Gamification of art and culture
A game by its very nature generally involves interaction between several people, and it is this characteristic that has often been used by artists who have a relational vocation, that is, who are not content to show their work to the public but intend to involve them in the process in emotional, intellectual and physical ways.
A recent and significant example of this ‘use’ of game dynamics in the artistic field is represented by the installation of the Italian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019). Milovan Farronato, the curator, designed a labyrinth in which the works were to be sought out by the visitors. The exhibition path led to a sort of game, in which one was to aim at discovering the works which were not immediately visible but, for example, instead announced by sound or music, evoked by small cracks in the exhibition structure or, finally, hidden behind a veil. However, as is the very nature of the labyrinth, the aim of the spatial mechanism was not only for viewers to find something, as happens, for example, in the labyrinths of neoclassical gardens, but also to experience an encounter with the unknown, with something that may just appear from one moment to the next. All of these aspects belong to the dimension of the game. This is what we can also observe, for example, in some works of art with a spatial characteristic conceived in the 1960s by artists who wanted to involve the public, such as the Italian Piero Manzoni or England’s Ralph Rumney, Robyn Denny and Richard Smith, who imagined art exhibitions inspired by the labyrinth. Manzoni designed the Placentarium in the early 1960s, which the artist himself describes in this way:
[It is] a kind of labyrinth composed of several cells (environ 60) controlled by an electronic brain. The ‘subject’, that is the spectator himself (his psychic structure). According to his reactions he will be directed autonomously rather towards one itinerary than another, an itinerary that will solicit in him different sensations, according to the unconscious choice that he will make. For some it will be banal, for others it will trigger upsetting reactions. For example, while in one cell he will be expelled, in another he will not be able to find a way out, while in the meantime the ceiling will be lowered threatening to crush him. And when he is close to finding the solution to get out, a voice will insult him and mock him by obstructing him.
(Celant, 1989, p. 262)
The labyrinth is, as can be seen from this description, a futuristic space conceived according to the same criteria that in more recent years will be used for the creation of video games.
Place, on the other hand, is the title of a space created in 1959 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London by a group of painters from the Royal College of Art.1 It was an exhibition-labyrinth, a ‘unité d’ambiance’, which immersed the viewer along a path full of obstacles made up of large-format paintings, which were also presented at an angle to the floor. Explicitly inspired by the concept of a game, the environmental installation was intended to investigate visitors’ behaviour. In the space saturated with paint, circulation was bound by certain rules and dictated by the path. Viewers could follow a path following a single colour of their choice between red, green, white and black. The viewers thus became an active part of the work, and the work works could not disregard the surrounding physical and psychic environment. It was to all intents and purposes a work strongly influenced by Guy Debord’s Situationist thinking. Game in this specific kind of cultural context is conceived as a system of rules aimed at provoking a playful experience for the player, regardless of the result to be achieved. This is a democratic conception of game, inspired by chess, in which players are aware of their role and not pawns manipulated by capitalist society. Game is in fact intended for Situationists as a metaphor for the world of work. We read in the first issue of the International Situationist, the press release of Debord’s movement:
play - the permanent experimentation of new playfulness - does not appear in any way outside the ethics, the question of the meaning of life. The only success one can conceive in the game is the immediate success of its atmosphere, and the constant increase of its powers.2
Game, therefore, is not at all foreign to art, starting, at least, from the avant-garde (it is enough to remember the value of the game of chess for Marcel Duchamp) and up to the neo-avant-garde, but today it has considerably expanded its presence in the world of art and in that of society, especially among the young with whom art itself continually interacts. With the spread of new technologies, the game has also changed its face and has become one of the most extensive areas in which digitization, computer science and social work are applied. Video games, emerging as a simple pastime in the now-distant era of Pong (1972), have become a tool capable of ludicrously conveying contents in the fields of education and strategic marketing; it has even become a means with which to do scientific research. One can just think, for example, of the valuable application of the video game Foldit, the innovative online puzzle which has made an important contribution to research on HIV treatment.
