作者：Leigh Alexander

很多人在谈论游戏时都会提到，人们似乎逐渐忘记游戏作为一种交流工具的重要性。

《普罗米修斯》，《亲爱的艾斯特》以及设计师Pippin Barr的最新作品《Art Game》都引起了人们对于“艺术游戏”的新一轮讨论。

游戏制作人兼批评家Barr经常使用游戏去评论游戏以及数字媒体中的文化现象。在他所有受欢迎的Sierra式（游戏邦注：对于八十年代到九十年代初期的 电脑游戏迷来说这是冒险游戏的代名词）像素游戏中便有一款是关于Marina Abramovic所主演的纪录片《艺术家在场》。

Art Game（from gamasutra）

现在，许多用户都认为热门游戏逐渐偏离了设计“规则”，所以Barr将带着《Art Game》把我们引向他的数字博物馆中，在那里，玩家可以领略到各种经典的游戏。

受Flixel所驱动，并且基于Commodore 64的浏览器游戏提供给玩家三个角色选择，即雕塑家Alexandra Tetranov，画家Cicero Sassoon，以及神秘的影像艺术家William Edge和Susan Needle。

在灰度图像，也就是《Art Game》的高级艺术世界中，Tetranov基于《俄罗斯方块》打造结构，Sassoon参照《贪吃蛇》进行绘图，而影像艺术家则基于《星际之战》进行创造。这便是我们一直都认为理所当然的再利用游戏设计。

举个例子来说吧，作为Teranov，你可以长期利用《俄罗斯方块》，但是你需要为即将到来的展会创造各种雕饰品。直到你输掉《俄罗斯方块》游戏后，你才算真正完成一件作品。

tetris(from jamesiliff.com)

使用可识别的游戏玩法而不是获胜的任务进行创造总是引人深思，但是Barr表示不想理会这些对话。

他说道：“故意创造出自称是‘游戏艺术’的作品其实是一种非常有趣的理念。我不认为所有‘真正的’艺术游戏创造者会认真思考‘这是一款电子游戏’，或者‘我在创造一款艺术游戏’，所以我想要进行挑战。”

这并不是在嘲笑艺术游戏或进行定义，而是探索到底怎样的游戏才算“艺术游戏”。

他补充道：“缺乏想象力便意味着你只是在游戏中创造艺术，而不是创造真正的艺术游戏。”

Barr并未对“游戏是否是艺术”这一讨论感兴趣，他也不认为这是一种争议：“游戏是一种能够创造出A级艺术的媒体。但这并不意味着所有游戏都是艺术——而有可能是完全不同的内容，不管当前的游戏是否能称得上是‘杰出的’艺术。这并不是谁可以决定的事，所以我们无需为此感到担忧。”

从某种程度上看来，Barr的《Art Game》便是轻松地面对这一问题——他澄清道：“虽然不能说我是很轻松地在面对这一问题，但说实话，我并不想以一种直接或认真的方式去看待它。”

他说道：“游戏是关于创造艺术（在游戏中），对于我来说这是艺术中最有趣的内容。”

他的主要目的并不是呈现信息，而是让玩家能够体验到自己创造艺术的感受。在创造一些《贪吃蛇》的画作，《俄罗斯方块》的雕塑或《星际之战》的影像后，玩家可以联系博物馆馆主，而这位馆主将从玩家的作品中随机挑选一件陈列在展会上。

鼓励玩家在游戏中发挥创造性“相比担心游戏是否是艺术而言，是更加有效率的方向。”

他补充道：“有些人认为馆长的决定或者随机挑选较为苛刻，但事实并不是这样的。我让馆长随机做出选择是因为这是最诚实的方法——如果我在其中设置了一些判断系统去指定优秀与糟糕的艺术，那么也会有玩家出来指责我的标准吧。”

对于Barr来说，让玩家体验到“创造内容，为内容命名，并将其呈现在别人面前等待对方的评价”是非常重要的。

《Art Game》展览场景中的“其他人”都是虚拟的，但Barr表示，设置这些人是为了让玩家能对自己的展览感到满足。他说道：“游戏最初的视角是，玩家坐在展览中，看着到访的人在欣赏着自己所创造的作品。”

让玩家去构思游戏界面能让他们按照自己的想法为游戏呈现一些有意义的创造。许多游戏是关于性能和个人演示，所以像《贪吃蛇》等未专注于这些元素的游戏便具有启发作用。玩家便会思考着怎样的《贪吃蛇》游戏能够创造一副好画作？

Barr说道：“你会出于其它目的去使用这些游戏的规则，并希望看到被这些规则笼罩着的游戏能够散发出不一样的光芒。”

他补充道：“当我们创造了某些内容并将其呈献给别人看时，便会得到各种各样的评价，这是一种不可思议的情感。而我希望在游戏中也能出现这样的情感。”

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Art Game: Make art with games in a game about art

By Leigh Alexander

There’s often so much talking about games that it seems people tend to forget how effective a communications tool are games themselves.

Into the fray of the rekindled “art game” discussion kicked off by the likes of Proteus and Dear Esther comes designer Pippin Barr’s newest little exercise — titled Art Game, of course.

Game maker and critic Barr frequently uses games to comment on games as well as cultural phenomena digital and otherwise. Among the best-known of his Sierra-style pixel titles is a game recreation of Marina Abramovic’s piquant and perplexing The Artist Is Present — a Museum of Modern Art exhibit where attendees lined up simply to sit across from Abramovic at a table.

Now, as audiences analyze (yet again) those popular games that exist in merry indifference to the supposed “rules” of design, Barr is bringing us back to his digital museum with Art Game, where players are invited to reimagine classic game forms as art pieces.

The Flixel-driven, Commodore 64-inspired browser game offers a choice between two single-player characters, sculptor Alexandra Tetranov and painter Cicero Sassoon, and one two-player option: Enigmatic video art pair William Edge and Susan Needle.

In the charmingly grayscale, haute art world of Art Game, Tetranov sculpts with Tetris, Sassoon paints with Snake and the video artists create as a pair through games of Spacewar. Beyond a cute conceit, this has the effect of repurposing game designs we’ve long taken for granted.

For example, as Tetranov you can play Tetris “correctly” for as long as you like, but you’ve been tasked with creating sculptures for an upcoming gallery show. You don’t complete an artwork until you “lose” a game of Tetris, and the skeletal shapes and negative spaces of a poorly-played game look a lot more interesting as a pretend objet d’art than the tidiest effort to “win.”

The task of using recognizable gameplay to create instead of to triumph is thought provoking, but Barr tells Gamasutra he didn’t necessarily intend to respond to the recent dialogue.

“The idea of going out of my way to make a self-proclaimed ‘art game’ seemed a funny approach to the idea,” he says. “I don’t know how many of the ‘real’ art game makers are sitting there thinking ‘this is an art game’, or ‘I am making an art game,’ so I kind of wanted to go right at it.”

The intention wasn’t to mock art games or to define them (“that conversation is kind of played out by now, hopefully”) — but to explore what an art game might be.

“Being literal-minded, that means a game in which you make art, rather than the game itself being art in some magical way,” he adds. “…Though maybe it is anyway. Who’s to say?”

The “are games art” conversation doesn’t interest Barr much, and nor does he see it as particularly contentious: “Games are obviously a medium in which big-A art can be created – it’s absurd to think otherwise,” he says. “That obviously doesn’t mean that all games a fine art — but that’s a whole other thing, whether or not current games are ‘good’ art. And that stuff is decided in bizarre ways that no one can really control. Best not to worry.”

In a way, Barr’s Art Game is a way of being lighthearted about the issue — “not to say that I take it lightly, but I don’t want to engage with it in some head-on and earnest way,” he clarifies.

“The game is about making art (with games, in a game), which is the most interesting thing about art in the first place, to me,” he says.

His main goal was not to show off a message, but to let others experience the feeling of making art of their own with a game. After creating several Snake paintings, or Tetris sculptures or Spacewar video artworks, the player can call up the museum curator, who may select one for a gallery show. Eventually, the players can walk amid the installments of their own exhibits.

Encouraging players to be creative with games “is maybe a more productive direction than worrying about whether this or that game is an exemplar of art.”

“Some people felt like it was snarky commentary on the meaninglessness of curatorial decisions, or the arbitrary nature of contemporary art, but that wasn’t really it,” he adds. “I made the game’s curator arbitrary because it seemed like the most honest way to build it – if I’d had some underlying system that judged good and bad art, that would have felt wrong to me (not to mention that people would have gamed that underlying system).”

It was most important to Barr for people to experience “that feeling of making something, giving it a name, and putting it in front of other people to see what they think,” he explains.

The “other people” in Art Game’s gallery scenes are just digital, of course, but Barr says he placed them there to help enforce the player’s satisfaction in owning the exhibit. “The original vision for the game was that player standing in a gallery, looking at someone else looking at something they had made,” he says.

And giving players a chance to shake ideas about what game interfaces are “supposed” to be for and letting them be expressive offers a new way for the game to be meaningful. Many games are about performance and personal demonstration by design, so it’s revealing to look that way at games like Snake that weren’t specifically intended for that. What kind of Snake game would make a good painting?

“You’re engaging with the rules of these games for other purposes, and hopefully seeing the games and your agency in them in quite a different light,” Barr says.

“There’s so much going on when we make things and show them to other people, it’s such a weird and emotional ride,” he adds. “I want the game to feel a bit like that.” (source:gamasutra)