Page 72 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

72about the technology or dynamics of digital games (Mitchell and Clarke 2003, Stockburger 2007: 29).From a viewpoint close to painting, photography or infographics, we nd works such as Miltos Manetas’s People Playing Videogames (1997–98). Infographics such as Game City, by Totto Renna (Fig. 3), and Eva and Franco Mattes’s portraitsof avatars from the virtual world Second Life, Portraits (2006) likewise draw on the culture of digital games in di erent ways.Further examples are sculptures such as Brody Condon’s 650 Polygon JohnCarmack (2004), a three-dimensional representation of computer scientist John Carmack, one of the founders of the developer ID Software, and Need for Speed. Cargo cult (2005), in which Condon replicates a model of a car extracted from the race simulation series Need for Speed (since 1994) using cast urethane branches.North Africa to southern Andalusia. In another video, Readyplayed (2006) by Ludic Society,on Parkour in the suburbs of French cities, the visual aesthetic provided by pixelated analogue material and certain other details such as a status bar on a screen give it the appearance of a retro videogame. An example of a project that uses graphic materials extracted from games to compose plastic pieces is Brent Gustafson’s AX/ BX (2005), generated from 128 di erent home screens of arcade games.The need to question the rulesThe systemic nature of digital games, the fact they are algorithmic structures governed by unambiguous rules, has clashed from the outset with artists’ bold, disruptive and provocative approaches.This is possibly why the rst creative tactics linked to the language of videogames were modi cations. Mods require some knowledge of the rules and computing system of a particular game, and sometimes even an understanding of a wider context such as the fans and the community built around the game. Interventions of this kind are often critical or ironic.Game mods are reverse engineering: creative manipulations of the software of any videogame to create a di erent experience.We might think of game mods as a sort of reverse engineering. Basically, they entail freely appropriating and modifying the software of any videogame in order to create a di erent experience (Baigorri 2004). The formal starting point of this inverse engineering is code patches that alter the graphics, architecture, sound, design or physics of existing computer games on the market (Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D, Max Payne, etc.).These creative manipulations of the software (and sometimes the hardware too) stem fromFIG. 3: Game City, by Totto Renna.Similarly, we also nd audiovisual pieces such as Estrecho Adventure (1996) by Valeriano López:a video creation with a videogame aesthetic that explores immigration from the coasts ofVIDEOGAME DESIGN AND DISRUPTIVE PRAXIS · LARA SÁNCHEZ COTERÓN