Radical Action and Pure Joy: David Oreilly's Video Game Everything In
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Stephan Schwingeler (DE) Radical Action and Pure Joy: David OReilly’s Video Game Everything in the Context of Game Art, Art History, and a new Gamic Avant-garde In the beginning I was an elephant. My first play - vidual traverse, playthrough, or free navigation is com- through of David OReilly’s videogame Everything1 parable to another player’s experience. Everything’s started in the pachyderm’s thick skin. Shortly after reception is a personal, individual journey depending that I entered a beetle’s body, transformed into pollen, on the path through the game’s cosmos chosen by the and back into a beetle. I controlled tufts of grass and player. This path is not laid out linearly leading from A turned into a palm tree. At one point I became a rubber to B, but is rather comparable to a web, a network, a duck, a snooker table, a set of conga drums, an electric rhizome. The player moves through this very system of guitar. I transformed into an island, a sun, a galaxy, objects and rules and thus navigates the system itself, becoming everything at once, incorporating everything wielding influence over it. In the following remarks I that is included in it at the same time. will discuss OReilly’s Everything from different per- On the one hand, David OReilly’s Everything plays spectives and situate it in art history. First the piece with this permanent change of perspective, enabling will be situated in the broader context of game art. the player to experience the game’s world as another After that I will lay out some basic remarks about the entity. On the other hand, the game utilizes change of video game as a new material in art history: the video scale resulting in the fact that the object incarnated game’s entry into the art world as a new material and before becomes the measure of the following object. genre is outlined in a short overview using examples The outcome is a journey from a small into a large uni- from the nineteen-eighties and nineties such as Toshio verse, from micro- to macrocosmos, and back again, Iwai’s Otocky (1987)2 and the video game modification comparable to Ray and Charles Eames’s famous exper- Arsdoom (Orhan Kipcak, Reinhard Urban, 1995) 3. In imental film Powers of 10 from 1977. the course of describing early video game pieces vari- A main difference, of course, is that Everything is not a ous artistic strategies are indentified that are used by film—it is a game, an interactive piece, in which no indi- artists mainly in the nineteen-nineties to appropriate 1 Everything. Directed by David OReilly, Produced by Double Fine Productions. 2017. see also p. 206 2 Otocky. Developed by Scitron & Art SEDIC. Published by ASCII Corporation. 1987. 3 Orphan Kipcak, “ARSDOOM – art adventure,” in Mythos Information: Welcome to the Wired World, edited by Karl Gerbel, Peter Weibel, and Ars Electronica, exh. cat. Brucknerhaus Linz. Vienna, New York, 1995, pp. 262–264. RADICAL ACTION AND PURE JOY Figure 1: OReilly, David: Everything (2017), screenshot. Here the player’s avatar is depicted as a tardigrade. https://www.everything-game.com/presskit/ (accessed on July 27, 2018). video games in the context of art. As a consequence, Video Games and Art the opportunity arises to step further into art history In the art context, Everything can be seen as belonging by highlighting various strategies of appropriation that to a larger field that curators call game art5. In the fol- are relevant to artists beginning to use video games as lowing remarks I will critically discuss the term game their material. It becomes clear that the first artists art, integrating David OReilly’s work into a larger con- using video games mainly in the nineteen-nineties text of art practice including video games as material. cultivated a rather aggressive approach towards the While the label game art makes sense from a curato- material tending to analyze it by disruption, interfer- rial perspective, it is problematic from a scholarly one. ence, and eventually destruction. These tendencies are One definition of game art was proposed by Matteo addressed by the concept of countergaming. The term Bittanti.6 Bittanti understands game art as every kind coined by media scholar Alexander Galloway4 can be of artistic expression in which digital games play a used to frame the strategies and tendencies to rebel significant role: against established forms of convential game design resulting in a new form of gameplay eventually lead- Game art is any art in which digital games played ing to a new gamic avant-garde: radical action. Every- a significant role in the creation, production, and/ thing can serve as an example for this new form of or display of the artwork. The resulting artwork radical gameplay being one of the first games to truly can exist as a game, painting, photograph, sound, embrace the potentialities of videogames as artistic, animation, video, performance, or gallery instal- hybrid material and one fine example of a new gamic lation. avant-garde. 4 Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming. Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis, 2006). 5 According to current scholarship, the concept game art was first used as a curatorial label in 2002. Curator Rebecca Cannon used it for her exhibition Trigger: Game Art from 14–25 May 2002 in Melbourne, Australia. Game Art functioned as the title of and as a sort of label in an exhibition at Völklinger Hütte in Völklingen near Saarbrücken in 2003 (cf. Meinrad M. Grewenig et al., eds., GameArt, exh. cat. Völk- linger Hütte (Ostfildern, 2003)). The concept game art refers in the context of game design to the implementation of graphics from the first sketch to the final product. Game art thereby encompasses the classical techniques of fine art as well as computational visualistics. 6 Matteo Bittanti, Per una cultura dei videogames. Teorie e prassi del videogiocare (Milan, 2002). He then adds a further attempt at a definition ex neg- materials. The field can be divided into three groups: to ativo: the first group belong adaptations and appropriations of the audiovisual surface of games that implement It is true that game art often defines itself against a “computer-game aesthetic” (which is not further commercial games. Its ambivalent nature lies in defined) in painting, graphic design, sculpture, pho- the fact that it both celebrates and condemns its tography, film, video, performance, et cetera. What 7 source material. we have here is a reception of computer game images and their use in other media and genres of fine art. According to Bittanti,8 then, artists can help them- Computer games as sujet. selves to the whole field of fine art and all its wealth The second group consists of forms of expression that of resources in producing game art. Bittanti’s game originate directly in the field of computer games with- art is independent of genre, materials, media, and out being computer games themselves, like machin- technology. The only restriction in terms of content ima12 or demos,13 for example. In the case of machin- involves the observation that such works of art are ima, the computer game becomes more of a tool for often directed against, or are critical of, commercial the production of an artifact. games and the computer game industry.9 The third group includes all modifications (or mods) A further attempt to define game art was made by Cor- and independent productions of computer games rado Morgana,10 who opens the genre up even further (sometimes called art games) explicitly under the to include (analogue) games as such: sign of art. When it comes to modifications of already Game art does exactly what it says on the tin: it existing games, one could speak of “art with computer is art that uses, abuses and misuses the material games.” In this case the computer game itself consti- and language of games, whether real world, elec- tutes the artistic genre. The strategy of modification tronic/digital or both. The imagery, the aesthet- was the “first attempt to approach the phenomenon of 14 ics, the systems, the software and the engines the computer game within its own medium.” OReil- of games can be appropriated or the language of ly’s Everything is an artistic computer game produced games approximated for creative commentary.11 from scratch and thus falls into the category of pro- duction. To be sure, a substantial scholarly work could Such a broad conceptualization of the area of inquiry be written just on the artistic production of computer and the generalization it entails lead to significant games—art games—which have become increasingly methodological problems. Game art thus becomes prevalent in recent years. It could be theorized that a heterogeneous field of artifacts of wide-ranging in the field of artistic computer game production, in artistic strategies and techniques, means, media, and contrast to modification, a second generation is devel- 7 Matteo Bittanti, “Game Art – (This is not) A Manifesto, (this is) A Disclaimer,“ in Gamescenes. Art in the Age of Videogames, edited by M. Bittanti and D. Quaranta (Milan, 2006), p. 9. 8 Ibid., pp. 7–15. 9 Ibid., p. 11. 10 Corrado Morgana, “Introduction,” in Artists Re:Thinking Games, edited by Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, and Corrado Morgana (Liverpool, 2010), pp. 7–14. 11 Ibid., p. 12. 12 Machinima are animated films created in real time by computer game technology. Friedrich Kirschner defines the technique as “shooting film ... in a realtime ... 3d virtual environment.” He adds: “Cameras record the action going on. ... [T]he time needed for the computer to transform the abstract data into a 3-dimensional visible representation is so little that you do not notice it.