Visionaries & Revisionaries
Although the art community and gaming circles aren’t always traditionally linked, their capacity to augment each other is clear. This is, of course, excluding the utterly essential art-direction and design in any game production process. I speak here of the more traditional art world. An artist need not even be tech-savvy or have anything to do with digital art to be considered a ‘new media’ artist. Creators are utilizing the vast potential of the internet to grant their work exposure, and video games are still a marginalized medium in that context. The union of the gaming world and art world holds potential for an increasingly globalized exposure and dissemination of forms and content. Many artists attempt to embrace the ever-growing body-without-organs, while still attempting to realize a fundamentally enjoyable gaming experience.
In the effort to preserve the integrity of each form, game and art should remain linked but distinct, for they each offer equally great rewards. Scott McCloud writes (illustrates), regarding the co-opting of text and image, that they are akin to dance partners, that “when both partners try to lead, the competition can subvert the overall goals” (McCloud, 2000). A successful hybridization of art and game reaches the same equilibrium, lest the two muddle each other, resulting in neither an effective art space, nor an enjoyable gameplay experience. Fortunately, an exuberant community of gamers and artists contribute willingly to see these projects turn into living, vibrant experiences. The digital landscape is wrought with creators, manipulators, authors of entire sagas and worlds. The line between producer and consumer ushering itself out the back door of the room at this point. The nature of the beast dictates that production never stops (just ask D&G). The audience, equipped with tools for modification and revision, are given the chance to revisit and re-appropriate content, making it their own. And revisit they will continue to do. Communicative, collaborative propensities come part and parcel with the interactive networks sharing nodes of virtual communities.
Then Now…
The story until now has been the family road trip, as McLuhan would’ve envisioned it. Designers with some predilection for the rearview mirror have chauffeured the gaming community, tempered wheel in hand. Fatigue sets in, however. Embracing the necessity for assistance, the driver bequeaths the wheel, allowing the passengers a go. The new medium is a collaborative medium, patriarchal in some senses, peer-based in others. In either case, as tools become more refined, a truly dynamic system has come to fruition, becoming more intuitive and alive every day, as the virtual population grows.
John Cage once treated a series of compositions writing that he wished to escape the ‘tempered system’ of intonation and scale. This is an approach that resonates with Andre Breton and the surrealists. McLuhan, as well, exhibited the same brand of progressive thought. He punned ‘now all the world’s a sage.’ Never before has this been so apparent than in the virtual world, the manifested global village. The same capacity for creation is now opening up to a new realm of creators. The ease of access and fluidity of production are demonstrable features. A highly proficient and creative base of visionaries revisionaries have found a new incentive to engage with art in a new medium. The incentive is global access that denies corporeal borders, and the engagement is reflexive and alive.