Art museums can be fun, but sometimes, they can be downright boring. What fun is it to stare at paintings all day that you can’t even interact with? In fact, if you attempt to “interact” with a painting, you’ll probably get thrown out of the museum for *gasp* touching it with your dirty fingers.
According to Technabob, when Brent Watanabe created “For(){}”, he did not want to paint a typical painting. Instead, he wanted a painting that could be both admired and played. So, Watanabe painted three canvases: a skinny rectangle, a less skinny rectangle, and another skinny rectangle. Then, he created a video game using Flash and the Box2D physics engine. His vision for this video game was: “There is no beginning or end to the game, just collecting and wandering, birthing and consuming, an arbitrary point system rising until your inevitable death and the birth of another generation. It is a game mechanism without the game. An addictive but essentially aimless experience.” Sounds pretty artsy to me. Finally, he added an old-school NES controller to control the game and a custom projector system to project the game onto the three painted canvases. You can watch “For(){}” in action in this Vimeo video.
As we have learned from Jesse Schell, the gamification of everyday things is a real phenomenon, and it’s coming faster than we all realize. Perhaps, “For(){}” is an example of the art museum of the future where paintings come alive in video game form and you earn achievements for completing certain paintings. Or, maybe, “For(){}” is just the absurd dream of an eccentric artist. Whatever the case may be, personally, I find it rather beautiful, and I would like to visit the art museum where this painting is currently installed. I think it would be fun to have someone take a picture of me playing a painting in an art museum.
I couldn’t help thinking that with current/future technology, there will be more and more things like this showing around us. For example, replacing those giant Info/Ad touch screens in the public with the Leap Motion will lead us to a new dimension(From 2D to 3D). Let’s think further. When the 3D Holographic Projection Tehcnology becomes more mature, combing this with the Leap Motion, all our current dreams about the future technology, well at least part of it, will come true, like the computer used by Tony Stark in the Iron Man Movie. Then, games will not be just “games” anymore. They could be transformed to any other forms – Art, Posters, probably even on the windows of stores. By that time, the gamification of life will not be a prediction anymore but simply a fact. And according to the speed of development of current technology, I’ll say we should get ourselves ready sooner.
I think achievements like this are what is really pushing the ‘games as art’ idea into reality. Aside from just games themselves reflecting the artistic efforts of their designers, literally placing them in entirely new scenarios can really extend the definition of what they are. Additionally, it appears as though the concept of the game is rather artistic itself. A game that never ends but has an arbitrary scoring system, thus enticing the player for doing things but never particularly providing reward. I think games that are simply fun to play don’t necessarily require a payout system all of the time. Much like the old Nintendo games that Brent mimic with the use of the classic controller, the game provides an experience in which people can partake and then be done with. It contrasts greatly with current interests in popular games, where progression systems and ample payoff are both expected and demanded. Then again, since the device the game is played on is likely to reside in public spaces, it does limit the longevity of play quite a lot.
This also made me think a lot about the always interesting “playing games on X”. There seem to be dozens upon hundreds of videos that simply show games being played on interesting screens. Often this comes down to projection, but there are a plethora of different ones. A fairly recent example of this can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnIK54dCbqI&feature=player_embedded. If that is interesting to you, you might also find this one neat http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRSrv0rqJ6E&feature=player_embedded. Anyway thank you for making the initial post, it was very interesting and made me think about games in a broad way.