Page 71 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

Game art, like other trends in new media art, used emerging technologies for artistic purposes. In this respect advances in PC hardware and software played a very important role in spurring the appearance of this trend in the 1990s. So did that fact that this generation of creators had grown up in direct contact with the computers and videogames of the 1980s (Tribe and Jana 2006: 10).Game art uses emerging technologies for artistic purposes. It borrows audiovisual elements from videogames and adapts them to the context of conventional art.Strategies of the cultural industry of videogames as a stimulus to artistic productionA major milestone in the history of game art comes from the cultural industry of videogames of that period. The videogame Doom (1993), made by ID Software, pioneered a new economic and social model with an initiative that was nearly a decade ahead of the phenomenon of user-generated content (crowdsourcing). ID Software brought out a smaller, free version of the game via Internet shareware channels and other online services. The result of this new tactic was that more than 15 million copies of the original game were downloaded worldwide (Manovich 1998).By o ering its software free, along with a detailed description of the game formats anda level editor, ID Software enabled players to extend their own product, creating new levels of play. The company’s self-hacking thus gave way to a whole host of content created by users themselves, which became new levels available on the Internet to be downloaded and modi ed by anyone.Here was a new cultural economy that transcended the usual relationship between producers and consumers (...): The producersde ne the basic structure of an object, and release a few examples as well as tools to allow consumers to build their own versions. (Manovich 1998)They later released a full, corrected commercial version of the game. This was therefore a historic moment. ID Software’s strategic decision ushered in a series of concepts and tools that played a determining role in the creation of new artistic discourses. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the phenomenon generated a large corpus of experimental creations, such as player-developed modi cations (mods), machinimas (audiovisual pieces produced from videogame settings, characters and environments) and other creative formats related to digital games.FIG. 2: Photograms from BlackShark’s machinima The 1k project, 2006. Film recorded by editing a thousand di erent races using the replay editor of the videogame Trackmania SunriseVideogames: motive, device and tool for artistsThe combination of the abovementioned social and cultural factors, coupled with an overall sensation of enthusiasm and fascination with the potential of this new technology, aroused an unprecedented level of interest in game art among the artistic community.Borrowing audiovisual elements from videogames and adapting them to in the context of conventional art is probably the most commonly used strategy in the art of the period. To do so, artists did not need to know anythingAC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 201671Smart Culture: Impact of the Internet on Artistic Creation