaking in their intricacy and beauty, most commonly associated with architectural installations like the dome above. But the principles of Islamic art needn't be confined only to these physical structures; one would assume that an art practice with such an emphasis on geometry would thrive in the digital realm: a world founded on numeric values and algorithms. Turns out, that's the case, and several video games are actually in development right now that draw influence from Islamic art.

In a recent piece for Kotaku UK, Dave Owen speaks to the creators of two such titles, Music of the Spheres and Engare. Both games ask players to conduct close reads with complex patterns and shapes to determine puzzle solutions. Players must look past the dazzling overlaps of lines and angles to follow single paths, which in turn grant an understanding of the structure of the artwork as a whole. And really, these concepts are a natural fit for games, which despite the pervasive penchant for narrative role-play, is also that medium that gave us abstract puzzlers like Tetris. Games don't have the same expectations as movies or books as outlets for human storytelling, they can simply be experiences in and of themselves; story generators as much as tellers.

Blips: What It Is

Source: No Alternative, 1
Author: Joel Goodwin
Site: Electron Dance

I really enjoyed this piece on Electron Dance about whether certain game developers creating experiences on the fringes of what we consider "games" actually want their works to be seen as games. The reason this speaks to me is because the answers that developers like Ed Key (Proteus), Dan Pinchbeck (Dear Esther), and the Tale of Tales team are the reason I've returned to games with such fervor and enthusiasm. For me, these kinds of games are both the most interesting games and some of the most interesting contemporary art being produced. Part of this reason is the way games are distributed, and their more accessible nature.

Here's the thing; "art" is a neutering label while "game" remains a bit of a taxonomical battleground. Imagine if Dumb Starbucks was considered a game instead of performance art. There's an earnestness to the "game" label, where "art" applied to the same situation is viewed as a hoax (unless you're talking about ARGs, which are more complicated). Not that "game" couldn't become what "art" is now (it actually feels like it may be headed that way), but at the moment, games are seen to occupy a space that has a more open and honest relationship with those who engage with them. It's an ironic twist that when the artists behind horse_ebooks revealed themselves, they essentially "came clean" by releasing an FMV game. For artists, entering the game space is equivalent to "going legit," in that they're deciding to enter a space that is generally regarded as a front-facing commercial enterprise. Public performance art is the game you play without knowing it, but in "games," players are willing participants. It's no mystery which one has greater potential for generating a healthy relationship between artist and audience across the long-term.

Blips: Grayscale Dreams

Source: The beguiling, sketch-like beauty of NaissanceE
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

My latest review over on Kill Screen is for NaissanceE, a very cool exploration/puzzle game from Limasse Five. In the review, I make the comparison between the game and a pencil drawing lesson, seeing as how both place such a large emphasis on the gradations of light and shadow on simple shapes. Of course, NaissanceE, does this on an architectural scale, which doesn't necessarily convey the feeling of a still life so much as a spacial ambiance, but I do think my analogy fits pretty well overall. NaissanceE is a moody game that had me taken aback by its beauty on a number of occasions.

Crazily enough, for a game that doesn't have much in the way of intricate textures or AI, I did run into some technical problems with NaissanceE on my meager laptop setup, so be forewarned there. The game's Steam page lists a set of minimum recommended system settings, so I imagine you can avoid my issues there by just meeting those standards. It was the first time I'd run into a progress-stifling bug/glitch/hiccup (whatever you want to call it) in a game, and there was a time that I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do about actually reviewing a game that I could not physically experience for myself. Luckily one of my fellow writers was able to shoot a save file from past my trouble spot my way, and everything was gravy from that point on. Sometimes I take it for granted how much I rely on the stability of console hardware for games, but increasingly I'm drawn to a lot of stuff on the PC, so I think this might finally be the year I put in for an upgrade. We'll see.

In the meantime, give NaissanceE a shot, won't you.

Blips: Installation Puzzle

Source: The Possibilities and the Pitfalls of the Video Game Exhibition
Author: Nicholas O'Brien
Site: Rhizome

Do video games belong in museums? This is the core question Nicholas O'Brien is asking in an op-ed for Rhizome. I don't see a definitive yes or no answer here since sometimes games can be perfect fits for museums, and other times they aren't. Having seen a few of the bigger, more mainstream museums like the Smithsonian's American Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York tackle video game displays it varies by game as to how well their approaches worked. When the curatorial approach is to treat games with the standardized format used for the majority of other artistic mediums on display in the museum (work displayed as is with a wall placard of vital stats), certain types of games will benefit, while others will seem terribly neglected.

They say a typical museum-goer averages something like 5 seconds with an individual work. Games born out of an arcade tradition are likely to thrive in a museum environment because they are literally built to attract the attention of passersby, and their gameplay is constructed around an immediate experience that takes only a short time to mechanically comprehend. Control schemes for arcade-style games are also more intuitive for those unfamiliar with a particular game or modern home controllers.

However, this same treatment, when applied to Myst or any other games with layered narratives and puzzles, does the game a tremendous disservice. Even assuming the game is programmed for easy restarting for each new player, many of these games take 30 minutes or more to truly get moving to the point where its core play experience begins. And in some ways this is why we don't see many novels or full-length feature films in general museum exhibitions; the majority of visitors are there for a "museum experience" and that's comes with a certain set of expectations. Typically this involves a desire to see many different works within a matter of hours, and choosing a select few of particular interest to engage with more deeply along the way. The thing is, people like to choose these works for themselves rather than the medium dictating how much time they need to engage with something before it can "click" with them.

I don't think every visitor has to actually play games on display to appreciate them so long as they're able to understand what's happening as a spectator. Still, special attention needs to be paid for certain types of games to make more sense in a museum context, and what this is will vary by game. Not all video art makes sense on a standard flatscreen monitor, and by that same token, though most games to function within a standardized context in a home environment, that universality does not translate to the museum setting. Perhaps this is an area where museums could take cues from gaming trade shows where a "vertical slice" of the game is offered instead of the full article. Additionally, trade shows have attendants on hand to assist players in understanding the controls and ensuring that the installation is functioning correctly (another huge hurdle for high traffic institutions). Or perhaps a totally different type of installation would be more suitable for a particular type of game. How about one that uses a "black box" space to envelop players and spectators in a game's immersive, surround sound environment? That might work for a solemn, contemplative game like Proteus, but might make a lot less sense for local multiplayer games where social interaction with fellow players takes precedent.

I still want that "museum experience" when I go to a museum, and what that means for games is that I'd like my experience with games in a museum to feel unique to the setting. I own copies of several Katamari Damacy games; I don't get anything unique when the museum installation of that game a is a stand-up replica of my setup at home. I can look at photographs of paintings, sculptures, and video stills in books and on my computer, but being in the presence of those actual objects in a museum is a special experience that can't be had anywhere else. This is more difficult with games due to their general status as widely available commercial products, but if museums aren't going to try and make the experience of games in their halls special as well, then perhaps it's best to leave that task for those who will.

Blips: Look Closely

Source: Two Games That Undermine The Concept Of Games
Author: Maddy Myers
Site: Paste

Maddy Myers really nails it with her recent piece for Paste about the institutional critique of The Stanley Parable and Antichamber. While other games like Hotline Miami and Spec Ops: The Line attempt to twist the expected campaign path back on the player, they do so at the player's expense. The curtain pulls back and the games accusingly ask, "why did you do that?" The Stanley Parable and Antichamber both satirize the role of the game developer instead, which actually further empowers players by allowing them abilities that would break most other games. In fact, "breaking" these games is part of the point. Myers begins her piece with a puzzle in Antichamber where continuing forward locks you in an endless loop, a metaphor for the typical gameplay loop that serves as a core element of game design. However, the only way to progress in the game is to break the loop and go back from where you came, a move that surprisingly leads somewhere totally new.

I haven't finished Anitchamber yet (a couple hours in), but I have a running theory that the game is about games as artworks, or rather, art as a game. This is in contrast to The Stanley Parable which is a game about games, which could be interpreted as art. Antichamber rewards astute perception, the sort that reveals hidden truths that require time and focus to unearth. The white cube space might as well be the "white cube" of the modern art gallery, the snarky puzzle hints on the walls the accompanying wall text. There's even a room in Antichamber full of sculptures in vitrines that reinforce the non-Euclidean nature of its world by appearing as different objects depending on the angle from which you're looking. How do you absorb an artwork, interpret it, and make it meaningful to you? For a painting, you look at it, study it, and live with it. The approach to Antichamber is only different insofar as the medium is different; ultimately what you're doing is the same.

Once I finish Antichamber, I'll flesh these ideas out more thoroughly (assuming I still feel the same by the end of it), but even now I can say that the game offers an opportunity to literally play with the idea of what games are and the spaces in which they can exist. That's a sophisticated level of institutional critique very few games approach, and fewer deliver.

Blips: Give 'em a Chance

Source: How an artist turned Shadow of the Colossus into a rumination on chance
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

I'm elated that my piece on artist Oliver Payne's exhibition at Herald St in London has finally been published. Payne's show opened way back in February of this year and features a video of an installation with Shadow of the Colossus being played on two monitors simultaneously. Using video games in artwork is not an easy thing to do without the result coming out as pandering or nerdily out of touch, but this piece was much better than that. I contacted Oliver in April and we slowly exchanged emails throughout the summer (luckily I didn't have a deadline!). Finally I had enough to go on to complete my article, which was submitted in August, but seeing as it was about an art show that closed 6 months ago, featuring an already-thoroughly analyzed PS2 game, it was justifiably not top priority.

But hey, now it's here, and you can read all about the artwork's John Cage influence and how video games take on chance aesthetics, for yourself. Thanks for reading!

Gotcha!: An ARG Story

My investment in this whole horse_ebooks thing was pretty low to begin with. An infamous Twitter bot that spits out spam poetry (that's a freebie, Def Jam) wasn't actually fully automated this whole time. Or maybe it was and was just being carefully curated by a couple humans; the details are fuzzy. Turns out both horse_ebooks and the Pronunciation Book YouTube channel were both being run by Jacob Ballika and Thomas Bender, and the string of cryptic clues emitted recently by both were the lead-up to a browser-based FMV game called Bear Sterns Bravo. As a result, both the Twitter handle and YouTube account will cease further updates.

Oh well.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this whole string of events is the framing of Ballika and Bender's initiatives as art, even staging a gallery show called Bravospam, complete with live performances. You can call (213) 444-0102 and hear Ballika or someone else speak a horse_ebook-ish-ism into a phone. There are a few videos on display too featuring characters from Bear Stearns Bravo staring back at you, as if "waiting to be spoken to," according to the in-gallery text explanation. Additionally, horse_ebooks and Pronunciation Book are referred to as online "installations."

The common thread that supposedly ties the whole thing together was the alternate reality game (ARG) that led up to this grand reveal. Cryptic clues were dropped around the Internet and people read into the patterns of spam being emitted by horse_ebooks looking for clues. The people who pursue hunts like this are intrigued by the mystery, curious to find out what's at the end of the rainbow. In this case, as is the case with just about every other ARG, the pot of gold is an advertizement for an upcoming product. At best these reveals are predictable and don't unfairly inflate players' expectations. Such was the case with the Boards of Canada ARG earlier this year, which everyone knew was being staged by the band and ended in the reveal of a new album, which while not a revolutionary announcement, was something that the ARG players were interested in and kind of saw coming. At worst the ARG culminates in a marketing ploy for something largely disconnected from the game everyone was playing and the point of original interest. Enter Bear Stearns Bravo.

This is a problem for the gallery show as well, which doesn't forge much of a connection between Ballika and Bender's suite of Internet memes and their FMV game about financial regulation, to say nothing of either component's individual value. It hitches onto the label of "art" hoping it will solve this problem and act as the rescue copter, lifting them out of the enraged jungle of followers and subscribers who feel lied to. It doesn't fare all that well as an art show though. Even the title of the exhibition, Bravospam, comes off as a lazy portmanteau of the two distinct concepts. There's no rulebook that states a body of artwork can't have a bifurcated concept, but in the case of Bravospam, it's more of a bait and switch.

And maybe that's the point.

I've played Bear Stearns Bravo, and it's a pretty funny game. If Tim & Eric made an FMV game about the housing crisis of 2007 it would probably look something like this. You play Franco, a government regulator, charged with investigating and taking down financial firm Bear Stearns for their credit default swap practices, among other white collar deceptions. The aesthetic of the game is straight out of the late 80s and early 90s, when FMV games were popular. Everything is shot and rendered in high definition though, unlike the muddly pixels and low resolutions of those old games. Actors ham it up for the camera and knowingly diverge into goofy, nonsensical tangents about their personal lives. Your only control in the game is selecting from dialogue options when questioned. The whole thing takes less than an hour.

The best thing to come out of Bravospam is the all-too-short scene in Bear Stearns Bravo where you encounter Champion and Dynasty, two sleazy, fast-talking debt slingers. They toss glowsticks (mortgages) back and forth and yell into disconnected phones, while justifying their behavior as essential to keeping the worlds systems in motion. It's a great parody of the egos that created the housing bubble and their tenuous relationship with credibility. At one point, you can try and empathize with them by saying that regulators and bankers aren't all that different, but they quickly dismiss your remark and continue shouting into their phones, totally self-absorbed.

The horse-ebooks/Pronunciation Book ARG isn't wholly unlike Champion and Dynasty, both are convincing you to invest in something that appears one way, but yields an unexpected return. And like the real world investment banks that facilitated the global financial crisis, Ballika and Bender have opted for the crash and the spectacle. I understand wanting to move on from silly web jokes that require daily iteration. I wouldn't hold it against Dan Walsh if he stopped doing Garfield Minus Garfield and said, "OK, I'm doing this other thing instead." Surely the appsurfing generation, with their supposed short attention spans, would be able to empathize with the horrors of boredom. This, the same generation that brought us the term "catfishing," too. The goodwill from players was there, but it was exploited instead of shepherded to the next thing.

A second episode of Bear Sterns Bravo is available for $7 from the game's website. It's probably good too, but I have a hard time seeing horse_ebooks fans giving Ballika and Bender any money considering they made a name for themselves through misdirection, and I'm not sure anyone else cares enough to pay attention.

:reposted on Medium Difficulty:

Blips: Excessive Motion

Source: The Body of the Gamer: Game Art and Gestural Excess
Author: Thomas Apperley
Site: Academia.edu from Taylor & Francis Online

OK, let's see how quickly I can break down this essay by professor Thomas Apperley about game art and human body glitch aesthetics. Putting aside whether video games are art, there exists game art, which is art that makes use of games in some fashion. This could be a straight-up art game, or it could be something else that makes use of the glitch, performance, or social aspects of games. The definition of game art is not simple to categorize and seems to be ever-expanding. Apperley's main focus is on motion controls and how they call more attention to the bodies of players than button-based interfaces do, and that the expressiveness of bodies at play using motion controls is ripe for implementation in game art, though not all that much game art has taken up this mantle. Apperley proposes that as far as game art is concerned, the human body acts as a glitch itself, though what he terms gestural excess. An example of gestural excess would be like when you're playing tennis in Wii Sports, and instead of performing a slight wrist flip to swing the virtual racket, you swing your entire arm as if you were actually playing a game out on a real court with real equipment. That excess motion is not factored into how the game interprets the controller motions, nor is your stance or your offhand. These are game behaviors, but they do not help players succeed in the game, and can in fact be detrimental to players' in-game success. Motion controls turn the role of glitch back onto the players when it comes to certain aspects of how the body interacts with games, but as these devices become more sophisticated and able to process minute gestural details, the window for gestural excess will begin to close.

How'd I do? I still recommend checking out the whole essay which cites a ton of neat examples of game art, most of which were new to me. I think Bennet Foddy's games fit into this discussion in an interesting way too, seeing as they get a lot of mileage out of the physicality of button pushing. A game like GIRP turns your computer keyboard into a timed game of Twister that you play with your fingers, and the ever-popular QWOP simultaneously simulates and abstracts muscular rhythms. I was a DDR player for a few years and definitely fell into the non-excessive "only do what's necessary" category, but not out of principle; I just wasn't good enough to have the time or energy to showboat. Then, when the Wii came out, dancing games that only tracked the Wiimote just seemed dumb. I couldn't understand why someone would dance an entire routine when the game only cares about the position of your right hand –too much excess.

Still, I worry that the time for game art to comment on these issues may be past us now. Wand-like motion controllers have fallen out of public favor, and only touchscreens and the new Kinect remain, the latter of which is attempting to cut out excess as much as possible, down to the minutiae of facial expressions. I fear we may have to wait until some kind of nostalgic reverence for the Wiimote emerges before we see game art of the sort of which Apperley identifies.

Blips: Games as Spaces

Source: Inflatable Maze-Like Sculpture Bathes People In Colored Light
Author: Sarah Brin
Site: The Creators Project

Level designers are the architects of video games. They create spaces for characters and mechanics to flourish and reflect back on those elements. Levels can evoke the personality of a setting and also educate the player on how to play the game. Level designers must consider how the spaces they create will guide players to move through the game and set expectations for what's possible. In a basic scenario, a character may have the ability to climb, but only on surfaces with dense woven textures like vines or netting. Once the player recognizes these as climbable surfaces, they'll seek out similar textures in other environments, expecting to be able to climb. Some games take a less prescriptive approach and are more sandbox-like in nature. Though they may also designate climbable surfaces in the same way, the spaces as a whole may not exclusively direct players toward climbing.

I found myself considering these open-purpose spaces after viewing pictures of Exxopolis, an inflatable luminarium most recently installed in a park in Los Angeles. Check the link above to Sarah Brin's article on the piece with accompanying pictures to get an idea of the sort of otherworldly space that exists inside Exxopolis. At what point is architecture level design, and at what point is architecture interactive art? The lines are blurred by projects like Exxopolis, which inspires exploration, meditation, and awe. Being an inflatable structure, visitors must remove their shoes, which has the added effect of evoking preparation for play, the same way children take off their shoes before entering a bouncy castle or a ball pit. The vibrant, tubular nature of the corridors is also reminiscent of tube mazes and the colored lighting effects of video games that were all the rage when that technology was new and in vogue. Small musical troupes also parade through Exxopolis at scheduled intervals, helping the environment to feel alive, and also providing a sort of soundtrack.

I can't speak from personal experience, since I've never visited Exxopolis, but it does remind me to some degree of the work of Ernesto Neto, whose cushy fabric caverns invite a similar degree of play. Likewise, I particularly enjoy level design in games that doesn't tell me what to do, but opens me up to play around and see what's possible.

:photo credit Simon Wiscombe:

Bonus Feature: Interview with Pippin Barr

I love interviewing game makers for features, but a lot of interesting conversation ends up on the cutting room floor for various reasons. If you hadn't seen it yet, I wrote a piece for Kill Screen about indie dev Pippin Barr's collaboration with superstar artist Marina Abramovic for her now-successful Kickstarter campaign to construct and open a physical space for the Marina Abramovic Institute, dedicated to long-durational artworks. Barr is making several game adaptations of both the proposed building and past Abramovic performances and I spoke with him about games, performance art, humor, and working with Abramovic. I'm presenting my conversation with Pippin Barr in full below.

Barr is most known for his humorous, often satirical games, particularly The Artist is Present, a game version of the Marina Abramovic exhibition of the same name from a couple years ago. He's also parodied the Humble Indie Bundle with his own Mumble Indie Bungle, offering a pay-what-you-want purchase model and games like Carp Life and World of Glue. Barr's output is more than just a bunch of jokes (though he does procedural comedy better than anyone), as the satirical irony often pushes into reflections on the nature of institutions and ritual behaviors.

OK, enough preamble. Here's the interview.

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LOW CUTOFF: For a long while now, it feels like there's the art world and the game world and never the twain shall meet, but projects like your collaboration with Marina Abramovic can be seen as directly challenging that notion. Where do you feel like your work fits in this continuum of games and art? Do you see the two as having different audiences? 

Pippin Barr: The "art versus games" thing has been going on for a good long while now. There are so many strands to it, and I certainly don't feel all that qualified to talk about it in general. My usual response is something along the lines of games as a medium clearly being capable of yield "art", whether or not we think of the things that have been made so far as artworks. And further that games are, of course, not obliged to be art or like art. So much of what we mean by art is tied up in institutions and processes and procedures associated with the art world –showing in galleries, being commented on by art critics, etc. etc. etc. The culture of the art world.

As to my own work, it's hard to say. I've never explicitly positioned myself as an artist making games, but I have of course played around with the idea of it, most explicitly in Art Game. I've had various of my games shown in exhibitions at galleries around the world, which technically means I must be an artist in the art-world cultural sense, or at least acknowledged as one. But it doesn't feel like that affects me personally in terms of how I proceed with making games (I may be wrong on this). My practice (to use an art world term) has simply been to have an idea and make it. Of course, that corresponds fairly well to what artists might say they do anyway, so the whole thing is rather blurry!

Collaborating with Marina Abramovic definitely takes it to another level of art-worldness. What I appreciate most about the collaboration, though, is Marina's willingness to let it be as much about games and what they are and do as it is about performance art or art generally. That's meant spending time thinking about the intersections of the two, and how performance art and Marina's take on it might "look" in the world of a game. That's been quite rewarding.

As to audiences, I'm not always sure who the audience for my games is. First and foremost, it's me, of course, finding it funny or wanting a particular type of game to exist. Ideally I'd like anyone to play them, I generally try to make them as accessible as I can in terms of controls and instructions, and I have my parents, who are decidedly not gamers, test them, to make sure things should make sense. Again, I don't see the games as specifically speaking to an "art audience" per se. If anything, I suppose some of the games do reference other games and game culture enough that they're more fully understandable by people with a gaming background.

LCO: On games and art, I agree with you about the blurry distinctions between art and game objects, but the worlds, that is the markets, press, and enthusiast and academic communities, for the most part seem to pay little attention to one another. Yet in small bits here and there, gallery shows with games, game designers employing more studio art methods of practice, there is some convergence. Do you think this middle ground will become something larger than the niche between worlds it currently occupies? 

PB: I think it's probably inevitable, right? If nothing else, people who've grown up with games are going to be more and more likely to be comfortable positioning (some of) them as artworks they might see in a museum or gallery context. And meanwhile I think a lot of the "smaller" (e.g. not the Smithsonian, not MoMA) galleries are working through the ins and outs of actually displaying video games in a way that complements their nature (most obviously interactivity). It certainly feels to me like it's a happily expanding part of the art world. 

LCO: Many of your games, even when dealing with more serious subjects, are quite humorous. Though Marina Abramovic has certainly incorporated humor in her work at times, she and the high art world in general are often viewed from the outside as direly self-serious, if not esoterically so. How do you see humor functioning in the games you're working on for the MAI project? 

PB: Yes, this is one of the revelations of actually meeting with Marina. I had, like most people I suppose, expected her to be kind of severe or detached or... something. But in fact she's very warm, excited, funny. The humorous aspect of my games (and particularly The Artist is Present) was a big part of what had attracted her to them in the first place, and she certainly sees room within performance art and the institute itself for humour.

It's a fine line, though. I'm making a game version of the Marina Abramovic Institute, for instance. Now of course I want there to be humorous elements to be in there, as is my inclination, but it can't be too funny or it will detract from trying to communicate something genuine about the exercises people will practice in the institute. So the process of designing/building the game has been a kind of negotiation of what feels funny in the right spirit and what might push across into parody, for example.

Another side of this is that I do keep meaning to make a game or two that aren't about comedy or humorous takes on subjects. So I'm seeing some of the other exercise games as something of an opportunity to tackle a different style as well.

LCO: Humor in the MAI games sounds like an even trickier challenge the just personal humor in games in general, where it's rare enough to begin with. Adapting something like "Complaining to a Tree" already sort of sounds like a kind of satire just by the title. How do you see using a non-pixel art drawing style as playing into this, if at all? 

PB: Yes, the humour thing is tricky. I really do prefer games to have a sense of humour, but humour can turn into or be interpreted as a kind of parody or mockery rather than adding lightness and curiosity to an experience. One good thing about the sorts of exercises Marina's interested in, though, is that they're really much more about what you bring to them - they're not inherently deadly serious or ridiculous, it's about the stance of the person experiencing them. I think that's a great perspective to take, and a good one to bring across into games more and more too. As such, while something called "Complaining to a tree", which is literally about complaining to a tree, might seem ridiculous to people, it's entirely possible, I think, to commit to or accept the experience and really get something out of it. A great thing about a digital/game version is that it's even easier to try it out without the "risk" of feeling embarrassed by talking to a real tree.

LCO: It would seem that video games and performance art have many things in common. Would you say that video game players are performers, or is there a distinction to be made there?  

PB: Absolutely. That's been one of the more fun things about making the games, working through the connections between performance art and games and players. I don't necessarily think that video games are necessarily always performers (in the sense of art), but I think that a game can probably be made in such a way as to push the nature of play toward performance. In the case of the project with Marina, the emphasis is less on "performance" for the player/audience and more on an experience of reality, or ways of being in the moment, so that tension isn't such a bit thing for these games.

But yes, I like the idea of players taking the mantle of performance more seriously, or rather being allowed to do so, to have it facilitated. That was definitely the core motivator of Art Game for instance –not for me to make a specific experience for the player to go through, but rather for the player to take over and enact their own artistic talents in the world of the game and to take ownership of it. 

LCO: Do you enjoy going to art galleries and museums? Do you think these are good places to show games or do you think the inclusion of more games in such spaces would necessitate some sort of change in the way those institutions function? The MAI project seems like it could be an interesting take on an exhibition space for interactive or long-duration works like games. 

PB: I do like galleries and museums personally –saw a great Lichtenstein retrospective at the Pompidou in Paris, for instance. I haven't seen many exhibitions that touch on games though. I remember a show in Amsterdam, but that was essentially video-art based on games. And I was involved in a show in Copenhagen that displayed games, many or even most of them playable. It seemed to work pretty well actually. It traded successfully on the pleasures of watching play as well as playing.

I don't know if games would require museums/galleries to change in some sort of fundamental way, but there needs to be continued effort to allow people to play games in the spaces. And I suspect that the kinds of games that will "make sense" in museum/gallery contexts will be kind of specific too, or their creators might need to be aware of the context and make the game accordingly... or something. Certainly approaching a game in a gallery space isn't the same thing as playing on your phone or on your couch, and it's not like that's going to change.

MAI is intriguing, I agree. I don't have a great fix on how games/interactive work might actually feature at the institute as of yet, but I'm certainly hoping to have some input! 

LCO: So, Marina Abramovic is one of the biggest, most visible names in contemporary art. What was going through your mind when she initially got in touch with you? 

PB: It really was quite a shock to see an email in my inbox with the "from:" field reading "Marina Abramovic". The subject line was, appropriately enough, "Hello from Marina Abramović". Pretty great. I didn't completely believe it was genuine to be honest. I kind of felt like it was the sort of thing various of my friends might do as a joke, and of course it's not hard to fake email addresses and so on. So I took it with a grain of salt, I suppose, but also responded quite wholeheartedly in the hope that it was real... which it turned out to be. When I was finally sitting face to face with Marina over Skype, well, that was surreal. 

LCO: Was she interested in working with you on the MAI project right away or did that come later? 

PB: Some kind of collaboration was really on the table from the beginning. She'd played The Artist is Present pretty much when it came out two years ago and liked it (and even spoke about it sometimes at speaking engagements), but hadn't contacted me. I guess that with the institute and its emphasis on different routes into thinking about performance, awareness, science, technology etc., it seemed like the time to actually get in touch and try something. 

LCO: How do you like being a part of a Kickstarter campaign? Has the crowd funding format forced you to change your process at all? 

PB: It seems fine to me, but I really feel like I have total autonomy and that I don't necessarily have a great deal of "ownership" over the Kickstarter itself. I want it to succeed of course (that's why I'm participating), but I don't feel pressure concerning whether I'm part of the make-or-breakness of it, and certainly not that the backers might be disappointed by my games. I don't think they will be, but it's also the case that particularly in more of an "art context" like this it's not the case that you have the same level of consumerist desire and entitlement concerning the rewards, I suppose. 

LCO: Since the sky's the limit, it seems, on scoring collaborations with superstars (you're in the company of Jay Z and Lady Gaga now), any other artists or game devs you'd love to work with? 

PB: Hah! Yeah, I don't know. It's definitely been an interesting experience, and it's led to some very fun source material for games. If Jay Z comes knocking I might be able to be convinced to collaborate...

Blips: The Artist's Dilemma

Source: The Talk of Magicians
Author: Elizabeth Ryerson
Site: \\...........//

There's an interesting discussion occurring around the game Corrypt by Michael Brough. The conversation, started by game dev/composer/blogger Elizabeth Ryerson, centers on the game's aesthetics, which have largely been ignored by critics in favor of talking about mechanics. Ryerson goes on to give a descriptive analysis of how Corrypt's unassuming visuals embody the spirit of the game and are perfectly fitting. She presents comments from other indie game designers like Jon Blow, Zach Gage, and Greg Wohlwend as a sort of counterpoint, that if Brough had polished his graphics a bit more that Corrypt would have been a more marketable game, and could even have become a big hit. Blow and Gage have since defended their statements on Twitter and the comments section for Ryerson's article, saying that they did not mean to advise Brough to change what Corrypt looked like, but to more generally point out how close he is to having a commercial smash if he'd so choose.

I'm not a game designer, and I won't pretend to know best practices in that marketplace, but I am an artist who's been producing work for quite a few years now, and am personally familiar with the conflict between artist integrity and marketability. I've never sold a piece of art, as much as I'd have liked to. Sometimes I've produced artworks that are purposefully impossible to sell, like site-specific installations. Anyone want 10 6' gradient prints? I'm sure you've got a empty 35' stretch of wall that would be perfect for them. Art academia has taught me to be skeptical of the art market, if not to outright despise it. This is the perceived difference between choosing an "art" or a "design" path; "fine arts" or "visual communications." It becomes easy to pin designers as artists who have sold out, given up their dreams, and sacrificed their integrity to make some money.

This is a lie, of course, but it's a lie that I've told myself in the past as I look for answers as to why what I'm doing artistically cannot sustain me financially. Serialization is an issue as well. Even if I produce a work that is totally uncompromising, producing more works using that same idea in multiples or as a series can take on an aesthetic of factory production that could be perceived to undercut the market-agnostic concepts behind the work. However, curating a consistent aesthetic is key for building an audience that can recognize my art on sight as mine. It's the same reason I have trouble taking most graffiti artists seriously; it's not that they aren't producing visually interesting work, but rather often their output is meant to be anti-establishment, yet they're entirely defined by their own unabashed brand identities.

Art games always seemed to be coming from the other side of the spectrum, as the ugly ducklings in a market-driven community that never expected to make money, but it's cool when they do. Like the painters and sculptors before them though, they're be faced with the same ethical dilemmas about which moves compromise or do not compromise a work's artistic integrity. It's the reason big-budget games about revolution or "fighting the system" always ring a bit false. They've commodified revolt into a fun ride that ultimately encourages complacency, the opposite of insurgency. Knowing this, it's only logical that I'd seek to avoid making the same mistakes.

There's got to be a middleground though, and for each person, that may be a different place. For whatever reason, I'm more comfortable producing marketable writing, and while I still like to make art out of broken golf clubs and air mattresses, I like to take pictures too, which are far more market friendly. I don't write and take photographs because those products and services are easier to sell; I just enjoy doing them. I can imagine a similar thought process in games where accessibility is a pleasant happenstance, not a soul crushing mandate. But maybe that's a bit of a dream that only a very select few people can actually capitalize on. After all, I still haven't sold any photographs and am not getting paid to write this.

Blips: Jenova Chen's Journey

Source: A Journey to make Video Games into Art
Author: Laura Parker
Site; The New Yorker

Looking for more video game talk in mainstream publications? Check out The New Yorker where Laura Parker has written a delightful profile on Jenova Chen and his studio thatgamecompany's fight to complete the critically-acclaimed Journey. It's a story of struggle and going all-in on a risky idea, a company driven to bankruptcy in pursuit of an artistic vision. I'd heard about some of thatgamecompany's troubles during Journey's development, but the triumphs of the game, and the inspirational talks of now-former developers always outshone the behind-the-scenes hardships. It all kind of makes sense now though that developers who became much more well-known names because of Journey, Kellee Santiago, Chris Bell, Robin Hunicke, all left thatgamecompany once their work was finished. A company with no money can't sustain livelihoods.

I'm also delighted to hear that Jenova Chen and company have rallied new financial support and are hard at work on their next title. As someone who saw Journey as the refinement of ideas represented in thatgamecompany's two prior games, flOw and Flower, I'm eager to see which direction they go next. The question of how to improve from Journey leaves me stumped.

It's a pity the commenters on Parker's article are so hung up on continuing to debate whether games are or can be art. The article itself isn't out to stake any sort of broad claim, merely to contextualize the aspirations of Jenova Chen and his team. That's the story of Journey's development, and it's a pretty interesting one at that. Don't let the mere mention of words like "art" and "Ebert" distract you from considering the human story at the heart of the article.

Blips: Buyers Market

Source: Trying to Make Galleries Relevant, One JPEG at a Time
Author: Laura C. Mallonee
Site: Hyperallergic

In a nice critical article by Laura C. Mallonee for Hyperallergic, she offers a critique of the Send Me The JPEG art exhibition at New York's Winkleman Gallery. The piece details some of the growing frustrations in the art world as the art marketplace has become increasingly digitized. Basically, people are buying and selling art without ever seeing the work in person, which lowers patronage numbers at galleries and has the potential to disenfranchise artists looking to make work that won't be traded about like a commodified stock option. Mallonee even mentions that many artists have sought asylum in other fields that promise wide audiences are more willing to engage in the works on display, including video games.

While games certainly seem more culturally relevant than most gallery art these days (I say this as an artist myself), they have their own problems with transitioning to digital distribution models. The art that is being ignored in galleries often requires a physical presence with the work to attain a true understanding of it. Sometimes installations stimulate multiple senses, and texture and scale never translate well in digital images. Video games on the other hand, have always been digital material, but with physical casings and controllers. The elimination of cartridges and discs in favor of direct downloads makes sense on financial and material levels. However, while many players have no love loss for the large gaming retail chains like Gamestop or piles of decrepit game cases, it's questionable whether the same level of value is still attributed to games when they become purely digital applications (see the Xbox One DRM debacle).

The annual Steam Summer Sale just wrapped up this past weekend, and I, like many people, bought a few games. Now, I love that a digital marketplace like Steam has these kinds of sales because they seem to financially benefit all involved: players can buy more games for less cash, developers can see dramatically increased sales numbers, and Valve, the company that runs Steam, takes a cut and ensures that you'll engage in their service when you come back to play the games you just bought. The story happening in the background of this shopping spree is that people are buying loads of games that they'll never actually play. These players (or shoppers, I should say) have what's called a "pile of shame," referring to the giant list of games that they own that will never be touched.

I've personally bought 3 Humble Indie Bundles containing 5-8 games each for a grand total of less than $10. I've played maybe one fifth of those games. Digital distribution for games may allow for cheaper prices, but it also puts those games in the same marketplace category as candy bars in the checkout isle of the grocery store. Games that cost $1 are impulse buys, and though the video game industry has never really been ashamed of its capitalist marketplace foundation, I can't help but wonder if the non-monetary value of individual games hasn't decreased in equal measure.