Game as an artistic tool: the art perspective

The essentially ‘social’ nature of games and, therefore, of ‘gamification’ goes back to at least the avant-garde in the artistic field, especially among those artists who, following the example of Marcel Duchamp, have opened the sphere of art to everyday life. There could be many examples of its earlier manifestations, but, thinking about the role that new technologies have at the origins of this phenomenon, we can cite a famous performance by John Cage. Protagonist of Fluxus, the postwar movement that programmatically wanted to establish a relationship between art and society by investigating mass communication, Cage conceived a performative action in the form of participation in some very popular television programs such as I’ve Got a Secret in the United States in 1960 and Lascia o raddoppia by Mike Bon-giorno in Italy in 1959. Presenting himself as an expert in mushrooms for Mike Bongiorno’s quiz, he created a short circuit with the normal rhythms and themes of the popular TV game, proposing a Fluxus concert entitled Sounds of Venice made of silences and sounds caused by using common objects such as boiling pots and water being poured from a watering can. The aim of this performative art form was to ‘educate’ the public, creeping into the medium itself and making them aware of the power of television in the information system. In this work, there are already all of the elements that have been found in the works of New Media Art since the 1990s.

In the field of New Media Art, an artistic form already having been extensively discussed because it is young and resistant to the more traditional definitions of a ‘work of art’, a creative vein inspired by video games has developed in recent decades. The video game itself is considered as an art form by several scholars who have been studying it from a cultural perspective since the beginning of the 21st century. In 2006, Matteo Bittanti summarized these interventions starting with the definition formulated by Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT in Boston. According to Jenkins (2005) ‘Video games represent a new lively art, specific to the digital age, just as previous art forms have characterized the mechanical age’ (p. 313). Also, Steven Poole in Trigger Happy (Poole, 2000) has argued that the very development of video games represents an art that transcends traditional categories, and James Paul Gee (Gee, 2006) has suggested that in order to properly understand the artistic status of video games, it is essential to develop new interpretative methodologies that go beyond those adopted for other forms of creativity such as literature or cinema.

In accepting these definitions that Matteo Bittanti introduces, however, a distinction between game artists and Game Artists emerges. In Bittanti’s perspective (2006), while the former are generally programmers and web designers who make video games for commercial purposes, the latter make works of Art Games, ‘videogames specifically developed for artistic, i.e. non-commercial purposes’ (p. 316). The latter are generally characterized by contents that have in themselves political, social or historical aspects and whose purpose is not, therefore, strictly and only playful. To better highlight the difference between commercial video games and Art Games, Bittanti relies on Kristine Ploug’s definition (Ploug, 2005), according to which some games are created specifically as art projects; therefore, it is the intentionality of the author or curator to define the scope of the game. Moreover, Bittanti concludes that it is always possible to include some commercial video games in the category of Art Games, such as ICO by Funito Ueda (2001), Electroplankton by Toshio Iwaii (2005), Rez by Tetsuya Mi-zuguchi or Okami by Clover Studio (2006), where the boundaries between the space of art and that of a game are extremely blurred.

That video games are a medium that arouses great interest from an artistic point of view is also demonstrated by a third approach to the art/ video game relationship that is represented by Game Art - or video game art - in which it is possible to include ‘any artifact in which digital games have played a crucial role in the creation, production and/or exhibition of the artifact itself’ (Bittanti, 2005, p. 317). Game Art is not necessarily a technological art form, but it aims at reflecting critically on the language, role and status of video games in contemporary society because it exploits both the linguistic logic - aesthetic and interactive - and the ‘power’ of penetration and enjoyment within society, especially among young people. These works reveal the communicative potential of the video game, the bearer of a subliminal message that directly reaches the player/spectator in a physical way.