Dear Player: Punching Paintings, Where Form Meets Function

What do videogames do? What do videogames want? This is a story about iconoclasm and blood, dystopia and freedom. To start thinking about videogames as an artistic medium, let’s begin with looking at how games comment on the art world. Let’s start with a painting:

With light, dry and delicate touches, Monet set to work painting this river scene [below] in 1874. The location was an industrial town just outside of Paris, during a period of dramatic social change. The second industrial revolution was in full swing, and paranoia abounded concerning France’s industrial capacity in the shadow of an emergent Germany. Nearby Paris itself had only just experienced the revolution of the Commune. But what we have here reduces its comment on the urban, political and industrial vicissitudes of its time to a few flecks of paint on the horizon. What the painting wants is latent in what it hides. Tranquil, harmonious colour complementaries assure its audience that the French state will live on, and that its middle class buyers have long open prospects for leisurely outings on the Seine.

Like all paintings, this one is not simply disinterested, pure form, of the kind Formalists like Kant and Bell theorise, but part of a world-view and an economy – though its function has changed over time. Indeed, so has its form.

On December 6th 2014, a Mr Andrew Shannon was convicted for punching this Monet painting, then worth £7.8million and hanging in the National Gallery of Ireland.

“Judge Martin Nolan jailed the thug, who has 48 previous convictions, for six years and suspended the final 15 months on strict conditions, including that he not enter a gallery or any other public institution where paintings are displayed. The Irish Mirror reports that Shannon was carrying a can of paint stripper with him at the time of attack, and had stopped and looked at the iconic Taking of Christ by Caravaggio before thumping the Monet. Although he never admitted it, police suspect Shannon attacked the painting in a “bid to get back at the State”” (Daily Mirror, 06/12/2014)

What was a formed object became a formless aggregate. With one punch the illusion of depth, a complete surface and the idea of an inviable aesthetic object, was shattered – all the result of a distortion. Where its formative principle was the application of marks in colour relationships on a 2D surface, it only took a dent to wipe away millions of pounds and reduce it to a ruined piece of cloth

3 days after the conviction in New York, a group of game developers made this free browser-based game, ‘punchamonet’, offering anyone in the world the chance to inflict 1000s of dollars of damage on an impressionist painting. It went viral over the past month, the twittersphere ate it up, and what was intended by its makers to be a cathartic re-enactment started to be confused with the crime itself. On social media people considered the game a “celebration” and endorsement of real-world vandalism, some even remarking they’d prefer to punch the maker of the game than play it. But the discussion it prompted was varied – what was the difference, some suggested, between this game of the event and reportage, or indeed between a game about art, and art?

There is no goal in this game, no reward, no end-state. We could dauddle forever, or rush up and punch it until it falls off the wall. However the space we are in is claustrophobic, framed much like the painting, it’s a focused stage, there is only the virtual painting and our crudely rendered fist, a punk aesthetic. We are a machine for punching, we have no body. The scene is static apart from a pictured fist and painting – the walls are unyielding textures which don’t even bear a trace of shadow, while a counter indifferently clocks the damage as cost but a s a positive integer. Where Monet built up the original canvas with light, feathery touches, and galleries since have put it at arm’s length, this game allows us to crack and tear its horizon, and turn a $12million masterpiece into a broken object. No wonder this game touched a nerve.

Much like the press, as players we must reflect on motive, the depth of our attachment to the Monet, and the nature of our encounter with it. The rigid linear perspective of the game environment meets the diffuse impressionism of the painting with deliberate force. If the game space is structured around 1-point perspective, it is the point which punctures the old medium of paint.

By putting the conventions of first-person action games like this (famed as a genre for rewarding indiscriminate disembodied violence) into play with the history of iconoclasm (such as Richardson’s courageous attack on institutionalised patriarchy, axing a velasquez) punchamonet provokes interesting questions about the relationship of art and video games, the gallery goer and the object on display, and the form and function of art objects.

Why, in a gallery, must we always look but not touch? This painting was an intense labour of touch, but set in a gilt frame on a gallery wall we can only look. Sometimes by breaking things we discover more about how their parts relate. If a lot of people consider games to be reductively all about violence, is a reverential, purely visual relationship to painting not equally reductive and limited? Is spouting art historical jargon in front of a painting more productive than playing with it.

Why are some paintings more valuable than human beings? Do we feel squeamish about punching an iconic painting? Do we feel squeamish about paying people less than living wage? Why should the police put you in jail for 6yrs if you did it in real life? That’s the maximum sentence for violent racially-motivated assault (though granted, that’s something police do with impunity to this day – but then again, all cops are bastards).

What do we value artworks for? If a digital copy shares so many of the formal features does it deserve the same level of respect? Does it fulfil the same function? The painting was quickly restored, and Monet himself is famous for painting series and copies – so why is it that breaking an electronic copy is legally meaningless, and breaking a piece of stained cloth in situ is deemed a violent thuggish attack against the body politick, defined in the language of Terrorism ‘revenge on the State’?

[Baldessari, Cremation Project 1970]

But conversely, why do critics of the game confuse the game with the crime – like a long line of conservative commentators who try to link simulated violence to real violence, blaming Grand Theft Auto for tragedies such as the Columbine killings? Could we relate punchamonet more productively to precedents in the art world? Artists have been destroying paintings to question their value and inviolability since the 1960s.

Like all interactive art, punchamonet gives no definite answers, but instead exposes relationships through play, which we can think of as both its form and function – aesthetic, instrumental and performative. Moreover, it's easy to argue that all art is interactive, even paintings. They just tend to be a bit more subtle about their ideology.

I opened with this example of an intersection between art history, museums and video-games, because I think it shows us how even a very formally simple-seeming game can be diverse and complex in terms of function, the kinds of question it makes us ask, and shows that video games offer us fascinating insights into the way form and function relate in art.

In the rest of this lecture I want to show you how games are taking on the critical philosophical and political roles that we’re more familiar with seeing in avant-garde ‘fine’ art, to suggest that what video games ‘want’ is as rich and various as any other medium.

Inadequate Definitions

Some of you might still be uncomfortable with ‘video games’ and ‘art’ sitting in the same sentence. I hope by the end you might be bit sceptical of both the category of games and of fine art, but for now, let’s see why we might want to take what society labels ‘video games’, seriously.

First some inadequate definitions. OED: “An activity or diversion of the nature of or having the form of a contest or competition, governed by rules of play, according to which victory or success may be achieved through skill, strength, or good luck.” How do we feel about that, where is the skill, strength or luck in punchamonet? What about games with no rules, no victory or no end?

Proteus is as much a massage as a game – an aimless wandering around a sonorous world. Passage recreates the harrowing first minutes of the film Up, facing the player with inevitable demise and charting the affective character of a life story in all of 5 minutes. Second Life is exactly that, a whole other world, made and perpetuated ad infinitum by its digital denizens – there is no end.

Indeed, many ludologists have tied themselves in knots listing the essential qualities of games. I prefer Flannagan’s open definition from the reading: “Games can be thought of more productively as situations with guidelines and procedures” (2009). Here games can be thought of as more about the relationships between objects than objects themselves, and relate to Kaprow’s happenings or conceptual art. Johan Huizinga, the grandfather of game studies, went so far in 1938 as to argue that games are central to the formation of all art: “All art derives from play”. Perhaps games are best understood as art in a state of becoming.

Museums Appropriating Games

Institutions have certainly proven resistant to accepting games as art – by some measures it’s taken almost twice as long as the adoption of other media such as photography and film. Why has this been the case? Well I think part has to do with these problems we found defining their form. For some more answers let’s look at the Museum of Modern Art’s approach to games

Playing games was eventually canonised as art-appreciation by the art world when MoMA accepted 14 games into its permanent collection in 2012. This acknowledged videogames increasing importance across society. The industry is forecast to exceed $100billion by 2017, making painting look like a niche subcultural activity. The medium is generating avant-garde counter-cultures, virtual communities and economies such as Second Life, as well as blockbusters involving the same investment in money and manpower as the highest grossing films. PewDiePie, a commentator on action videogames is the worlds most subscribed youtube star, making someone playing games the most watched thing on the planet. Indeed games are all around us, commentator’s like Charlie Brooker being quick to point out that social networks are essentially games – where players manage resources such as statuses and followers, in order to accrue reward tokens such as likes and retweets, all through a slick graphical interface

Perhaps this gets us our answer – games are too popular, too commercial, and so pervasive in the modern world that they sink into it. If ‘All art is derived from play’, broadly construed, perhaps games are more a generative state of being than an assemblage of things. Too much function, too little form?

Tellingly, it is mainly through their aesthetic visual formal properties that the first games are being legitimised by museums like MoMA, while for academia and the press, it is the critical, political and personal qualities of independently produced games which confer on them value. MoMA standardises and frames all its games uniformly, like paintings in a white cube gallery – they are given labels and rubrics which look solely at origins rather than use, and describe the games visually and in terms of what happens, like a video piece, rather than engage them on a thematic or critical level, often with a smattering of comparisons to canonical paintings to add some pedigree.

What we see here is an old structure behind the way art objects are controlled and used in the West according to the interests of Power. Cultural institutions claim the objects concerned are universal, aesthetic and purely formal constructs whose political functions are elided or framed to engender an audience of passive consumers. Commercial capitalist institutions similarly claim the objects concerned are instrumental, entertaining and purely functional constructs whose political functions are elided or framed to engender an audience of passive consumers. In the main, what progressive, subversive space that remains since the 19th-century has involved (in all art) playing one against the other, and exposing the way form and function inflect each other in an attempt to increase the awareness of the audience, in our case, players.

So, Tetris is a collectable game, because it’s so planar, visual and abstract like a Mondrian or an abstract Expressionist painting, but Second Life is not because it is counterculture, not high-culture. Proteus isn’t a commercial game because it’s niche, open to interpretation and loosely framed as an experience, while Angry Birds is a game because its sole marketed purpose is entertainment.

Indeed, visual formal properties of games are an important element – from virtual objects and textures pictured within the game to the spaces of colour and tone which consume the screen, but very quickly these become hard to separate from function when it comes to discussing interface, how the player interacts with the game. MoMA attempts to hide as much of the interface as possible, using uniform shelves, and sinking the controllers used to play the games into recesses, all to encourage uninterrupted visual desire and maintain the illusion of immediate access to an objective spectacle.

But can we really restrict a game’s form to its screen? Shouldn’t we consider the buttons we press as a formal component essential to the experience? And if the interface is part of the game, what about the individual? The suspension of disbelief, the suturing with the screen, our own attentiveness and input are essential to creating the game – what is a game without the player? The horror game Alone uses a Virtual-reality headset to simulate a game within a game. By sucking us in Inception-style, it leaves us all the more exposed and vulnerable to changes in the first degree of simulation by pushing the ‘interface’ deeper into the game. In a series such as Telltale’s The Walking Dead, a clunky, obvious interface forces the player to reflect on moral consequence, and deep sensations of guilt and regret are instilled in the player by breaking the fourth wall. In one instance a visual cue tells the player a character will remember their actions, only to have that character die seconds later. By letting us believe we are in the safe position of an omniscient narrator, we are unprepared for the sucker-punch of a game that breaks its own rules. Games are therefore material as well as visual, emotionally affective as well as virtual, political as well as playful

Beyond the Gallery: Identity and Politics

Many games in the public sphere highlight their capacity to deal with more than aesthetics or amusement by reflecting on the medium, their physicality and their interface. Those like Depression Quest deliberately avoid sensory immersion in order to foreground the experience of an invisible disability. Here the game shows the player not only functional choices they can make, but choices they cannot in order to allow an empathetic encounter, as well as a cathartic reification of the symptoms of depression. Instead of being pushed to win, the game removes pressure from the player and encourages self-awareness by distancing the player from the game. Nevertheless it remains affective, allowing the player to project their own imagination and self-image over the blank text with little formal interference, making player emotions a key material aspect of the game.

By contrast, Gone Home encourages a very intimate and tactile investigation of a specific life-story – where the player sifts through objects, scrutinising the old media of the recent past from photo-albums to cassette tapes to trigger reminiscences about the absent characters in the game, like a ghost in your own home. You discover the moving and personal account of your character’s sister and her girlfriend through affective encounters with virtual objects. Here game tokens are instead vectors of memory, and button-presses are psychometric encounters with sublimated life experiences. Instead of interacting with the game space through violence associated with most first-person games, Gone Home fosters self-acceptance and self-discovery – inverting the genre by removing all visual traces of the player’s body, the player focuses instead inwardly in meditation and self-reflection.

Gone Home received high praise for dealing with a non-white hetero-male life experience, the story of a young gay woman, but like Depression Quest it also courted abuse and attacks from reactionary elements of the game-playing community. This right-wing homophobic, ableist, racist and misogynist element self-identifies as #Gamergate. #Gamergate can be understood as a symptom of the changing terrain of games. As games increasingly expand their functions and audiences, groups with privilege attempt to limit what games do and who they act on behalf of, sending verbal assaults and death threats to the creators of both these games in a similar way to how patriarchy attempted to delimit fine art in the 19th-century.

All of this goes to show that the same discriminatory power relationships we find in the art-world and wider society are also present in the world of games. Indeed, even highly abstract games can carry political content, and offer a platform for self-expression to minorities, like this game, Lim. It comes from the growing movement of Queer game designers. It uses colour to illustrate the experience of being genderqueer, colour and motion violently rending the screen apart from within if you attempt to conform and suppress who you are, and from without if attempt to express yourself in a hostile world. This game uses violence to allow non-binary gender’s to externalise and articulate the visual and physical violence of being read as an Other as well as convey that experience in a way that other media cannot. We can say that games like Lim constitute a subversion of games like Tetris, and a reaction to big-budget blockbusters.

Beyond the Gallery: Representation and Realism

In a world which prizes a cinematic realism in games – from lens flare to naturalistic particle effects – we might say that games such as Lim propose a more radical and structural realism. Indeed, games also function to impact our understanding of the world as well as the conditions in which we live, through intended as well as unintended means of interaction

Over the course of 10yrs, reddit user Lycerius played a strategy game called Civilization, what emerged was that after all these years the game world devolved into a mirror image of 1984. Our ‘artist’, reddit user Lycerius, pushed Civ 2 beyond its intended limits, resulting in a resource impoverished world left in perpetual and irresolvable war.

What makes this case all the more interesting, however, is that many took this act of play to be prophetic of a real-world future. Reported on by global media last year, from CNN to the Guardian, fascination wasn’t held merely by the thought that someone had spent 10yrs in front of a computer, but because of what the experience seemed to confirm in our sense of history and the future. Game time became entwined with our own notions of historical time. ‘Is this a vision of a future unending war?’ they ask, and however flippantly, they expose an interesting feature of acts of play – their capacity to hold a cultural position similar to an oracle, or prophesy, and also that of the science, the idea that this act of play is somehow objective, a simulation, because it exists inside of a game. Such is the myth of the infallibility of machines, that our closest AIs are taking their names from games – Windows' data assistant takes its name (and voice) from a character in Halo to earn its users’ trust.

A massive multiplayer online experience that was to draw the attention of real world epidemiologists, Corrupted Blood began as an intentional game element in World of Warcraft – a massive game played online by 10s of millions of people daily. A simple disease-like spell, restricted to a virtual locality, in 2005 players worked out a way of combining game elements to release the contagion onto the wider game. Rapidly thereafter, both through player action and the logics of the world itself it became a monstrous pandemic. And player reactions often emulated that of historical and predicted epidemiological events. People attempted to erect quarantines which were over-run, others took to creating survivalist communities in the hinterlands, and while some proffered their services as healers, others perpetuated the destruction and soon whole cities were left littered with the virtual dead.

Not only have people saught to learn about the world from games, but the world itself is altered by the virtual worlds existing alongside it. Players of Second Life and Eve can make livings from their virtual products. Even more provocative and chilling a thought: at the start of the Libyan civil war a staff member of the American embassy was killed, leading to a virtual war in Eve over ownership of his $50,000 worth of digital real-estate in the game he was playing when shot.

Pixel Aesthetics/Ethics

While all this can do wonders for upsetting our ontology of the real/virtual divide, what about ‘realism’ and the place of games in shaping our daily lives? The rise of the survival genre (Don’t Starve, Under the Ocean, Organ Trail etc.) now faces the player with a new kind of dark fantasy – that of subsistence living. As in Terraria and Minecraft, here players ceaselessly mine resources and recombine them or face penalties – a repetitive act in exchange for abstract gain. In Cart Life every action from stacking papers to smoking cigarettes is valued and atomised into mundane game-like tasks to the extent that for all its 8-bit graphics, there exists no more grindingly ‘realistic’ game on the market. As its satirical neoliberal tagline directs: “Work Harder, Hard Worker”. What should we make of this?

In The Culture Industry, Adorno analyses the place of leisure and amusement in late capitalism. He argues that leisure time is now inseparable complimentary of work time, looking at its evolution in France in the time of Monet. Far from being an escape from work, it reaffirms the primary importance of regimented and exploitative work as the inescapable basis of life in late capitalism. Increasingly, he argues, leisure time has even come to openly mirror work time – we partition it, subordinate ourselves to mod con machines and engage in passive relationships with film and TV that reflect the banal soap operas of our lives, while we expand and articulate our free time almost exclusively through the consumption of the goods we work to produce. More and more the spaces of desire and fantasy become those of work and mechanicity - the last thing employers want is for us to lose our work ethic or our hunger for consumer goods. Our time becomes homogenised, our attentiveness never relaxed.

Games might be seen as one of the largest ‘proofs’ of Adorno’s thesis, relying as they often do on a system of repetitive actions rewarded by abstract points reinvested to increase one’s ability to perform repetitive actions. But the retreat from cinematic naturalism (and with it, the retreat from the naturalisation of labour relations in game spaces) unleashed a bolder phase of the work ethic’s war on desire. In World of Warcraft some players, called gold farmers work as in sweatshops, harvesting virtual gold in exchange for real money, and the broader trend of free-to-play mobile games that allow the substitution of money for points, gesture towards the open fusion of play and production.

In the survival genre, consumption and production have become a closed and brazenly self-justifying system. An insular model of life. Moreover, in games such as Minecraft, Gnomoria and Organ Trail immersion and realism are dependent on the rejection of naturalism.

By foregrounding the pixel, the basic blocks of colour, the indie game attempts to win over our trust. It seems more simply a game because it displays its visual components with transparency. While in monolithic MMORPGs and photo-realist FPSs units of exchange are woven into a convincing fiction of explosions and magic, or at least loosely veiled by a narrative, Indie games ground themselves in transparency. Openly self-mocking and self-aware they are also all the more beguiling. The pixel becomes the bare unit of exchange, like currency. As the quote from Cart Life reads, our bodies have become cyborg in a globalised world of digital consumerism – we are material creatures of Capital: “It’s funny how our blood tastes just like pennies, dimes, nickels and quarters.”

Moreover, augmented reality allows the fusion of virtual and real worlds. The rather boring video of minecraft I’ve been running actually shows a 2D version of Minecraft which has been built and run within Minecraft, made entirely from virtual objects, pixel-like blocks. This opens a whole set of metaphysical questions, from set theory to the 'brain in a vat'. In conjunction with google maps, Minecraft players can even geotag and render their creations in the real world through augmented reality – with a smart phone you could see the pixelated car someone fabricated over hours with their virtual labour now made into a ‘real’ commodity. Heck, you can even 3D print it. Where’s your God now?

Even more worryingly, ‘gamification’ promises CEO’s and HR managers the means to incentivise its work force by making work more like a game - with points, levels, scaled challenges and smart interfaces. As Cart Life would remind us: “Work Harder, Hard Worker”. While games came to reflect capitalism, Monopoly beginning life as a critique of capitalism, now business looks to games for a model of productivity. Increasingly games are being lauded by marketers and employers as a new window onto human nature without realising their own role in its creating a new human nature. And so we find our games looking less life-like but our lives become more game-like.

In Cart Life, a self-reflexive masterpiece, incidental and banal conversations meditate on the harsh boredom of the daily grind rendered in blocky greyscale. In bleak gestures and a constant foregrounding of the player-as-person it pushes us to question why we play. In this ‘retail simulation’ there is no dissimulation – a player interacts performatively by literally typing the thoughts and actions of their avatar. In this it even questions reality, representation and the nature of performative language for an ASCII generation. But as artful games push the limits of radical critique, like the avant-garde before them, marketisation is constantly encroaching.

So we’ve seen 3 major functions for games today – their capacity to critique institutions, their ability to convey lived experiences, and their ability to reflect or comment on the world we live in. What I would like you to start to question from now on is whether there is a meaningful division between the virtual and the real, between the entertaining and the political, and between form and function.

One final game to leave you all with, so we can come full circle, and a game I hope all of you play – as it’s a set reading for this week. Limits & Demonstrations problematizes the distinction between the real and the virtual, and gets us to think about the function of form by simulating an exhibition. It probes the limits of Huizinga’s ‘magic circle’ the space of suspended disbelief in play, by featuring a fictional exhibition by a real but forgotten artist – a little known Situationist. The game’s magic realism allows us to engage with an impossible exhibition of objects, and decide whether we would prefer to discuss the objects for their own sake, or as a means of understanding ourselves and our fellow characters. Alternately melancholy and utopian, the game is aware of its limits, a tree of choices – and embraces the contradictory nature of games as scenarios which both abstract and exceed the every day.

“Maybe its not a puzzle, but it’s just about a puzzle?/Maybe it’s a ‘puzzle’, but there’s no right answer. That is kind of sad.”

A very self-referential game, what I think this dialogue questions is the nature of self-referential art, and through it whether there is a distinction between knowledge and ignorance. Games both represent and create, they are both form and function. To live a free life, Limits & Demonstrations suggests, is to live without definite answers.

Merlin Seller

The above is a transcript of a lecture delivered by Merlin Seller at The University of East Anglia, UK, to undergraduate Art Historians 16/01/2015

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Dear Player: Punching Paintings, Where Form Meets Function