Most photos of the famed French painter Marcel Duchamp show him at a chessboard.
Duchamp began to focus less on art in 1918 and dedicated himself to the game, a preoccupation that led members of the art community to criticize him for wasting his time. Duchamp’s wife was so annoyed with his habit she once glued the chess pieces to the board of his set.
“The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem,” Duchamp said. “I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”
Duchamp’s name arose time and again at the Art History of Games symposium, held jointly by Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College and the Savannah College of Art and Design at the High Museum of Art earlier this year. The event served to credit video games with the same regard Duchamp gave to chess. Thus, he was referred to repeatedly as “the patron saint of gamers.”
One of those to canonize Duchamp was Celia Pearce, an assistant professor of digital media at Tech and director of the Experimental Game Lab and the Emergent Game Group. Originally a writer who went on to design video games, board games and amusement park rides, Pearce has been a champion of games as an art form since the 1980s.
But, she said, much of academia has long looked at video games as “the medium that dare not speak its name.”
When she turned in a curriculum for a proposed master’s program in interactive art at the University of Southern California, other faculty members excised every use of the word “game,” Pearce said.
“I left there in part because I was a bit disgruntled about that,” she said.
Early on, she would hear from journalists only if they were writing articles about how video games supposedly made children violent. She remarked that none of her video game-obsessed students has ever been violent.
Pearce joined Tech’s existing games program in 2006. While she continued to strive to earn games mainstream respect, the younger generations that made up her students needed no convincing. She said every class she’s ever taught has been over-enrolled.
“We want to elevate games to the cultural status they deserve,” Pearce said. “They’re on par with books or movies. I feel like I’m on the side of the future.”
Thou Shalt Not Kill
In the past decade, the video game industry has been dominated by sports and massive, cinematic series that feature a preponderance of violence. Grand Theft Auto and Halo are two notable examples.
At the Art History of Games symposium, John Romero remarked on the entrenched genres of games and took some credit for that evolution. Romero has designed 130 games and created Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom and Quake, which established violent first-person shooter games as a genre of choice for developers and fans.
As the gaming industry has boomed into a multimillion dollar business, design companies have become stuck to the formulas they’re familiar with, Pearce said.
“They’ve been ruined in a way by their success,” she said. “For game design, I have a commitment to innovation.”
Students in Pearce’s game design class have a surprise coming if they expect just to learn the technical demands of creating a video game. For the first four weeks of class, they don’t even talk about video games, much less play or design them.
Instead, they study folk games that were handed down from one generation to the next. The first assigned book is a history of the queen chess piece and how its role in the game corresponded to cultural changes as queens came to wield more influence.
Pearce said the effort corresponds to the broader mission of the School of Literature, Communication and Culture to take a humanistic approach to technology.
“I’m trying to get them to wrap their heads around the idea that video games are part of a tradition that goes back much farther,” Pearce said. “With computer games, I talk about who made them and why.”
She said most gamers know all of the technical aspects of Space Wars, the first vector graphics arcade game released in 1977. But few know it was inspired by a science fiction novel.
Once students finally start coming up with their own games, they’re forced to abide by Pearce’s rules that prohibit cliches. And of those, one is central: No killing.
Not only must the games refrain from having central characters kill enemies to advance, but Pearce also pushes students to not allow the main character to die. “What things beyond death signify a restart?” she asks them.
Students work through those constraints in the Experimental Games Lab on the third floor of the Skiles building. It’s a shared room for faculty and students with computers for programming, board games, nearly every gaming console ever created and a library of games. Pearce noted that the lab accepts donated games. On another shelf a book about game theory sits next to a Max Payne strategy guide.
The projects that come out of the lab tend to redefine games in significant ways, such as professor Ian Bogost’s combination of video games and journalism. Other developing games include one about Ellis Island, another called Mermaids with an ecological focus and a PhD thesis based on Pride and Prejudice.
The Art of Gaming
The question “Are games art?” never was discussed at the Art History of Games symposium. Instead, the leading game designers and theorists from around the world in attendance talked about the artistry of games.
“Games are a dynamic and alive form of art,” said Michael Nitsche, one of the event organizers and an assistant professor at Tech. “We only lose time if we return to a debate on whether they are art or not. This conference was a milestone of the discussion.”
Presenters focused on the influence of other art forms on games and the past, present and future of games as an art form. Tech professor Jay David Bolter and postdoctoral researcher Brian Schrank presented research on avant-garde video games, including the Jodi art collective’s work in stripping down the code of games such as Doom until they become almost abstract forms.
“It forces you to become conscious of the game’s conventions,” Schrank said of such games. “They make the familiar unfamiliar.”
Frank Lantz, a game developer and director of the New York University Game Center, called for theorists and developers to not forcibly group games with other mediums of art but to embrace the wildness of games.
“Instead of formalizing them, we should embrace games as weird,” Lantz said. “Games are like an art form for Asperger sufferers.”
The event also featured commissioned games. While watching the attendees play on computers and on an oversized game board and unite in discussion, Nitsche said he was energized about the medium.
“The symposium will provide a good foundation for future work — both in academia and game design practice,” Nitsche said. “This is my hope.”
Playing Together
Pearce looks at video games in the same way that Duchamp looked at chess — that there is beauty in the movement of the pieces, the flow of the game and the interaction of the players.
“Spore is one of the most innovative uses of computer science ever,” Pearce said. “But it isn’t thought of as computer science.”
Though a staunch supporter of games now, Pearce said she didn’t care for them much when she began working for a game design company in 1983. She had preferred pinball as a youth, but when Pong debuted in 1972, she took an interest.
“I really liked Pong,” she said. “I still think it’s one of the best games ever.”
The next game to capture her attention was the original SimCity, released in 1989. There was artistry in the design of the game and the way it utilized the computer, Pearce said.
Later, she became a fan of the immersive fantasy game Myst then began both participating in and researching massively multiplayer online role-playing games and virtual worlds such as Uru, Lineage and Second Life.
Her most recent book, Communities of Play, follows a group that united in one virtual world, Uru, and relocated to another world, There.com, after Uru shut down. When There.com closed down in March, Pearce eulogized the site for Gamasutra.com.
“The long-term sustainability of a community rests largely on the social bonds between its members,” she wrote. “One of the most important findings of my MMORG research has been that players come for the game but stay for the people.”
The growth of online multiplayer games has given people with disabilities or with social phobias a way to interact with others, she said. These games also return the medium to its board game roots.
When arcade games first popularized video games, it established gaming as a solitary activity, Pearce said.
“All games used to be multiplayer,” she said. “Solitaire was an anomaly.”
In recent years, that trend is turning. Between online role-playing games, multiplayer games like Wii Bowling and interactive systems like Xbox Live, video games are full of opportunities to socialize.
Another type of socializing is crucial to advancing games, Pearce said, and that is bringing game developers and researchers together.
While the Art History of Games symposium united like-minded people from different countries, a new effort is rallying those on Tech’s campus. Games at Georgia Tech is a new overarching brand that will encompass all video game-related work done at the Institute.
Pearce said faculty from several colleges and departments are working on different aspects of gaming, but often they don’t work together.
“We all have informal relationships, but then we find some music guy who has a game,” she said. “We want to find the people who are hidden and make [our research] more coherent to the outside world.”
Developing the Future
While gaming has come a long way since Pearce became an academic, she still sees areas of improvement.
She’d like to see better discourse and writing about games, for one.
“Most is like, ‘This version has 17 more weapons available than the last one,’” she said. “There’s a lot of interesting stuff to be said more than how many guns there are.”
Pearce praised the establishment of the iPhone and other mobile devices as gaming platforms for leading to a boom in more creative independent games. She expects the merging of alternative reality games with mobile devices will be the next evolution in gaming.
She also still sees a lot of room for improvement in game developers’ treatment of women. While most board games were marketed to males and females of all ages, video games often are targeted purely at young males.
Pearce was pleased when, in a recent class, a female and male student both turned in papers disparaging the gender stereotypes in a recent game.
As her students graduate and go on to work at big studios like EA and Zynga, Pearce is encouraged that mainstream games will also become more diverse.
“Hopefully they take that level of enlightenment and make better games,” she said.
Pearce at least can take comfort in one development. Her old department at Southern California, once so game averse, is now called the Electronic Arts Interactive Entertainment Program — named for the gaming studio.
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