Video Games and Art
Well, this one doesn’t need a ton of explaining to make sense while VGxA is featuring it. Pretty much just the title will suffice. But to give some context, the book Videogames and Art is a compilation volume edited by Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchel. The first third are various overviews of art world interfaces with video games. The second third (which is perhaps the most interesting) is interviews and essays by artists, such as Edo Stern and Suzanne Treister, who were working with video games in various capacities. The final section features critical essays from various contributors both academic and games industry.
I want to highlight one fact about this book, which has both positive and negative ramifications, which is that the original edition was printed in 2007, with a slightly newer second edition printed in 2013. The reason this dating is worth a prolonged note is that this period was something of a heyday for artists using video games’ materials in their practice, and that section is by far the strongest, featuring projects and essays that deserve more attention. However, some of the other sections’ essays are, frankly, not very strong, sometimes even to the point of being deeply misleading about their subjects. Other essays are just very dated, not reflecting major changes in video games and culture that occurred across the following decade. I only mention this so that readers who don’t have a ton of grounding in video games can come into the non-artist sections prepped to subject the critical essays to a high degree of skeptical rigor and further research with more contemporary sources (especially the third section’s disappointingly shallow engagement with the ever-misleading “are video games art?” question.) But overall, this—alongside Gamescenes—is one of the absolutely fundamental volumes for understanding video games in the context of the rest of art!
Editors: Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchel
Link: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/V/bo11486194.html