game – we respond together

Flappy Bird in a museum

December 5, 2020

I started off on Wikipedia’s “List of video games considered artistic”, a curated list based on game designers and art critics, which was already a weird place to be. Who gets to definitely decide what is ‘artistic’ or not? As I was scrolling through the list, one game in particular caught my eye: Flappy Bird. I remember how the game became instantly famous overnight. Everyone and their mother was addicted to the incredibly simplistic game, to the point where the creator eventually had it taken off the app store. But despite its success, should it really be considered art? According to Wikipedia, the “arcade-style mobile game [is] now present in both the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.” This raised another series of questions because I’ve been grappling with the idea of video games as art for a while now. While I do agree that game designers are artists, is it the type of art that can be imagined in galleries and prestigious museums? I tried to look further into whether it had been exhibited, etc., but I couldn’t find too much more on the subject. But who knows- as digital media and entertainment becomes more popular, maybe we’ll start seeing pop culture start to mesh with the world of fine art.

Flower

December 3, 2020

I was searching for artistic games and came across the game Flower. It immediately caught my eye as I thought the graphics were really calming and artsy, and I was like…is this really a game? Flower is a video game developed by Thatgamecompany and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was primarily intended to arouse positive emotions in the player, rather than to be a challenging and fun game. The game allows the player to control the wind as it takes a single petal around the world, giving everything it touches a breath of new life. You then create a floral trail that flows through the world that you have created as you guide the petals against the wind. The game involves colorful flowers and the graphics gives off a very relaxing feel which gives that sense of life as you play the game.

Reviewers praised the game’s music, visuals, and gameplay, calling it a unique and compelling emotional experience. It was named the “best independent game of 2009” at the Spike Video Game Awards, and won the “Casual Game of the Year” award by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.

Hoa and Cuphead

November 27, 2020

We’ve talked a lot about how artists use games as a medium for their works, but I’ve also been interested in how games borrow from existing art. For example, Hoa is an absolutely beautiful indie game that is based on studio Ghibli movies. The art style is an absolutely perfect recreation of the movies and the animations/gameplay seamlessly incorporate the style. I highly recommend you google and watch a game trailer – you can’t totally understand how well-executed it is until you see it. Another really incredible looking game that recreates existing art styles is Cuphead, which looks exactly like an old hand-animated Disney cartoon. Making these games looks super labor-intensive, but with increasingly powerful image processing and generating technology, I wonder if more games like these will be possible in the future.

Apotheon

September 25, 2020

Apotheon is a 2D action game whose art style and narrative is based on Ancient Greek mythology. I was thinking about this game after our conversation about appropriating art, and I think this game does a good job of celebrating and appreciating this style rooted in Greek culture instead of just borrowing parts for the aesthetic and failing to really represent the culture it’s based on (but correct me if I’m wrong, I’m no Greek mythology expert). I also just think games with unique art styles are super cool because games are such dynamic mediums. It’s like trying to frame movie shots without having control of the camera. The different ways developers try and guide the player’s point of view and form scenes that can be engaged with functionally in many ways but are still visually pleasing regardless of the player’s choices are really fascinating to me.