Taking Art to the Next Level: Video Games as Inspiration, Platform and Medium

By Thomas Gibbs

*Trigger warning – scene depicting video game gun violence*

Too many people have asked whether video games can be considered art – this is a tired and outdated debate. It is far more interesting to look at the galleries around the world already embracing interactive entertainment in their art exhibits. I am not talking here about computer or games museums like Sheffield’s National Videogame Museum; instead, the inspiration for this article came just a few miles from the computer’s birthplace in Bletchley, from the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes.

Larry Achiampong, Wayfinder Exhibition Space, 2022, Installation, Gallery MK, Milton Keynes.

Video games were not the focus of Larry Achiampong’s multimedia installation Wayfinder. Achiampong imagined an Afrofuturist space programme, with cosmonauts travelling back in time to hear the testimony of oppressed Africans and the African diaspora across time. He successfully utilised a variety of media to create a cohesive exhibition space: new Pan-Africanist flags, cosmonaut mannequins, mission patches, and benches in the shape of a fractured post-Brexit United Kingdom. Most unusual, however, was the final room which he had filled with beanbags, old television sets, and games consoles – each playing a ‘journey’ themed game that had inspired Achiampong and his art.

Ostensibly a way of bulking out the otherwise heavy and conceptual exhibition with ‘interactivity’ and ‘family appeal’, this room provided a rare insight into the life experience of the artist. I saw one group of children who were regulars and dropped by whenever they were in town. Besides encouraging children to enter and engage with a gallery, no mean feat in itself, this space encouraged them to consider their own inspirations and the link between the media they consume and the works they can create. Furthermore, it promoted a sense of the artist as a normal human being, with normal passions and interests outside of political art-making; something I am always in favour of.

For the older viewer it also provided an important insight into young artists’ new inspirations – with some 60% of the UK now gamers in some form it is little wonder that such popular culture is invading the art world. Gallery MK isn’t alone in this observation. In 2020 Ohio’s Akron Art Museum opened an exhibit entitled ‘Open Worlds’ showcasing artists inspired by video games. Akron’s curator Theresa Bembnister told Forbes: ‘I really wanted to go beyond the question of whether or not games are art and to demonstrate the growing influence of games on the creation of visual art’. MoMA New York began collecting video games ten years ago, not as artworks but as culturally significant pieces of design.

Skawennati, Still from TimeTraveller™️, 2007-2014, Machinima recorded in Second Life, online (https://www.timetravellertm.com)

Besides influencing artists, video games have emerged both as a medium for creating and as a platform for displaying artworks. During the pandemic, many galleries turned to virtual reality shows, and since then many have continued – arguing that the internet makes for a more flexible, democratic, and accessible exhibition space than a Victorian museum hall. Meanwhile, specialist virtual gallery-creation software like Artsteps is now being taught in universities around the globe. Although not games, such software builds on the pioneering work of 2000s hybrid virtual artists like Jennifer Steele who rebuilt her gallery in Second Life’s virtual world to sell her digital art around the globe. In fact, at its peak, Second Life had hundreds of art galleries, theatres, and architecture exhibitions; some of which are now immortalised in physical galleries. Skawennati’s semi-surrealist machinima TimeTraveller™️ imagines a Native American dominated future and looks back at our history from this imagined viewpoint. Much like Achiampong, Skawennati turned to video games for their focus on the creation of entirely new worlds.

Blockworks, The Uncensored Library, 2020-Present, Minecraft Server, online (https://www.uncensoredlibrary.com/en)

It is little surprise then that immensely popular construction game, Minecraft, has been used extensively by amateur and professional artists, promoters, and organisations. The works are too numerous to list but span sculpture, machinima, architecture, and pixel art. Entire Minecraft art galleries are dedicated to their display with some ground-breaking and innovative architectural styles on display (many of which would be entirely impractical in real life). Perhaps most notable is The Uncensored Library – a collaboration between professional Minecrafters Blockworks and French NGO Reporters Without Borders, the immense library holds thousands of texts censored around the globe. It is a striking artistic reminder of how widespread censorship has become, but it serves a concrete purpose too. Since it is impossible for governments to block access to individual Minecraft servers without blocking the entire game, an immensely unpopular and heavy-handed move, the texts are accessible in countries without press freedom, and all in the gloriously rendered surroundings of a neoclassical library of Alexandria.

Prof Joseph DeLappe, Screenshot from Elegy: GTA USA Gun Homicides, 2018, Twitch stream of a modification for Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar Games, 2013), online (http://www.delappe.net/play/elegy-gta-usa-gun-homicides/)

Other artists, meanwhile, are content to work within the games’ existing worlds. Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto series might seem an unlikely artistic medium but its stunning virtual environment and reputation as a gratuitously violent murder simulator present many artistic possibilities. In 2018, just across the Tay from St Andrews, Abertay University’s Professor Joseph DeLappe created Elegy: GTA USA Gun Homicides. Every day from July 4th, for a whole year, the game would play itself, killing as many Americans as had died from gun violence since the start of the year. The bodies would pile up until midnight, when the streets would reset, and the murders would begin again. The point, of course, was that DeLappe used real data scraped from the Gun Violence archive every evening, so each day his Twitch stream would bear witness to more mindless murders. Choosing as a platform the game blamed more than any other for US gun violence, DeLappe’s work makes immediately concrete data that can often seem abstract in its immensity. During the pandemic, gatherings in the game’s multiplayer replicated protests in cities around the world and created what could be described as impromptu performance art – each player role-playing as a protestor.

Brent Watanabe, San Andreas Deer Cam, 2015-present, Twitch stream of a modification for Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar Games, 2013), online (https://bwatanabe.com/GTA_V_WanderingDeer.html) and in various galleries including Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA.

Not every artist using GTA as a medium has such political aims, however. Brent Watanabe’s ‘San Andreas Deer Cam’ depicts a single autonomous deer wandering the streets of Los Santos (Rockstar’s imagined version of Los Angeles) and the surrounding countryside. Exhibited at galleries around the world and streamed every day on Twitch, millions of people have watched as the deer gets itself into scrapes – accidentally interacting with gang members, headbutting pedestrians, being chased by SWAT teams, and being repeatedly run over by supercars. Watanabe told the Washington Post: ‘I saw the deer like Buster Keaton, flailing and struggling through this environment… [even] when you’re not watching on Twitch, he is still wandering and bumbling and stumbling. Really funny and sad and tragic.’

From the political, to the beautiful to the absurd, video games provide a platform and a medium for artists around the world. They are accessible, affordable, and novel. The debate about whether video games can be art is a tired one. Perhaps it is more important that we accept that video games are here to stay, that they are an important part of our culture now, their influence on art will only continue to grow.

Notes:

Abertay University. 2018. Professor uses GTA V to protest gun violence . July 13. Accessed January 23, 2022. https://www.abertay.ac.uk/news/2018/professor-uses-gta-v-to-protest-gun-violence/.

Baker, Nick. 2022. Online gaming statistics 2022. October 8. Accessed January 22, 2023. https://www.uswitch.com/broadband/studies/online-gaming-statistics/.

Evans-Thirlwell, Edwin. n.d. The meaning of a massacre: GTAV and protest art. Accessed January 24, 2022. https://wireframe.raspberrypi.com/articles/the-meaning-of-a-massacre-gtav-and-protest-art.

Fowler, Hart. 2020. Artists have used Grand Theft Auto V as a canvas for years. Now, protesters are doing the same.February 11. Accessed January 20, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/02/11/artists-have-used-grand-theft-auto-v-canvas-years-now-protesters-are-doing-same/.

Ings, Simon. 2021. How the pandemic is revolutionising art galleries and museums. February 3. Accessed January 23, 2023. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933202-100-how-the-pandemic-is-revolutionising-art-galleries-and-museums/.

Levin, Rachel. 2021. How the Pandemic Changed Museums Forever (or Did It?). Summer. Accessed January 22, 2023. https://news.usc.edu/trojan-family/virtual-art-museum-tours-exhibitions-after-covid-pandemic/.

Scott, Chadd. 2020. Game (Almost) Over, Exhibit Connecting Video Games And Contemporary Art Finishing Run At Akron Art Museum. January 5. Accessed January 24, 2022. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chaddscott/2020/01/05/game-almost-over-exhibit-connecting-video-games-and-contemporary-art-finishing-run-at-akron-art-museum/?sh=8f3906b559f2.