games-as-art
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15 Minutes of Fame: Anthropologist Bonnie Nardi on WoW culture and art
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. We've written before at WoW.com and even here in 15 Minutes of Fame about attempts to study World of Warcraft culture from a sociological, psychological or anthropological point of view. In all of these cases, the researchers in question have logged time playing WoW as part of their research, albeit some with greater degrees of immersive success than others. So I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that Bonnie Nardi, a University of California-Irvine expert in the social implications of digital technologies and author of the rather blithely titled My Life as a Night Elf Priest, not only rolled the token raiding character in order to observe the curious behavior of the raiding animal -- she actually enjoys WoW in its own right. Rather than cautiously sniffing WoW culture only to generate another wide-eyed, ZOMG-look-at-this-funny-lingo report from the digital field, Nardi dove deep enough to play in four different guilds: a casual raiding guild; a raiding guild composed of fellow academics; a small, casual guild; and her own friends-and-family guild. Our two-part interview with Nardi, packed with opinion and cultural analysis, reveals a witty approach to WoW culture that successfully combines academic insight with the familiarity of a seasoned player.
Roger Ebert's latest column posits 'games can never be art'
In the "Games as art" debate that seems to never end, the number one opponent of our industry's medium of choice being considered art (at least "high art") has been renowned film critic Roger Ebert. Since he made his initial declaratory statements about video games many years ago, folks have piped up on both sides of the argument. Ebert's latest volley in the long-running discussion is a piece published on the Chicago Sun-Times website in response to thatgamecompany prez Kellee Santiago's TED talk at USC last summer. While he allows Santiago many pleasantries and compliments throughout the piece, he argues that, regardless of her various points, games "can never be art." At the very least, he says, "No video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form." He contests that games consist of "rules, points, objectives, and an outcome," which stands in contrast to his somewhat ambiguous definition of what, exactly, art is. In a moment of seeming clarity at the end of his piece, he asks: "Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form." And while we might not agree with all of Mr. Ebert's points, we can certainly find common ground with his wondering why the debate over games as art is still such a topic of concern among gamers (ourselves included). [Thanks, Salvatore]
Classic games reimagined as art
From the 8-bit art show to E3's Into the Pixel exhbition, game-inspired art is nothing new. But while the works in these shows use the characters and scenes from popular games, they usually create a visual aesthetic all their own. Which is why it was kind of refreshing to stumble across these works by visual artist Jeremiah McNichols that go the other way -- inserting other artistic elements into familiar game scenes.The scenes came from McNichols' experiments making desktop wallpapers out of real wallpaper sample, and the effect is pretty freaky. We especially like this Frogger piece that makes it look like our froggy hero is trying to cross an oriental rug. McNichols blog has similar examples that draw from Contra, Gauntlet, Pitfall and more.[Via Boing Boing]
