Galloway: “Counter-gaming” (2006)
• Artist-made game mods (usually “game-art”)
• Mod visual design and software, not rule—do not
modify gameplay
• Qualities (normal games vs. art mods):
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Transparency vs. foregrounding
Gameplay vs. aestheticism
Representational modeling vs. visual artifacts
Natural physics vs. invented physics
Interactivity vs. noncorrespondence
• Calls for indie game movement, “radical action,”
critique of gameplay itself
Tom Bissell, “Braided” (2010)
• Jonathan Blow: “dynamical meaning”—theme
and mood developing out of gameplay
• Story vs. challenge (p. 93)
• “touching people authentically and deeply”
• “It feels as though the person who created it was
trying to communicate something, however
nameless and complicated. It feels like a
statement, and an admission. It feels, in other
words, a lot like art.” (p. 101)
• Is art narrative (or narrative-related) for
Blow/Bissell?
Ian Bogost, “Art” (2011)
• Roger Ebert’s objection—no authorial voice
• “art-games”—use proceduralism to make art
• 5 qualities:
– Procedural rhetoric (making a claim by modeling
its processes, rather than description or depiction)
– Introspection
– Abstraction
– Subjective representation
– Strong authorship