Class Notes

Origin of art games

Dada (dadaism):

art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, begun by a group of artist & poets

> primarily involved: visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestoes, art theory, theatre, and graphic design

> concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works - & anti-bourgeois; with political affinities with the radical left.

> activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals

surrealist games of the 1920s

Fluxus (1960s)

Marcel Duchamp
- French-American painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Dadaism & conceptual art

- regarded as one of the three artists(along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse) who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the twentieth century

& is responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

OULIPO

Ian Bogost

Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames
> how video games make arguments: rhetoric, computing, politics, advertising, learning

his theory: 

- videogames make arguments and influence players; they are capable of informing and persuading as well as entertaining; they possess the power of rhetoric

- thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality, videogames open new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetorics.

Procedural Rhetorics: a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. 

> areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and education

alternate reality game (ARG): interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and uses transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.

> defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to players' responses

> it is shaped by characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game.