Videogames and Art

This book, Videogames and Art, is one of the first books to provide a complete overview of the field of videogame art – that is to say, art produced with or influenced by videogames. In selecting the essays and interviews to be included in this book, we have sought not only to give an indication of the current state of videogame art – and its major practitioners and genres – but also to place this work in a broader critical context. Its intention is to show that even though this area of digital art is comparatively young and exhibits a wide variety of different styles and techniques, it none the less forms a distinct and coherent artistic movement – united by shared aesthetic concerns – and is therefore worthy of being taken seriously as an art form. As we have pointed out previously, in our paper for the Level Up games conference, videogames are most people’s first point of contact with computers. Videogames have also, through their immense popularity, become part of our shared cultural capital. As such, they are often recognizable even to those who have never played the original game and may also carry connotations beyond their original content, context and meaning. It is therefore inevitable that artists have used them firstly as inspiration and as a source of material, and then, over time, sought to create their own games and modifications to existing games. Videogames have become a popular area of academic research and have spawned many books and conferences, so why then is a book needed specifically on videogames and art? The reason is that videogame criticism (whether from a background in ludology or narratology) has tended to concentrate on the mechanics of the videogame, rather than its aesthetics. As a result, the theoretical discussion has tended to revolve around how these factors contribute (positively or negatively) to the gameplay and/or the narrative of the game, rather than as qualities to be assessed and/or appreciated on their own terms. While this is a valid theoretical approach to take, implicit in this type of analysis is the assumption – whether made consciously or not – that what is being looked at is game design, rather than game aesthetics. In other words, it is game craft rather than game art.Download Here  

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