Page 70 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

70To speak of playing games is not a conceptual redundancy but an assertion that underlines the di erence between ludic activity and designed object. Playing games entails subjecting ludic activity to a series of rules, mechanics and challenges that are sometimes negotiable but predetermined by formal design parameters. We need to bear these nuances very much in mind when establishing links between digital games and art, a eld heavily imbued with action, attitude and experience of play as the essence of artistic creation (Huizinga 2008).It can be said that videogames, as digital examples of games, are possibly the most unique and complex cultural artefacts that currently exist, the predominant twenty- rst-century form of culture (Eric Zimmerman 2013). Attempts to analyse them as a cultural device stem from the desire to acknowledge them as an art form derived from the human drive to play, a need comparable to the act of composing music as a cultural construct related to the pleasure of listening to sounds or creating narratives and making lms in response to the human impulse of storytelling (Costikyan 2013).Attitude and experience of play are the essence of artistic creation. Videogames are the most unique and complex cultural artefacts that exist today.Digital games can be traced back to the emergence of computing systems in isolated science labs at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century (Fig.1) in an age when western art and counterculture, much more mature, rebelled against conventions and questioned established ideas. During these early years videogames were overlooked, regarded as mere technological curiosities, and it wasn’t until three decades later that their social acceptance and their speci city and complexity as a form of culture began to appeal to artistic sensibilities.FIG. 1: Spacewar! (1961) one of the rst videogames in history, developed at the MIT by Steve Russell, Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen, mounted on a PDP-1 computer (Computer History Museum, California).Game art as a subgenre of new media artBy the mid-1990s artists, curators and critics were starting to use the term new media art to refer to artistic projects created and developed using new digital technologies (Manovich 2001, Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 2003, Tribe and Jana 2006). Various authors cite works which span the broad practical range of the new technologies, displaying an outstanding degree of conceptual sophistication, technological innovation and social signi cance, and examine the cultural, political and aesthetic possibilities of these digital tools (Tribe and Jana 2006: 6, 7). The eld of new media art is characterised by interactivity, networks and computation and is often about process – that is, patterns of behaviour – rather than objects (Graham and Cook 2010).It was during this period, in the mid-1990s, that game art began to take shape as a subgenre of new media art. The iconography of videogames had already become a part of shared cultural capital – the set of icons that artists could reasonably expect their audience to recognise (Mitchell and Clarke 2003). Apart from this status as references, which we might classify as cosmetic, videogames began to provide creators with a rich source of interesting and relevant themes.VIDEOGAME DESIGN AND DISRUPTIVE PRAXIS · LARA SÁNCHEZ COTERÓNSmart Culture: Impact of the Internet on Artistic Creation