Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/6960
February 2010 46 same sentence, the discussion tends to revolve around the questions of whether video games are art, the art and graphics of commercial video games, and, less often, the use of video games in fine art," posits Pearce. "Contempo- rary digital game art is a growing movement, comparable to the rise of video as a fine art form in the 1980s; however, fine artists have harnessed the expressive power of games for nearly a century." Leading by Example An integral and important part of the confer- ence was the introduction of three new games specifically commissioned for the Art History of Games. Premiering their new games were: conference presenter Jason Rohrer, creator of the critically acclaimed games Passage and Gravitation; Tales of Tales' Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn, creators of Path, many Web sites, and Internet artwork; and Eric Zimmer- man, co-founder of GameLab, and his part- ner, architect Nathalie Pozzi. Rohrer's contribution, Sleep is Death (Geis- terfahrer), is a two-player asymmetric game. Pozzi and Zimmerman's Sixteen Tons—aptly named after the folk song made famous in 1955 by Tennessee Ernie Ford about coal min- ing and debt bondage—looks like a large-scale board game, but the gameplay is complicated by the fact that players can pay each other with real money. Playing the game becomes an experience that critically blurs work and play, as the real value of money is grafted onto the artificial meanings of the game, and player identity shifts fluidly back and forth from co- operation to competition. Lastly, Tale of Tales' Vanitas is a virtual memento mori for your digital hands. Vanitas presents players with a gorgeously rendered 3D box filled with intriguing objects that can be moved by the tilt of an iPhone or pushed and dragged using a simple iPod. Joining the illustrious roster of speakers and panelists was John Romero, a game designer, programmer, artist, and sequential artist whose work spans more than 130 games—97 of which have been published commercially, including the iconic works Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. Romero, who is inspired by, if not in awe of, the creativity and inno- vation of the video game pioneers, celebrated the genius and contributions of those who first breathed life into the industry in his lecture "Masters Among Us." "Since the dawn of the digital industry," says Romero, "game designers and program- mers pushed technology beyond its bounds, and on the granular level, millions of seem- ingly trivial mechanic innovations made the medium and cultural art form what it is today. Our masters still walk among us. Interestingly, however, few practicing game designers and even fewer experiencing their works know the masters among them." e conference also featured Jesper Juul, an influential theorist in the field of video game studies and the author of Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, considered to be one of the top 50 books written about the game industry; and Frank Lantz, creative director and co-founder of Area/Code, a New York-based developer that creates cross-media, location-based, and social network games. Other notable presenters included Chris- tiane Paul, adjunct curator of new media arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Henry Lowood, Stanford University's curator for the history of science and technology collec- tions and film and media collections; Michael Nitsche, a digital media scholar and assistant professor at Georgia Tech; and John Sharp, SCAD interactive design and game develop- ment instructor and art history professor. Organized and chaired by Bogost, Nitsche, and Sharp, the Art History of Games confer- ence aimed to break new ground, unearth the past, and pay homage to the next generation of game developers. To some, it's all about gameplay; to others with a wider vision, it is about the art of the game. n Presenting at the conference were Ian Bogost (top), associate professor at Georgia Tech's Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, and John Sharp (bottom), interactive design and game development instructor/ art history professor at Savannah College of Art and Design. Jason Rohrer presented Sleep is Death, which is meant to blur work and play, as the real value of money has a role in the game. n n n n Education