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Net Art and Games as Protest Media - Interviews
Robert Praxmarer:
Why do you
think that games are an appropriate medium to communicate
a message of critique or protest?
Andy Deck >
People
have demonstrated an eagerness to play games with
computers for decades, but today many don't even
know that online art exists. For interactive software
art, if it is not to be elitist and directed only
at people who are already familiar with art software,
games are an interesting form to adapt. Familiarity
is something that can be used.
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I think EVERY medium
is appropriate for dissent. That doesn't mean
that every medium is suited to the message
of course. I think that the best medium for
dissent are physical actions like protests,
strikes and sit ins. They bring people together
in physical space to share their ideas and
opinions. We learn who is on our side. For
example in a strike police will attack the
strikers and protect the scab labor. The situation
is exactly the same in a lock out. But we
need space to develop our theory too, to record
the memory of these struggles and generalize
from them, that is where books, journals and
papers come in to play. If we are to win this
class war and get rid of classes forever we
must be clear in our objectives and informed
about our strategies. Videogames fall into
the larger category of cultural dissent. I
don't think it works the same way as the more
direct action, propaganda and organizing.
Nevertheless, we are enduring a cultural assault
from the right. There are multiplexes full
of war propaganda like Black Hawk Down, and
the Army has put out a recruitment war video
game. I think this demands some symmetry.
We should fight them on all fronts, of course
we should be tactical about it, and I don't
think that the would of videogames is where
we should put too much of our energy!
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Firstly,
gameplay is inherently about struggle and
interacting with and challenging boundaries
and rules. In a cultural and historical sense
the videogame is a subversive medium that
inspires passion in young people. It offers
a level of broad social relevance and empowerment
for delivering progressive ideas that you
can't get so much anymore from traditional
media.
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Robert Praxmarer:What
about the drawbacks of this medium, are there any?
Like people could say it's an infantile or immature
way of dealing with serious topics, where people losing
their lives or it's about serious politic questions.
Andy Deck >
Of
course the styles of the popular games demand
alternatives that the game industry has failed
to deliver. There are ways to approach the game-as-form
that are serious. Many artists working with games
have imitated the violence of the industrial mode.
Actually, this is partly for technical reasons,
because the easiest way to build a game is to
hang new wallpaper in an existing game framework.
It's much harder to build something original from
scratch. So if there is a drawback of this form,
it's that technically it is very challenging for
an individual to produce a video game comparable
in its sophistication to the ones that are built
by the game industry. By sophistication' here
I'm referring to technical qualities and complexities
that are immediately perceived by game enthusiasts.
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I think there is a
problem with "fighting" on the cultural
front in general. Which is that using art
didactically often produces poor art with
a sloppy message. There are exceptions to
the rule of course. There are some great children's
books like Raymond Briggs' Where the Wind
Blows for example. I don't know that cuteness
is a problem per se. There are great political
cartoons which employ cute characters to convey
serious political messages. In the USA there
is a great comic strip called the Boondocks
which often comments on the racist institutions
from the point of view of two young African
American kids.
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The major
drawback of this medium is that production
and distribution is largely controlled by
a corporate elite. Only once this control
is seriously challenged can we truly find
out how much the problems and perceptions
of the videogame medium have to do with inherent
limitations of the form versus how much they
actually have to do with the content that
is created for it. I also think there is no
distinct line that can or should be drawn
between entertainment and serious topics in
games - after all, 'serious' novels and films
are still given aestheticised treatments.
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Robert
Praxmarer:Do
you think the message communicated with games
has the same kind of impact you as an artist
would want to achieve?
Andy Deck
>
To
some extent, yes. Some people are thinking
about games and their symbolism in new
ways because of the existence of art/game
alternatives.
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I can't claim
Antiwargame to be a great success.
I don't really think it works that
well as a game - or as a political
statement. But it was an attempt to
do both. Games are such a specific
form of culture, there is a magic
component called gameplay which requires
a strange mix of math and art. There
are very few games of any genre that
are really successful. Part of the
process to creating a successful game
is a lot of time spent play testing
it, which is something I did a minimal
amount of due to time constraints.
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We
are still seeking production funding
to finish our game so we can't yet
tell whether we've achieved what we
set out to achieve. But the response
from lots of Australian gamers and
refugees so far has been great - many
seem to instinctually understand what
we're trying to do.
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Robert Praxmarer: For
sure the younger generation are the principal participants
in games. Do you think they are getting the right
messages? Or is the emphasis on everything being fun,
making them unable to distinguish a protest game from
an ordinary shoot-em up game ?
Andy
Deck >
The
games I've made are not very fun and they don't
deliver the kind of satisfying results that one
might expect. So I don't think there's much danger
that people are going to mistake my work for pure
entertainment. In general I mistrust this tendency
to focus on what's wrong with kids today. Adult
political "leaders" are treating real
people as if they were avatars in a video game
without consequences. Let's begin by accusing
them and deconstructing the schemes of representation
that are used against the interests of the young.
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I think young kids
a pretty smart on the whole. I am not sure
whether Antiwargame was coherent enough, but
I hope that some of what I was trying say
got through: it was business calling for war,
troops would rather get stoned than fight,
this will end in nuclear war or revolution.
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I think
gamers recognise that lots of commercial games
are overtly political and always have been.
The only real difference between our game
and a commercial game will be the politics
- we're hoping to make it just as fun because
we see that making a good quality game is
essential to achieving one of our major goals.
That goal is to help prove that it is possible
to make a playable game that wholly embraces
the medium - ie beyond conceptual art - whilst
engaging with challenging and progressive
themes.
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Robert Praxmarer: How
old are you? Do you belong to the gamer generation?
What's your favorite game, and do you play any computer
games at all?
Andy
Deck >
Mezzo
del cammin. When I was fifteen I met the local
tycoons of the video game parlor. They were all
in their early twenties. My personal dislike for
them led me to stop playing games because I didn't
want to help them buy more fancy sports cars.
Up until that point I played hand-held and arcade
games, but now I hardly ever play electronic games.
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I am 31. I don't play
many videogames, though I have worked in a
couple of games companies. I play a lot of
board games and card games, and I used to
play a lot of Sid Mier's Civilization.
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I'm 27,
and we're (the EFW dev. team) mostly in our
late 20s and early 30s. My favourite game
of all time is Deus Ex because of its depth
of content and ideas but for sheer pleasure
the game i've played obsessively is Counter-strike.
Because I've worked in the game development
industry I know lots of hardcore gamers -
which makes me realise that I'm not hardcore,
maybe somewhere in between a "casual"
and "moderate" gamer.
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Robert Praxmarer: Why
do you think games (ordinary ones as well, like chess)
have such a long tradition? Is it a meta layer for
human social-interaction? -which leads me to the next
question. What about the one player scenario, just
you and the computer, does that mean that we are growing
a generation of sociopaths?
Andy
Deck >
Again,
I think the generation of sociopaths is all grown
up and, where I come from, they're in charge of
the government. I'm reminded of a slip of the
tongue by Norman Schwarzkopf during the first
Gulf War. When asked whether war had become too
much like a game, he denied it. He then went on
immediately to say, "[A]t this stage of the
game, this is not a time for frivolity on the
part of anybody." Games and game cults are
so pervasive that it's hard to avoid being influenced
by them. I guess if there's a hopeful aspect to
this situation, it's that the commodity-orientation
of electronic games generates expectations of
novelty. As games continue to evolve, there will
be more and more opportunities to sustain meaningful,
quasi-literary experiences.
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There has been a long
history of solitary games. But on the most
part games a structured form of social interaction
that help us connect with each other. Even
one player videogames have a sort of one way
interaction going from the designers through
to the players. But more and more games are
being made that connect people together. People
with games consoles can connect them to the
internet and speak through headsets to other
players they met online. People are social
creatures, that is why those gaming parlors
are so popular around the world. I don't think
that we have a generation of sociopaths growing
up. Even kids who sit there alone playing
shoot em ups for hours, understand that this
is "just a game." As the contradictions
of this profit driven world increasingly prevent
us from living meaningful and fulfilling lives,
we seek meaning where we can find it. I hope
that there are generations of revolutionaries
growing up, but that will take more than videogames,
more than art. It will take lots of reaching
out to those who are angry at the system and
joining with them in struggle, all the time
discussing what it will take to change it!
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There's
been a lot of assertions from Moral Panickers
about the supposed brain-numbing and anti-social
nature of gaming - but isn't reading a book
inherently an anti-social experience? Most
gamers I know love network gaming. Some of
the closest bonds I've formed with my workmates
have been due to LAN gaming. I guess that
would count as a meta-layer for social interaction,
because I've found that you can tell alot
about someone's personality and interactions
in the real world from how they play a multiplayer
game. I guess it's the same in traditional
games. Many people have said that one of the
important roles of games is to provide a safe
space in which you trial and act out risky
actions without fear of real-world consequences.
Videogames have the potential to take this
to a whole new level in a social/political
sense with massively multiplayer games and
persistent worlds.
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Robert
Praxmarer is
a core member of the Ars Electronica Futurelab, and Virtual Reality
Research Department. He works on concepts, visions, realizations
in the fields of science, technology and art. He also writes for
RebelArt
Magazine. He was preparing
an article on net art games as a protest media and his research
had included these email interviews.
Interviewees
Andy
Deck is an American
media artist specializing in Internet art. His work addresses the
politics and aesthetics of collaboration, interactivity, software,
and independent media.
Josh
On's
Antiwargame 'lets a player
act as the US President and lead the USA into a war against terrorism...It
is the President¹s challenge to keep up presidential popularity
while pursuing whatever strategy might appeal to the player's sense
of gameplay or political outlook.'
Kipper
is the creative director of
Escape From Woomera, an online first person, 3D adventure game,
being developed by an Australian collective of games developers,
artists and activists. The game invites players to assume the character
of a modern day refugee, and attempt to escape from a well-known
detention centre in Australia.
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