Art Games | Code Like It's 198x

In January 1984 the American magazine Video Games reported that games, already called “educational toys for the computer age” and “time-wasting tools of the devil”, had “earned a new label: Art”. Washington’s Corcoran Gallery had held an exhibition of games called ARTcade, and two Californian designers were selling cartridges in which “the goal in each is not to rack up points or kill aliens”. “Most of the games on the market are variations on the same game,” one of them, Jaron Lanier, said. “But John (O’Neill) and I are making games that live by their creativity rather than by a paranoid world view.”

An art game is one its maker meant as a piece of expression first: a game about growing old, about a marriage, about growing up. Magazines were already using the word in 1983, and it came back in the late 2000s, when a handful of small, strange games made people argue about whether games could be art, and whether these were games at all.

Fast facts

First wave: Alien Garden (Epyx), Moondust (Creative Software, 1983) and Lifespan (Roklan), all on sale by the end of 1983.
Second wave: Rod Humble’s The Marriage (2007), Jason Rohrer’s Passage (2007), Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard (2008) and The Path (2009).
Recognition: Passage was among the first 14 games the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired, announced in November 2012.
Related: walking simulators, and the games some developers called “notgames”.

The first art games

Video Games named two. In Lifespan, by the English-born painter John O’Neill, the player travels “through all the stages of living from childhood through death”, collecting aspects of character in childhood and then passing through “Opportunity Gates” and an “Experience Corridor” to a “Payoff”, a light-and-sound display that changes with the life the player has led. In Lanier’s Moondust, for the Commodore 64, a spacewalker drops seeds for passing ships to sweep over, and the patterns they make play music. Both games had an “art mode” with no points or challenges at all; O’Neill imagined people leaving his on the television during dinner.

Their makers were not programmers by trade. Lanier was a composer who had learned to program about three years earlier and had worked at Epyx on Alien Garden. O’Neill had painted in the 1960s art scene and grown tired of what he called its “self indulgence”. “Video games are the best medium that’s available to an artist today,” he said. Lanier warned that games could prove an “electronic hula hoop” if they stayed clichéd, and that the business needed “the courage to invest in creativity”.

Alien Garden was designed by Bernie DeKoven, who told Electronic Fun that he had wanted “an alien world, but not one that was necessarily hostile. A world that had some danger, but also some beauty.” The player steers a Cosmic Critter through rows of crystal flowers that grow, mutate or explode when touched. Reviewers did not always know what to make of it. The Book of Atari Software 1983 called it “an intellectual game that has merit, but seems to be one that few will ever learn to enjoy”. COMPUTE! found Moondust “fascinating to play for the sheer beauty of it”.

The return of the art game

The term came back with independent developers a generation later. Rod Humble, a veteran of The Sims at Electronic Arts, made short experiments in his spare time; Edge described The Marriage as “an abstract poem centred on the nature of relationships”. Jason Rohrer, whom Edge called “the ruler of the artgame development scene”, made Passage (2007), a five-minute game in which, as Wireframe describes it, the player walks “along with a spouse, down a seemingly endless, empty corridor where minute changes are gradually introduced, your hair thinning, your pace slowing”, to an ending everyone can predict. He followed it with Gravitation (2008) and Sleep Is Death (2010), a two-player game in which one player is the storyteller and the other the star, each with thirty seconds to respond. “What’s the most interactive thing in our lives?” Rohrer asked. “The people around us, and the most interactive experience we have is conversation.”

In Belgium, the artists Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn worked as Tale of Tales. The Graveyard (2008) gives the player an old woman to walk, slowly, to a bench in a cemetery; Wireframe called it “a walking simulator in the truest sense”. The Path (2009) retold Little Red Riding Hood through six sisters. “It’s a failure game,” Samyn told Edge in 2007: “there’s one goal and you must not do it!” The pair argued that games were “more closely related to architecture than film”. Their last commercial game was Sunset (2015), after which, by public accounts, Tale of Tales stopped making games for sale.

“Not games”

The new art games drew the old question. Writing in Edge in 2013, the designer Clint Hocking noted that Passage and The Graveyard “have both been labelled as ‘not games’ by a significant number of people”, and that the same charge was later aimed at Dear Esther and at Journey, which had just won Game of the Year at the DICE Awards. Some developers took the word as a badge. In a 2013 Edge feature on how games had changed over twenty years, Adrian Chmielarz of The Astronauts chose: “The appearance of notgames.” Games such as Journey and Dear Esther, he said, “have basically opened up a whole new world for us”.

Museums took a side. In November 2012 the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced its first 14 video games, among them Passage, Jenova Chen’s flOw and Katamari Damacy. Edge reported the reaction under the heading “Are games art? NYC’s Museum Of Modern Art appears to think so”.

Since then

Personal and political games kept coming, though fewer of them used the label. Edge called Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please (2013), in which the player checks identity documents at a border crossing, an “empathy game”. Numinous Games’ That Dragon, Cancer (2016) told the story of its makers’ son Joel, and Wireframe discussed it in 2019 alongside Chen’s Flower as a game built to convey feelings rather than challenge.

Sources

Mary Claire Blakeman, “The Art Side of Video Games: The Wave of the Future”, Video Games (US) volume 2 issue 4, January 1984, pp. 27–28: the ARTcade exhibition; Lifespan and Moondust; the art modes; Lanier and O’Neill’s backgrounds and quotations; Lanier at Epyx on Alien Garden; Lifespan published through Roklan.
Phil Wiswell, “The Alien Gardener”, interview with Bernie DeKoven, Electronic Fun with Computers & Games volume 1 issue 8, June 1983, pp. 76–78. “Moonduster”, interview with Jaron Lanier, volume 2 issue 2, December 1983, p. 85.
The Book of Atari Software 1983, p. 104: Alien Garden review (Epyx, $39.95).
COMPUTE! issue 42, November 1983, p. 172: Moondust (Creative Software, Commodore 64 cartridge, $34.95).
Edge issue 231, September 2011, pp. 126–127: Rod Humble profile (The Sims; his “artgame experiments”, including The Marriage).
Edge issue 236, January 2012, pp. 142–143: Jason Rohrer profile (“the ruler of the artgame development scene”; Sleep Is Death; conversation as “the most interactive experience”).
Edge issue 214, May 2010, pp. 18–19: Sleep Is Death (storyteller and star, thirty seconds a move).
Edge issue 242, July 2012, p. 142: “2007’s celebrated art game Passage” and “2008’s lesser-known Gravitation”.
Wireframe issue 44, October 2020, pp. 72 and 74: Passage; The Graveyard.
Edge issue 182, December 2007, pp. 46–48: The Path preview (Harvey and Samyn; “a failure game”; architecture and film).
Edge issue 253, May 2013, p. 136: Clint Hocking, “A rose by any other name” (Passage, The Graveyard, Dear Esther and Journey called “not games”).
Edge issue 258, October 2013, p. 13: Adrian Chmielarz on notgames.
Edge issue 249, January 2013, p. 28: the Museum of Modern Art and games.
Edge issue 262, January 2014, pp. 5 and 116–117: Papers, Please, the “empathy game”.
Wireframe issue 29, December 2019, pp. 44–47: That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016) and Flower.
Wikipedia, “The Marriage (video game)” (web, secondary): released in March 2007 after the Game Developers Conference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marriage_(video_game)
Wikipedia, “Passage (video game)” (web, secondary): released November 2007; five minutes long. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_(video_game)
Wikipedia, “List of video games in the Museum of Modern Art” (web, secondary): the first 14 games, announced in November 2012, citing MoMA’s press release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_in_the_Museum_of_Modern_Art
Wikipedia, “Tale of Tales (company)” (web, secondary): The Graveyard (2008), The Path (2009), Sunset (2015) and the decision to stop commercial game development, citing the studio’s “And the sun sets…” (June 2015). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_Tales_(company)