New Media Presentation Outline

Topic: New Media Art in Video Games

• Video Games can be art
• Art doesn't have to only serve itself, it can have meaning and be a storytelling device
• http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-art-of-video-games-101131359/?no-ist
• Chris Melissinos reached that opinion some 30 years earlier, as a teenager plugging away at King’s Quest on a neighbor’s PC. 
• The game’s hand-drawn animation and two-word typed commands seem crude now, but “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, this is a fairy tale come to life,’” Melissinos says. He still gets goose bumps remembering hidden warp zones in the first Super Mario Brothers.
• Now Melissinos is the guest curator of “The Art of Video Games,” an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that celebrates 40 years of the genre, from Pac-Man to Minecraft. The show will include video-game screen shots, videotaped interviews with game designers, vintage consoles from Melissinos’ personal collection (“I’m having a bit of separation anxiety,” he says) and several opportunities for visitors to seize the arcade joystick or PlayStation controls themselves.
• Critics say that art can't be a video game, and that video games can't be art. I think they're wrong.
• Artists either incorporate their art into the game, or make the game their art form
• Mark Essen, creator of  Nidhogg uses video games to carry a story to the viewer
• http://messhof.com
• The definition of art is very open to interpretation. Most art critics say that video games can’t be and are not art.
• The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones wrote an article saying that video games are a playground where you can pretend, but nothing is real there.
• Both the Smithsonian and the New York Museum of Modern Art both have had exhibits depicting video games as art.
• The Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that video games are indeed a form of art.
• If we look at Lev Manovich’s definition and criteria of what New Media art is: Represented numerically, modular, variable, automated, and transcoded.
• What happens in a video game is created and caused by algorithms, so that’s correct.
• Some video games are modular, where there is no set way for something to happen, so some games are truly modular.
• Video games are almost always variable. you can change what happens in it by changing the actions taken. It isn’t as fully variable as Manovich defines it, because there’s only so much you can change in a game.
• Again, parts of video games are automated. Some actions happen regardless of if you trigger them or interact with them. This is perhaps the weakest link in the connection between video games and New Media.
• All video games contain transcoded information. This includes sounds, pictures, and physical elements.
• It sure seems like video games share a lot of the attributes of New Media Art…
• Even if video games aren’t art, they definitely contain elements of art and are created with artistic methods.
• Concept art to actual assets are an artistic creation.
• Creation of soundscapes are also artistic.
• The creation of a story is also art.
• Cory Arcangel
• His Super Mario Clouds is an example of art and video games merging.
• While it is hacked, it is using the assets of the game itself to create art and to provoke thoughts an emotions of the people viewing them.