Almost 10 years ago, Auriea and I switched from the web to video-games as a medium for our artistic activities. We had already been playing some video-games and they had inspired our work here and there. But somehow it had never occurred to us that we could make them ourselves.

When you come to video-games late, like we did, when you missed Mario, skipped Zelda and can’t distinguish too well between childhood memories of Hide & Seek and Pac-Man, video-games seem like an exciting new medium for artistic creation! In video-games you can make living worlds to explore, you can breathe life into artificial characters, you can set up conditions for situations without knowing how they will play out, you can create a visceral form of visual poetry that makes the separation between the art and the spectator very small. How could our artists’ souls not be attracted to all this potential? Indeed, this medium seemed like a godsend to satisfy centuries of artistic desires. The desire of the artist to become one with the spectator, the desire of the spectator to step into the mysterious world imagined by the artist. It was pretty clear to us: the medium of video-games is the medium mankind had always been waiting for.

As newcomers to a field, we started to investigate our new surroundings. We visited conferences and fairs and played hundreds of video-games. From the most well-known to the plain obscure.
We ended up confused and disappointed. Yes, we did find the worlds and characters and situations and even the poetry that comes so natural to this medium. But we were surprised to find that most video-games were structured in a way that prevented us from engaging with this content. With almost no exceptions, each video-game put obstacles in our way that we needed to overcome. The connection between these obstacles and the fictional world they were placed in was mostly rather vague and often even absurd.

It seemed to us that the things we were interested in -the imaginary world and its fictional characters- only served as visual presentation of an underlying system. This would explain the shallow characters, the cliché story plots and even the bad walk cycles of the avatars that you are staring at for hours on end. Only then it dawned on us that video-games were essentially games! That’s why they were called video-games. All this amazing technology, the spectacular realtime rendering, the sophisticated artificial intelligence, the revolutionary non-linear story-telling and mind-boggling capacity for interaction were used only as a way to present dull sports-like games.

Playing these games was not about engaging with characters at all. It was about winning or losing. It wasn’t about exploration at all. It was about attaining goals. It wasn’t about having a good time. It was about getting rewards, getting results. We were dumb-founded. It was as if somebody took a big brush and scribbled a tic-tac-toe grid over Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. What a terrible waste of a perfectly fine medium!

What have people done to amuse themselves with computers since the CD-Rom era? Why hasn’t anyone made another Ceremony of Innocence since? What happened to the promise of exploration made by the first Tomb Raider? Why had people not realized that most of us were playing Myst for its world and its stories, and not the arcane puzzles? Why had developers continued to refine the simulation of fire arms rather than the immersion in virtual landscapes? And where does this damn loyalty to the 8-bit stone age come from?

I have no idea. Maybe it was easier to come up with rigid games than wrangle with wild fantasies. Maybe the technology was not accessible enough to artists. Maybe the industry was satisfied with its commercial results and reluctant to expand. Maybe the art world didn’t care enough.

I don’t know. But what I do know is that the desire is still there. We all know what we want from this medium, from the medium of video-games. We want it to deliver on the promise that art has been making for centuries. We want to visit other worlds, we want to walk in somebody else’s shoes, we want grasp a little bit of what it means to be in another situation. We want this medium to make our lives richer, our understanding of the world more intense, our connection to other people more profound. We want to live through adventures. We want to see the attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. We want to watch the C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.

That is what video-games promise us on the back of the box. That is what gamers talk about when they reminisce their hours of playing. That is what excites non-gamers when they hear about this medium. We all like playing games just fine. But this is about something else! Something more! Something much more profound. This is not a game.

I’m delighted to see that, despite the setbacks of the previous decade, the first glimmers of hope have started to appear on the horizon of the video-games medium. That is what is presented in this exhibition. Video-games created by passionate people intent on exploring the potential of this new medium. Unsurprisingly, most of these have been created by independent developers, individuals or small teams working on shoestring budgets. It’s hard work. And we’re going against the grain. But we all believe that this work needs to be done. We owe it to this medium. And we owe it to humanity. We will find a way.

I would like to thank the Cologne GameLab for organizing this event and designing this truly wonderful exhibition. Maybe it will become historic. Maybe this will be the turning point. Maybe video-game developers and artists will respond to the wake up call. We have a wonderful new medium here, let’s make something with it!

Open your favorite music program right now, play some music, and turn on the visualizer.  Look at it for a minute or two.  Put it in the background while you read the rest of this essay.

Back yet?  Good.  Now, what you’ve been looking at is art.  I don’t mean to say that it’s Art with a capital “A”, or even that it’s any good–all I mean to say is that you’re looking at some form of creative expression, as distinct from the music you’re listening to as a film is from its soundtrack.  If we agree that fractal art is a legitimate form of creative expression, it’s hard to say your visualizer isn’t.  But…what kind of medium is it?

It’s a moving image, so it’s certainly not prose or a painting, and it doesn’t seem to be film, because you never see the same thing twice, and what you see is dependent on the music.  It’s tempting to call it a game, but I think this is a mistake.  It’s not like any game we’ve seen before: it has no objectives or goals, no notion of progress or completion, and very little interactivity.  In fact, the little we can do to interact with it–change the music–results in the least interesting behavior.  It looks much better if we just let the music play.  The program is interacting with the music, not a player–you don’t “play” this game at all, you only watch it!  It doesn’t even seem to have rules except in the most abstract sense of the word.  You could, I suppose, argue that it still counts as a game, that the music is the “player” and the lines of code that govern the program’s behavior are the “rules”.  But doesn’t that seem like cheating a little?  If the categorization were that simple, we would still be calling films “photoplays”.  Why don’t we?  Because calling them photoplays is a disservice to the unique strengths and weaknesses of the medium.  Can you imagine what film would be like if we still thought of them as “plays, only on a screen”?  The film industry would be a joke!  A film that was shot on location instead of on a set would be considered experimental, and a film where the camera moves from place to place instead of remaining static would be the height of avant-garde.  No one would have even thought to actually cut and edit the film! The same is happening now with video games: because we call them something they’re not, because we still think of them as “games, only on a computer”, we limit what they are capable of.

Look back at your visualizer.  What you’re looking at is not a game: it is something new entirely.  The fact is, games are not new.  Games have been around longer than movies, longer than books, longer than the written word.  Kittens play games; they are probably older than language itself.  Games are not new. Computers are.  Computers have given birth to a medium of expression so unique, so bizarre, so unanticipated, that we can only name it by comparison with what it is not.  This medium is not the medium of video games.  Those in the video game industry–even those on the very edge of the avant-garde–still hold to the assumption that games are made to be played.  But programs don’t have to be played.  They don’t have to be interacted with.  They don’t have to be “fun”.  Like the best true art, they can be beautiful for their own sake.

I don’t mean to say that we should stop making games.  Computers are a wonderful tool, and–as with dozens of other media including film, painting, photography, and music–they have allowed us to do things with games that weren’t possible before.  I don’t even mean to say that games can’t be art, in the highest sense of the word–Brenda Brathwaite’s Train, a game made without a single silicon chip or digital display, is as much a work of Art as any painting or song.  What I am saying is that by fixating on games, we are ignoring the potential of this new, unnamed medium.  What’s worse, by confusing this new medium with the medium of games, we’re putting severe limits on what we can do with it.  Film gave us a new kind of stage play, true–any play, after all, can be translated into a film.  So, too, can any game be translated into a video game.  But in both cases, the true potential of the medium lies in the things it can do differently than what came before.  Games can be wonderful–and like plays, they have strengths that their successor lacks–but these new programs, these notgames, have the potential to be so much more.

Enjoy the read!

Notgames is a project.
Notgames is a challenge.
Notgames is a question.

Can we create a form of digital entertainment that explicitly rejects the structure of games?
What is an interactive work of art that does not rely on competition, goals, rewards, winning or losing?

The notgames thought is inspired by videogames. By those fine moments in virtual experiences when we feel like we’re in another world, when we believe a synthetic character is our friend, when our bodies merge with the system and the software becomes our hands and eyes, when we find ourselves enthralled by the very thing that we are doing at that moment in complete disregard of the prize that we might be winning or losing.

Rare moments that are all too often shattered by the demands of the game. So let’s ask ourselves what if we don’t allow the game to interfere? What if we create an experience that consists only of such beautiful moments? And figure out how to design it so it remains as engaging as a game can be but without the “unnatural” constraints.

So notgames is a design challenge.

This is a new medium. It may be suitable to create works that re-use old formats (such as films and games). But that’s not where the challenge lies! We are interested in the unique things that this technology is capable of. What can we do with the medium of videogames that can only be done in this medium? And what is the best way to offer this experience to an audience?

One of the motivations for the notgames thought is the desire to explore the potential of videogames as a medium. Videogames are software. Software can be anything. There is no need for software to be games. There is no need for videogames to be games. Especially not if the games structure may be holding us back, may be limiting the potential of the medium.

So notgames is also an artistic challenge.

The question is not whether videogames are art. The question is how can we make good art with the medium of videogames. Notgames proposes that one direction of exploration may be to abandon the idea that what we make, should be a game. To approach the medium with an open mind.

It’s a question.
An invitation.
An exercise.