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Shifting Borders: Walking Simulators, Artgames, and the Categorical Compulsions of Gaming Discourse

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Shifting Borders: Walking Simulators, Artgames, and the Categorical Compulsions of Gaming Discourse View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Press Start Press Start Shifting Borders Shifting Borders: Walking Simulators, Artgames, and the Categorical Compulsions of Gaming Discourse Andrew Bailey York University, Canada Abstract This paper looks at how the walking simulator and artgame categories intersect, before comparatively analyzing two game designers whose work functions to disrupt the notions of genre these terms exemplify. The first work is Bill Viola’s The Night Journey (Game Innovation Lab & Viola, 2007), a gallery installation that many early game studies scholars used to help them first define how videogames could function as art. Following this, the paper compares Viola’s work to Connor Sherlock’s (2015) cheekily titled “Walking Simulator A Month Club.” With this project, Sherlock uses the itch.io and Patreon platforms to release a new experimental walking simulator game every month. Like The Night Journey, each of Sherlock’s games are ambiguously rendered and non- goal oriented. To conclude, this paper uses these two examples to investigate the potentially useful relations that can be uncovered between the experiences of traversing gallery and game space. Keywords Artgames; walking simulators; Connor Sherlock; The Night Journey; Bill Viola; surrealism Press Start 2019 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 ISSN: 2055-8198 URL: http://press-start.gla.ac.uk Press Start is an open access student journal that publishes the best undergraduate and postgraduate research, essays and dissertations from across the multidisciplinary subject of game studies. Press Start is published by HATII at the University of Glasgow. Bailey Shifting Borders Introduction Over the course of their interwoven histories, game studies and gaming criticism have struggled to establish an accepted lexicon for examining their objects of study. This struggle is partly due to the waning newness of the medium and an all-too-common defensive compulsion to make legitimizing comparisons with older media, like cinema, literature, and visual art. In both scholarly and popular discourse, this urge to formally categorize and name has led to the construction of unproductively restrictive rules, used to subdivide videogames based on a number of aesthetic, ludic, and narrative qualities. Two of the most controversial examples of this urge to formally categorize are the artgame and the walking simulator, both terms which are meant to refer to videogames that do not connect easily with ludic definitions rooted in the much longer histories of board games, gambling, or sports. In this paper, I work to disorient the categorical impulse that permeates much of the history of videogame culture by comparatively analyzing two games that move fluidly between these categories, resisting formal definition. The first of these games is Viola’s The Night Journey (Game Innovation Lab & Viola, 2007), a work that initially began as a walking simulator- esque gallery installation. Many game studies scholars and game art historians have used The Night Journey to help them define how videogames function as art. I then compare Viola’s work to Connor Sherlock’s (2015) cheekily titled “Walking Simulator A Month Club.” With this ongoing project, Sherlock uses the itch.io and Patreon platforms to release a short, new experimental walking simulator game every month. Although Sherlock is continually releasing new walking simulators through this project, for the purposes of a salient comparison with The Night Journey, I am only analyzing Marginalia (Sherlock & Kunzelman, 2018), a work created in collaboration with games critic and scholar Cameron Kunzelman. Moving beyond their mechanical similarities, in my comparative analysis I focus on how both The Night Journey and Marginalia present nocturnal and mostly empty landscapes that have been deliberately imbued with themes of transcendence, mysticism, and the sublime. Building on Laine Nooney (2013) and Aubrey Anable’s (2018) metaphorical use of “spelunking” as a method to critically reorient game studies and videogame history, I aim to provide a comparative model for looking at artgames and walking simulators; more broadly, this model also allows comparisons between other videogame genres and any other work of visual art. Through Anable’s speleological method, there is an excitingly disorientating and dark pathway that bypasses the ontologically focused discussions of medium, form, and category prevalent throughout much of early game studies. This, in turn, allows ample room for an alternative focus on points of subjectivity, disorientation, abstraction, and hybridity—qualities I argue become lost through the use of overly formal or structuralist modes of analysis. Press Start 2019 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 ISSN: 2055-8198 126 URL: http://press-start.gla.ac.uk Bailey Shifting Borders Disorienting the Categorical Compulsion As mentioned above, both the walking simulator and the artgame are categorical terms within videogame discourse that, since their inception, have been the source of much heated debate. At the time of The Night Journey’s initial development and exhibition, the walking simulator term had yet to reach the level of common use that it has today. Through its more recent commercial release on the PlayStation Network and itch.io platforms, however, Viola’s game has explicitly positioned itself within this context of the walking simulator genre. With the use of author- selected product tags, as well as the purchase and review-based recommendation systems that come with digital storefronts, both Marginalia and The Night Journey are placed in direct relation to many of the titles that inspired the, initially pejorative, term to be first created. In a historical survey of the term’s controversial connections with #GamerGate, as well as its eventual neutralization, Nicole Clark (2017) interviewed a number of game developers about their opinions on the walking simulator, ultimately concluding that the phrase was created to define these kinds of games by what they are supposedly missing, rather than what they are capable of. Although the term is now used far less often as an insult—on Steam and itch.io it is an easily searchable and standardized product category—Clark still argues that the walking simulator is an example of the reductive pitfalls that can come along with excessive genre classification. At the time of this paper’s writing, The Night Journey and all of Sherlock’s games use the artgame categorization tag on their itch.io pages, although only Sherlock uses the walking simulator label (GameInnovationLab, n.d.; Sherlock, n.d.). An obvious portmanteau of the words art and game, artgame is typically used to describe any game with experimental or artistic intent. It was first defined by Tiffany Holmes (2003) at the International Digital Arts & Culture Conference to help her discuss the then “emerging relationship between videogames and art” (p. 46). In the following years, the artgame has been rearranged, redefined, and expanded to form a new taxonomic spectrum, with additional categories such as artist’s games, game art, avant garde games, serious games, empathy games, and altgames—to name but a few. Although attaching the artgame (or walking simulator) tag to their work may make it easier for the videogames to be found on itch.io’s digital storefront, there is room to question how the use and conceptualization of the category affects the broader games-as-art debate that has been going on sporadically since the mid-2000s. In an essay for Gamasutra, game designer Matthew Seiji Burns (2018) reviews the common practice within game art history and games criticism, where a select few games are championed and declared worthy of being called art. He criticizes this binary mentality, stating, “In the end all we’ve done here is created two large plastic bins, one labelled Art, one Not Art, and we’re tossing our cartridges and compact discs into them” (para. 15). Press Start 2019 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 ISSN: 2055-8198 127 URL: http://press-start.gla.ac.uk Bailey Shifting Borders The rationalism that fuels the binary classification systems Burns (2018) critiques is not only restricted to the games-as-art debate. The artgame and walking simulator are just two examples of videogame culture’s longstanding urge to name, categorize, classify, and measure. In How To Do Things With Videogames, Ian Bogost (2011) seems to revel in this categorical impulse, calling for readers to take what he refers to as a “media microecological approach” when analyzing videogames, arguing that, “Just as an entomologist might create a collection that thoroughly characterizes the types, roles, and effects of insects on an environment, so a media microecologist might do the same for a medium” (p. 6). As if in direct response to Bogost’s (2011) call for game studies to begin producing bug collections from their objects of study, many other scholars have produced texts with heavily taxonomic methodologies that seem primarily concerned with classifying videogames by form, genre, and type. In his book Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, Jesper Juul (2011) provides a circular diagram that communicates what he would formally define as games, not games, and borderline cases, as well as the qualities that constitute each category (p. 44). Building on Juul’s diagram, game art historian Brian Schrank (2014) crafts a similar series of charts within his book Avant-Garde Videogames: Playing With Technology, where he
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