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Prestigious Art Gallery To Exhibit Video Games
dipfan writes "Anyone passing through London (England) in the next few months should check out Game On - the history, culture and future of video games, an exhibition at the prestigious Barbican gallery, which opens on May 16. The exhibition publicity says: "Game On will trace the 40 year history of computer games from Space War, which was made way back in 1962, right up to the latest, as yet unreleased games from the likes of Nintendo, Sony, Sega and XBox." Cool. Exhibits include the first home games console (the Magnavox Odyssey from 1972), special sections on the influence of anime and manga, and lots of playable games, from Pong onwards, and a whole lot of other interesting stuff. The Barbican cinema is running a games-related film festival to go with the exhibition: Tron, The Matrix, etc. Even if you can't make it to London, the exhibition is going to tour the US and Japan."
...the Commodore 64/128 will be included in this. Though I'm one of the people who have found many uses for my c128 (and the c64), there were a great number of kids who used it for a game machine. I remember back in the mid-late 80's when the NES was popular. I would boggle some kids' minds when I showed them my collection of 300+ video games, to their 20.
Ahh... The good 'ol days of copy parties. A couple computers, several 1541 or 1571 drives, and Maverick. Anyone else have the extra 8K of RAM or a speed control installed in their drives??
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
The decordova museum in MA had a video game exhibit in the 80's (abiet a long time ago). Back when games were games. THey had atari 2600, intellivision and coleco vision all playing donkey kong. THe had a lot of stand up machines too, asteroids, ms. pac man etc. They took tokens they sold at the front desk, except Zaxxon which was free. Went there a couple days after school when there were no crouds... Kick'n.
We had 8 bit color and mono sound back then, none of these fancy shmancy 3d cards they have now...It was amazing what they could get out of that hardware!
Channel 4 have quite a good write up with a realplayer video of one of their news pieces the other day.
There are some *very* cool (arcade) machines in the exhibition ranging from Computer Space through to Dance Dance Revolution, plus all the home consoles you can eat. I can barely wait...
Cheers
Chris
-insert snobbish British accent-
Ah yes, a fine example of the post-modern "Pong" era. Note the sharp contrast of lines and dots against the uniform background. It obviously shows the ongoing struggle of mankinds struggle in the universe as the left line and right line are forever embattled over the little dot...
See article in The Guardian Online section today.
If Britian views gaming as an art on a different medium, they need to get into the US Government to give Gaming the same rights as art...
Art is protected by the First Amendment, but Games aren't... Bah!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
This gallery will be at my house between 5-12PM every night, $20 + various snack foods is the enterance fee.
Things to keep in mind:
o This article discusses computer games, not video games.
o Pong is not a "computer game". Pong can be done purely with analog circuits, without any ICs of any kind. Find one at a garage sale and crack it open if you don't believe me. I did. And it was in friggin color, too.
o If you're going to make an argument against Space War being the first computer game, argue in favor of the simple games like poker, hangman, and blackjack which have been around since the late 40s. By the time Space War surfaced, chess was already a mainstay on most computers by the early 60's. Keep in mind, people were doing voice synthesis in the same year that Space War popped up.
o If you include mechanical computers, subtract 75 years from any claim made for an electrical computer. Chances are, its been done. Human versus machine Tic-tac-toe can be done using hand-cranked wooden tinkertoy arrays.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
People like Henry Allen giving dissertations on PacMan. :/
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
After September, the exhibition moves on to Edinburgh, then on to various other places in Europe and finally to America.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
There's always a lot of debate about what constitutes "art". Usually the discussion comes up if the "art" in question could be arguably pornographic, but I wonder what kind of reception this kind of thing will get from major American grant-providing organizations (ie, the National Endowment for the Arts, etc.). It's great to see that a venue like the Barbican is hosting it... but judging from the fact that the several of the email addresses on the Game On site are @barbican.co.uk, it looks like some infulential geeky guys at the gallery were able to get this kind of thing up and running.
I'm intrigued by the future of digital art, but judging from the overall poor critcal reception of major digital art efforts, and the clear inferiority of digital film (Ebert's previously-posted article is a good one re: AoTC)... there are certianly some major questions as to the validity of the digital medium as "art".
bona-fide sludgesicle man,
pub
Funny you should bring this up. I was listening to NPR the other day and they were talking to people that play Counter Strike, in teams, to compete in a playoff type of tournament. They want these games to be cosidered sports.
Free Mac Mini
CV (Resume) that I'm a art connoisseur and I devote much of my spare time to fine arts:)
Since submitting the story, yesterday I went to the press launch of the exhibition, and it's extraordinarily good. Basically, imagine dying and going to videogame heaven, because that's what this is like.
The exhibit doesn't have much in the way of "how games are made" filler - this is about games, games, games: 150 playable games! Woo hoo! If you're looking for an excuse to go on holiday to London, let this be it.
Going in the door there's an actual DEC PDP-1 unit on which the original Spacewar! was played. Then it's a gentle stroll through the development of games and the consoles, with almost all of them working models, some of which are hardly seen outside of Japan (the Nintendo Famicon, for example). There are some games looked at in-depth: sections on GTA3, and the making of the Sims, as well as Pokemon - there are copies of ancient GameFreak magazines - and some incredible Final Fantasy lithographs by Yokshitaka Amano. The "sound" of videogames also gets some recognition, and obviously the influence of Japan (including a couple of working Pachinko machines). The multiplayer section's cool, with a five-player playable Bomberman set-up.
Criticisms? Well, not many, unless you want to know how games are actually developed, but who cares? The "new release" section is a bit weak, with just PS2's Harry Potter game and XBox's motogp, neither of which are cutting edge. And there's no Doom, which is a serious omission given the game's historical importance in the growth of the industry (although there is Wolfenstein 3D). It would have been good (from a personal point of view) to have had the whole Metal Gear series on show, rather than just MGS2, but hey.
Strong-points: the exhibition is "platform neutral" - it's not sponsored by Sony or Nintendo or Microsoft (the organisers told me they resisted a bit of pressure from the console makers to get involved - at the cost of pushing out their rivals), and the consoles themselves are dealt with even-handedly.
The exhibition's in London until mid-September, then goes to the National Museum in Scotland. It's signed up to go to Helsinki next autumn/fall - and negotiations are going on with venues in the US and Japan. All the games are free, it's £11 entry (about $16), and at the moment it's all-day entry, but they are talking about a two-hour time limit - so get in there before the school holidays kick off. There's also a £20 exhibit guide book, but it's not worth the money (or indeed the paper it's printed on).
The Guardian newspaper had a review here.
Accounting is hard too, but we don't go calling that art.
Not that I don't think that video games could be considered art... I just don't think that something requiring a lot of effort qualifies it as a more viable art form.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
"Anyone passing through London (England)"
I mean, he even SAID England just so people would notice it.
Judge Limbaugh is a judge in the U.S. of A., which means his fatuous idiocies can be safely laughed to scorn by the British.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Shakespeare was throwaway entertainment for the masses.
Rembrant painted pictures for money so some rich tart could have something nice to hang on her wall
DaVinci was the Duke of Milan's biatch.
95% of everything is crap.
Hindsight is everything.
I hate art snobs.
Wow, finally games get the recognition they deserve. Games are (for the most part, there are exceptions) serious creative endeavours on the part of their creators and should rightly be viewed as such. I.E. in my opinion, games have every right to be treated the same as art. Yeah, there are good games with many will agree should be considered art, and there are bad games which many won't agree to consider art, but then there's also good art and bad art, both of which can get the same rap.
In fact, after I get tired of actually playing a game, or get to a point where I just cannot seem to progress any farther in the game, I just turn on the cheat codes so that I can run around the game world admiring all these is to see. I like to kind of perform a rudimentary analysis of the game, noticing what's especially cool about the visuals, what about the game makes it so damn fun, and why the hell I couldn't seem to make it past that last bastard without the cheats. Hell, in many games the visuals can be so striking that they can probably be enough to qualify the game as an artform all on their own. I especially like the visuals in Oni for the interesting architecture of the levels and the buildings around which the levels are based. But that's probably becasue I almost became an architecture major until I found out it would require one more extra year of school. There are of course other games with interesting visual aspects or level design, but I've rambled enough in this post.
Kudos to the people at the Barbican for giving games the kind of credit they deserve.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Here's a bit from their "press release" (http://www.gameonweb.co.uk/pre_site/pdfs/gameon.p df), with what game embodies each of their game categories:
Role-Playing Games (Dragon Quest)
Reflex Games (Parappa the Rapper)
Racing Games (Indy 500) -- think they mean the Atari 2600 version?!!
Football Games (FIFA Soccer)
Shoot Em Ups (R-Type)
Fight Games (Virtua Fighter 2) -- I'd've picked VF1
Platform Games (Pitfall)
Life Simulations including Military Strategy Sims (Metal Gear Solid 2)
Sports Sims (Football Manager)
I can't tell if these are what their source for the categories they used ("classification of games families devised by the Le Diberder brothers in their book L'Univers des Jeux Video") or what's actually at the exhibit.
An interesting bit about the consoles is that this part of the exhibit will go on permanent display in Scotland. "Following the exhibition tour, these consoles will form a unique permanent collection at the Museum of Scotland." Is their any significant to Scotland in the history of gaming?
The media guide continues showing sections to do with US vs. European games (one of the differences is apparently violence; Mortal Kombat II, Castle Wolfenstein 3D and NFL Blitz seem to be the US representative games *sigh*) and another section on Japanese gaming. Worth a read!
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
I think this presentation is an outstanding idea. When I think about the number of computer game background scenes I have seen in games, there are many that have a beauty to them. Laugh if you will, but occasionally I'll stop in gameplay to just look around and enjoy the scenery. I remember a particullarly "Unreal" (sorry for the pun) experience when I first got a 3D card that came with Unreal. I stopped shortly after the 1st level when I came out into the outside area, and just stopped and panned around enjoying the scenery of the waterfall and the birds flying overhead.
The whole MYST series is a perfect example of this, especially with the improved Graphics and 3D views of MYST III: Exile. Its like a painting of a landscape or natural scene, except what is presented is un-natural, but still enjoyable to look at and behold.
Art, and what is appreciated as art, can show up in just about any medium, from canvas to sculpture and now an electronic/virtual medium.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
Minor niggle, but the Barbican isn't really an "art gallery" per se. It's more like a university campus environment, but close to central London (prob ~20 mins walk from the City, the finacial district) which hosts many different art and cultural events. Last time I went I saw Vincente Amigo: highly recommended live if you happen to have had a bang on the head when you were a baby which left you cursed with the desire to listen to flamenco. I liked him so much I bought his most recent album.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Its an interesting point - the blurred line between commercial art and "museum quality" art. You even have artists and commerical artists, those who paint and sculpt, and those who paint and sculpt for a specific product.
Let's take Coca-Cola's logo for example. Some people collect the logos as they change throughout the years as it reflects tastes of the times, some do it because its a favorite product. Some call it art, or Americana, or Kitch Culture, or commercial advertising and not art. I'm inclined to follow the phrase "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", and along that line, art is anything that it takes creative inspiration to create. Along that line, everyone has their own definition of what is art and what isn't. Now that I think about it, its all a matter of personal opinion.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?
If you think it'd be cool to go to the Game On exhibition, how much exponentially cooler would it be to go to the Game On exhibition with a group including Jeff Minter!?
(Forgive me if I am the only person who thinks this would be rather good
So "Planescape Torment" has no artistic value, but a painting of a can of Campbell's soup is art? Bah.
(And yes, I know the significance of Post-Modernism in art, so no flames on that. Just trying to make a point.)
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
A lot of artists throught the centuries have been influenced by public opinion because they were trying to sell paintings to eat- similarly, a few games designers create games they think are cool with almost no regard to whether they will sell well.
graspee
Computer games indirectly spurred a different kind of computer art as well. In the early 80s, when the computer games were starting to become a large industry, some computer interested youngsters started to remove the copy protection (if any) from the games and to spread those cracked games to friends.
Often the crackers changed a few words on the title screen of the game, claiming the credit for having cracked the copy protection. Some guys even linked a special introductory screen with the name of the cracker before the game started.
Over the years, those introductions became more and more advanced with music, graphical logotypes, and scrolling text. The first intros used the title music from the game or from some other game, but soon the crackers started making their own music while at the same time improving their programming skills and graphical capabilities.
After a while, the cracker intros were actually more technically and artistically advanced than the games themselves!
In parallell with the improvements to the intros, the intros forked off into the demo concept. The demos were more technically advanced than the cracker intros, and most commonly all graphics and music was done by the demo creators themselves and not taken from some game. The demos pushed the limits of the computers on which they ran and in turn inspired the games creators.
More information about the intros found on the classical Commodore 64 computer can be found at intros.c64.org and a very good collection of Commodore 64 demos can be found at www.c64.ch. If you don't have access to a Commodore 64 or a Commodore 64 emulator, there is a good DivX encoded video showing one of the best C64 demos around: Deus Ex Machina by Crest.
In a sense, the gaming industry made it possible for the creation of the cracker intros, which in turn led to the demo artform - an artform like no other.
Everyone knows that video games aren't art
A federal judge says so.