Video game art is a specialized form of

computer art Computer art is any art in which computers play a role in production or display of the artwork. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, video game, website, algorithm, performance or gallery installation. Many tr ...

employing

video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device to gener ...

s as the

artistic medium Arts media is the material and tools used by an artist, composer or designer to create a work of art, for example, "pen and ink" where the pen is the tool and the ink is the material. Here is a list of types of art and the media used within tho ...

. Video game art often involves the use of

patched Patched (Ptc) is a conserved 12-pass transmembrane protein receptor that plays an obligate negative regulatory role in the Hedgehog signaling pathway in insects and vertebrates. Patched is an essential gene in embryogenesis for proper segme ...

or modified video games or the repurposing of existing games or game structures, however it relies on a broader range of artistic techniques and outcomes than artistic modification and it may also include painting, sculpture, appropriation, in-game intervention and performance, sampling, etc. It may also include the creation of

art game An art game (or arthouse game) is a work of interactive new media digital software art as well as a member of the "art game" subgenre of the serious video game. The term "art game" was first used academically in 2002 and it has come to be un ...

s either from scratch or by modifying existing games. Notable examples of video game art include

Cory Arcangel Cory Arcangel (born May 25, 1978) is an American post-conceptual artist who makes work in many different media, including drawing, music, video, performance art, and video game modifications, for which he is best known. Arcangel often uses the ...

's '' Super Mario Clouds'' and '' I Shot Andy Warhol'',Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell (eds.),''Videogames and Art'' (Intellect Books, 2006). Joseph Delappe's projects including "Dead in Iraq" and the "Salt Satyagraha Online: Gandhi's March to Dandi in Second Life," the 2004-2005 Rhizome Commissions "relating to the theme of games," Paolo Pedercini's Molleindustria games such as "Unmanned" and "

Every Day the Same Dream ''Every Day the Same Dream'' (stylised in sentence case) is a short, 2D art game that puts the player in the role of a man whose life is about to change. Developed for the ''Experimental Gameplay Project'' at Carnegie Mellon University in 2009, ...

", and

Ian Bogost Ian Bogost is an American academic and video game designer, most known for the game '' Cow Clicker''. He holds a joint professorship at Washington University as director and professor of the Film and Media Studies program in Arts & Sciences an ...

's " Cowclicker." Artistic modifications are frequently made possible through the use of

level editor In video games Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual f ...

s, though other techniques exist. Some artists make use of

machinima Machinima, originally machinema () is the use of real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production. Most often, video games are used to generate the computer animation. The word "machinima" is a portmanteau of the words '' ...

applications to produce non-interactive animated artworks, however artistic modification is not synonymous with machinima as these form only a small proportion of artistic modifications. Machinima is distinct from art mods as it relies on different tools, though there are many similarities with some art mods. Like video games, artistic game modifications are often interactive and may allow for single-player or multiplayer experience. Multiplayer works make use of networked environments to develop new kinds of interaction and collaborative art production.

Techniques

Machinima

Machinima is the use of real-time

three-dimensional Three-dimensional space (also: 3D space, 3-space or, rarely, tri-dimensional space) is a geometric setting in which three values (called ''parameters'') are required to determine the position of an element (i.e., point). This is the informal ...

(3-D) graphics rendering engines to generate

computer animation Computer animation is the process used for digitally generating animations. The more general term computer-generated imagery (CGI) encompasses both static scenes ( still images) and dynamic images ( moving images), while computer animation re ...

. The term also refers to works that incorporate this animation technique.

In-game intervention and performance

Artists may intervene in online games in a non-play manner, often disrupting games in progress in order to challenge or expose underlying conventions and functions of game play. Examples of this include

Anne Marie Schleiner Anne-Marie Schleiner (born 1970) is a theorist, an educator, a new media and performance artist, a hacktivist, a scholar, a gamer, and a curator. Her work is focused on gender construction, ludic activism, situationist theory, political po ...

's ''Velvet-Strike'' (a project designed to allow players of realistic first person shooter games to use anti-war graffiti within the game to make an artistic statement) and ''Dead in Iraq'' (an art project created by Joseph DeLappe in which the player character purposely allows himself to be shot and then recites the names of US soldiers who have died in the Iraq War).

Site-specific installations and site-relative mods

Site-specific installations and site-relative gaming modifications ("mods"), replicate real-world places (often the art gallery in which they are displayed) to explore similarities and differences between real and virtual worlds. An example is ''What It Is Without the Hand That Wields It'', where blood from kills in Counterstrike manifests and spills into a real life gallery.

Real-time performance instruments

Video games can be incorporated into live audio and visual performance using a variety of instruments and computers such as

electronic keyboards An electronic keyboard, portable keyboard, or digital keyboard is an electronic musical instrument, an electronic derivative of keyboard instruments. Electronic keyboards include synthesizers, digital pianos, stage pianos, electronic organ ...

embedded with music chips. See also chiptune and the Fijuu project.

Generative art mods

Generative art Generative art refers to art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that w ...

mods exploit the real-time capabilities of game technologies to produce ever-renewing autonomous artworks. Examples include

Julian Oliver Julian may refer to: People * Julian (emperor) (331–363), Roman emperor from 361 to 363 * Julian (Rome), referring to the Roman gens Julia, with imperial dynasty offshoots * Saint Julian (disambiguation), several Christian saints * Julian (gi ...

's '' ioq3apaint'', a generative painting system that uses the actions of software agents in combat to drive the painting process,

Alison Mealy Alison may refer to: People * Alison (given name), including a list of people with the name * Alison (surname) Music * ''Alison'' (album), aka ''Excuse Me'', a 1975 album by Australian singer Alison MacCallum * "Alison" (song), song by Elvi ...

's '' UnrealArt'' which takes the movements of game entities and uses them to control a drawing process in an external program,

Kent Sheely Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it face ...

's "Cities in Flux," a '' Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas'' mod that glitches and distorts the game's world in real-time, and RetroYou's '' R/C Racer'' a modification of the graphic elements of a racing game which results in rich fields of colour and shape.

Notes

Sources

''GameScenes: Art in the Age of Videogames''.
(Johan & Levi, 2006). Edited by Matteo Bittanti and Domenico Quaranta.
Introduction to artistic computer game modification
by Rebecca Cannon (

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

file) Backed up her

by Rebecca Cannon (

file) Backed up her

''Videogames and Art''
by Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell (eds.)
Journal of Media Practice vol 7, no. 1
(special edition on videogames and art) by Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell (eds.)

online magazine of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media,

San Jose State University San José State University (San Jose State or SJSU) is a public university in San Jose, California. Established in 1857, SJSU is the oldest public university on the West Coast and the founding campus of the California State University (CSU) sy ...

From "First-Person Shooter" to Multi-User Knowledge Spaces
Mathias Fuchs and Sylvia Eckermann
Konsum Art-Server nTRACKER
Margarete Jahrmann and Max Moswitzer
Messages For A First Person Perspective
Maia Engeli *

External links

* ttp://maia.enge.li/gamezone/taxonomy.html Art games archive with examples of artistic modifications {{DEFAULTSORT:Video Game Art Visual arts genres Digital art Works based on video games Modern art