Page 76 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

76Oven, in collaboration with the Dutch National Ballet, takes this idea as a basis to devise a dance game for two players. Each player grasps one end of the mobile and they must both rotate it and twist their bodies around a virtual sphere following a path of rings.With a less evident but no less direct correlation, the eld of experimental games has comeup with designs such as Memory of a Broken Dimension (Fig. 6), a project by XRA of theUS that provides a disturbing and dystopic experience using a spatial and narrative game design very close to the extreme modi cations made by game artists of the 1990s.Creative game action vs instrumental game actionAnother signi cant eld to be explored is the actions that artists carry out within massively multiplayer online games. Like other media, games give rise to beliefs through their systems of representation and mechanics; artistic interventions of this kind tend to generate transgressive or ritual actions that are unsettling and therefore often help us reconsider the nature of these normative environments.Games give rise to beliefs through their systems of representation. Generating transgressive actions in response to these normative environments is unsettling and helps us reconsider their nature.Indeed, a great many artists have used game landscapes for interventions within the game itself, such as projects with a markedly ethical focus. An example is Velvet Strike (2001), which is the product of collaboration between artists Joan Leandre, Anne-Marie Schleiner and Brody Condon and intended as a protest action within the massively multiplayer online game Counter Strike (1999) by using spray paint to create anti- war gra ti. The project was devised at the start of former US president George Bush’s war onterrorism and sparked controversy among regular Counter Strike gamers. Dead in Iraq (2006), by Joseph Delappe, is likewise a modi cation ofthe videogame America’s Army (2002), which came out on the third anniversary of the startof the US invasion of Iraq. The author entered this multiplayer online videogame, which was developed as a recruitment tool for the US army, as an avatar called Dead in Iraq and wrote the names, areas of service, ages and dates of death of each of the soldiers killed in the war.Another ethical and political action, this timein a game environment with a single player,is Magnasanti. This is the name given by architecture student Vincent Ocasla in 2010 to the city he created inside the game Sim City 3000. Ocasla built a highly optimised city based on parameters of functionality that in fact turned out to be a hellish, totalitarian metropolis where six million residents and a total population of nine million lived in very hostile conditions (Arida 2014).It is also interesting to stress actions that are curious, aesthetic or even gross at rst sight, such as Brody Condon’s Suicide Solution (2004), a compilation of acts of suicide from more than 50 action videogames performed by the main character in the game, manipulated by the artist.However, attitudes of this kind are as common and diverse among artists as they are among players. These acts of playing are linked toa subversive, curious type of player whoplays outside the limits of the game system, sometimes spotting technical or design cracks in the game, sometimes hacking codes.The act of playing creatively is related to the moments when the player conceives a new experience from the design elements pre- established by the designer. This type of act of playing is related to the ability of users of digital games to address situations from an approach di erent to that imposed by the game system. Some players derive a certain amount of pleasureVIDEOGAME DESIGN AND DISRUPTIVE PRAXIS · LARA SÁNCHEZ COTERÓNSmart Culture: Impact of the Internet on Artistic Creation