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[Finishing up our Art History of Games coverage - here's Part 1 and Part 2 -- and this one has the ever-controversial Tale Of Tales guys kicking off a ruckus, as well as Celia Pearce weaving some absurdist art references into a look at art and games.]

At the Art History of Games conference, Tale of Tales, the indie studio behind The Path, argues that "games are not art," and "largely a waste of time." Meanwhile, one professor examines where art and play have collided.

Tale of Tales: Games "Not Art," Largely A "Waste Of Time"

Tales of Tales has never been shy about making bold statements. At The Art History of Games conference in Atlanta, GA last week, Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey, who also worked on The Path, which many pigeon hole as an "art game," laid out their case for why video games are not and never will be art, and why games are never going to evolve.

"One thing need to be said first, we're not trying to not fit in on purpose," said Samyn. Instead, he maintained that they had tried to carve out a place for Tale of Tales in the game industry but room was never made for them. Samyn and Harvey listed the problems they have with games. Games, according to Tale of Tales, were not beautiful enough, or immersive enough, or welcoming enough for a large audience.

Harvey announced, "some of the members of the audience are confused," as he displayed a presentation slide that boldly said: GAMES ARE NOT ART. Samyn then argued that play was driven by a biological need, and that over time play had been turned into games. On the other hand, art was not created out of a physical need but in a search for higher purposes.

Unfortunately, according to Harvey, art is dead. After the rise of Modernism art has been co-opted by capitalism and restrictive forms of government. The speakers maintained that the real artists were no longer working in the art world, but instead were experimenting in the less explored corners of the internet.

Samyn then dug in further, intoning, "Beside a few noble attempts, video games are overwhelmingly a waste of time." Video games have stopped evolving, Samyn continued, and the reason that games could not get their act together was that they lacked guidance. Those that controlled the game industry weren't interested in changing, they were too comfortable with the way things were.

However, they said, old media that featured one-way communication was not enough. Computers offered the way forward for art, but at this point it is being held hostage by the video game industry. The speakers then switched from addressed to audience to a tone that implied that they were talking beyond the room.

Samyn announced that they, Tales of Tales, could not be stopped. They would continue to take games and rip out their "stupid rules" and goals. He promised that after eviscerating games they would breathe new life into the carcass, creating something new.

"Our time has come." Samyn said.

Harvey responded: "Make love, not games."

The two creators also announced that they were starting a project to organize all the people all over the world that were creating what they called "not games." The movement would be maintained on a series of blogs and forums, featuring conversations, screenshots of projects, as well as festivals with particular rules to guide the production of these new, 'not games'.

Tale of Tales' work to date includes The Path, the unreleased project 8, its first "anti-game" Endless Forest, Fatale, and its first iPhone project, the in-development Vanitas, commissioned by The Art History of Games conference.

When Art And Games Collide

While the subject of art and games has a lot of discussion that surrounds it, often it's without doing the hard legwork of actually compiling a list of the different instances in which the two worlds have collided. At the Art History of Games conference, professor Celia Pearce attempted to do just that, giving a long and thorough survey of participatory and game art from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.

Appearing in several lectures beforehand, Pearce clarified the connection between the famous artist, Marcel Duchamp, and games. Famously obsessed with chess, the French artist also made art as if it was a game, often playing with constraints, such as doing on entire painting while cross-eyed. Pointing to Duchamp's readymades -- already-manufactured pieces that simply bore Duchamp's signature, including a bicycle wheel and even a urinal -- Pearce pointed out that "the procedurality of the readymades was more important than their status as objects."

Touching on the Fluxus movement, Pearce talked about the composer John Cage, who would often give himself rulesets for how to perform his different pieces, even going to the extent of physically modifying the pianos he would play. A friend and collaborator of John Cage was David Tudor, who would build musical instruments out of electronic devices that were never meant to produce music.

"This is playful art," Pearce pointed out, "not necessary games, but structured play."

Pearce touched on more modern perspective in game design, such as the New Games Movement, which created outdoor games that were not directly competitive. She connected this to the work of Frank Lantz, the co-founder of the game studio area/code, who created games such as Pac Manhattan, in which familiar video games and types of games were scaled up to the point where they became something like performance art pieces.

Parallel to the New Game Movement and Lantz's Big Games is the beginning of video game art, such as the game Alien Garden, which was designed by Bernie DeKoven and programmed by Jaron Lanier. Mods and hacks also played a huge role in early video game art. One of the first exhibitions of game art was actually an online show called "Cracking the Maze" which featured, among other pieces, the modification of different games to add female characters.

Interestingly, Pearce said, at the same time Counter-Strike, a mod of Half Life that is not considered game art, was showing the mods could actually be more popular than the games they were modifying. The two perspectives on moding collided however with the game art piece "Velvet Strike", which allowed the player's gun to fire graffiti all over the walls during a Counter-Strike match.

Pearce finished by pointing the audience towards latest wave of game art, such as Mary Flanagan's piece Giant Joystick. A recreation of an Atari joystick scaled up to 8 ft. 9-11 Survivor is a game that lets the player explore the terrible choices of a person trapped in one of the damaged Twin Towers.

Finally, Pearce pointed to the recent and strong overlap between the art games and indie games. Works like Unfinished Swan, Gravitation, Moon Stories, and The Path, are all the inheritors of a long tradition of both art and games. This meeting of the art game movement and the indie game movement is important in bringing art games to more eyes and finding more possibilities to explore in indie games.

[Charles J Pratt is a freelance game designer and a researcher at NYU's new Game Center.]

I've been watching a whole ton of Steven Seagal: Lawman. That show is incredible. Did you know that, besides being a cinema action hero, Seagal has been a cop for over 20 years? (Well, according to the man himself, anyway.) And now, at least on US television, he's also a Reality Television Star.

But according to game historian Frank Cifaldi in this fascinating vaporware retrospective, in 1993 -- which I estimate is about when Seagal began to pursue hobbyist lawmanship -- publisher TecMagic licensed the action star's likeness for use in a Genesis and SNES cross-platform game titled The Final Option.

"At the time," Frank writes, "the project was being touted as the first example of a movie star -- rather than an actual movie -- licensed for use in a video game." (Fascinatingly, though Seagal's visage itself was licensed, his digitized video game character was portrayed by none other than Some Other Dude.)

Then Frank gives us this great morsel:

"Celebrities are more stable than films," TecMagik director of marketing Jeff Tarr told The Hollywood Reporter, saying that Seagal was specifically signed because of his film's performances in the video tape rental market, especially among the game-playing demographic.

Though it's left implicit, Cifaldi's column suggests that the partnership with Seagal largely contributed to publisher TekMagic's untimely demise. The Final Option never saw the light of day and, however arguably, Seagal's star, too, has faded. I keep trying to tie this all into something profound about how celebrity, too, has changed -- about how, in these modern times, you no longer need to be a "star" to be "famous" -- but I can't quite grapple the thought.

[1UP's Retro Gaming Blog: Lost Levels]

So here's some splendid news -- Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, who together founded Harmonix in the mid-90s, are included among the honorees of the second-annual Character Approved Awards, a ceremony that celebrates meaningful contributions to the humanities.

And those software developers are in good company: included among this year's luminaries are Nora Ephron, for her contributions to writing; the band Green Day; Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow; Jessica Jackley, founder of kiva.org; and for design, Yves Behar, creator of the hundred-dollar laptop. Rigopulos and Egozy will be honored for their contributions to New Media.

The Character Approved Awards ceremony is a USA Network initiative -- get it? Because, the motto, "Characters welcome"? -- and as such, little narrated profiles of each of the honorees are slated to air on, you guessed it, USA.

I gather those segments will ultimately air piecemeal (the event itself isn't televised, unfortunately), with each honoree's profile presented as an autonomous human interest clip between other, longer television shows. So as for when to catch the Harmonix segment, your guess is as good as mine, although I'm told all those "vignettes" will begin airing on the 25th.

Last year's first-annual Character Approved winners included musician Lupe Fiasco, chef David Chang, Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, and pop artist Shepard Fairey.

[Character Approved]

Xong is an odd and idiosyncratic munge of a Rogue-like, a level-based puzzle game, and an Arkanoid clone. It's Rogue-like, in that it's an ASCII graphics game with procedurally-generated levels, but the actual gameplay is puzzle solving with Breakout-like aspects.

You're a white square that moves with the arrow keys; scattered about the level are a bunch of colored bricks along with some enemies, and a level exit. The level exit is colored, and to use it, your "puck" must be of the same color. It's also generally located someplace hard to get to initially.

You can eliminate bricks by shooting your puck at them (CTRL plus direction); the puck picks up the color of the last brick it eliminated (but is white by default). You can, if you want, let a puck bounce around, Arkanoid style to eliminate a bunch of bricks, but it only moves in cardinal directions. There are usually some spare pucks lying around to pick up, which will be necessary if you lose your puck in a black hole.

The only way to eliminate enemies is to direct them into a black hole with "chevrons" -- direction indicators that you lay with ALT + direction key. Chevrons also affect puck direction. Enemies move in predictable, Pong-like ways, so they're fairly easy to avoid, but leave a red line behind them, Snake-style, which kills you if you intersect it, though it gradually disappears behind them.

It's actually pretty interesting, although in common with other Rogue-likes, you can get dull levels, and can also get into a condition whereby the current level cannot be solved. There's no level restart or save game, so you don't have a recourse other than starting over. It's pretty imaginative, though.

[Valkyria Chronicles 2's producer Shinji Motoyama and director Takeshi Ozawa talk to Game Developer magazine EIC Brandon Sheffield on scaling the neat SRPG console game down for portables, and how to design great maps in strategy games.]

Valkyria Chronicles was Sega’s acclaimed entry into the tactics RPG genre from Sega, with innovative active battle sequences that incorporated non-grid movement with dice rolls and finite turns. Valkyria Chronicles was on the PS3, and sported an appealing pastel pencil storybook visual style.

Sega has just released a sequel to the original on PSP in Japan, designed around a multiplayer experience for the Monster Hunter crowd, but without following the Capcom juggernaut’s playstyle (incidentally there is still a single player campaign).

In the past, Gamasutra interviewed the original game’s producer Ryutaro Nonaka and director Shuntaro Tanaka extensively, but this time around the game is getting some new blood.

We spoke with Valkyria Chronicles 2’s director Takeshi Ozawa, and producer Shinji Motoyama to see just how they scaled the experience down – and up. One method not mentioned in the interview is splitting levels up into multiple areas, allowing tiered maps to save on geometry while still allowing a vast playfield:

Graphically the new game looks pretty similar to the PS3; maybe just fewer polygons. How much of a challenge was it, making it work on the PSP?

Takeshi Ozawa: Well, without going into the nitty-gritty, there are assorted issues that the engine has to work with. The hardware platform's completely different, of course. The PS3's a high-end machine while the PSP's lucky if it's half as powerful. You just can't expect to output as many polygons on that machine, and the way light coloring and so on works is also different.

So one of the main issues we had to deal with on the PSP was how to deal with colors -- not have a shader overlay on top of everything like on the PS3, but still retain that canvas-like look that's the game's trademark. That required a lot of trial-and-error to accomplish.

Do you have previous PS2 development experience, and does that help when optimizing?

TO: In terms of being able to ballpark-guess the upper limits of what we'd be capable of accomplishing with the hardware audiovisually, I'd say that -- and we've all got PS2 experience, yes -- I'd say that experience is something we can advantage of. Our staff doesn't have to actively benchmark everything out; instead they can sort of eyeball it, so to speak.

This is not a criticism, but simply for the sake of asking - why make a sequel and not a port? What sorts of new things did you want to put across?

TO: Well, the story is completely new, set two years after the original game, and the characters and battlefields are all new and revised.

In addition, there's also a new and very substantial online-play mode, with both co-op and competitive modes available; something that was possible with the PSP that really piqued our interest. The volume of the game is a lot larger than before, too. Those are the sorts of things we were challenging ourselves to do this game, I'd say.

Shinji Motoyama: Multiplayer was something all of us on the team wanted, but after that, we also considered how we could improve on the BLiTZ battle system (the realtime/turn-based hybrid strategic battles in Valkyria Chronicles), which had gotten a lot of positive response.

We wanted something that everyone could play together - the story of the previous game put a lot of emphasis on the bonds the characters forge, so we wanted a way for players to form those bonds with each other within the game. With the PSP, and especially with Monster Hunter dominating the marketplace, there's a demand for online games that people can play while talking to each other in real life.

With the sort of multiplayer we had conceived, we thought the PSP was the ideal platform for that -- being able to call out to your friends to take out this or that unit and forming strategies with each other while you're playing. So that was one motivation behind choosing the PSP.

What sort of online play types are there?

TO: Well, there's co-op and competitive. In the previous game you consumed command points (CP) in order to move people around maps; here, two people can do that at the same time.

When this was first announced, I said to myself that it'd be nice to have a mode like that.

TO: Oh, exactly. Each character has a certain amount of CP that he or she carries, but you can pass these around between people and consume it as you work together. You can have both characters attack, or have one attract enemy fire while the other goes behind their flank. That sort of thing. In competitive battle, it turns into something very much like a chess game. There are a lot more customizable options in this game, too; you can create your own trooper and fight with him.

Can you make battle maps?

TO: Well, not battle maps, but we have a lot of maps available for play, and each map has its own special features - the previous game had sandstorms in the desert map, but now there's something like that in every map, which opens up the amount of choices available to you a bit. You can also set the rules of battle - in the previous game you had objectives like "destroy the enemy base" or "defeat all enemies," and now you can define what objectives you'd like to have in your competitive match, along with the time limit and the field of battle.

How do you design levels with the active-time system, in terms of determining optimal positioning for buildings and obstacles and things like that? When characters have different lengths of walking, their walking ability is different, so how carefully do you have to construct these worlds so that you know a scout can go this far, a lancer can go this far, a sniper can go this far...determining placement of the crow's nest and buildings and things like that. Breakable walls for the tank. How do you go about that?

SM: Well, in the original, you had your low-level unit types that could be leveled into higher-level types. In this game you've got 35 different types -- for example, you might have a character who's mainly a spy, but is at least somewhat capable in battle as well, or has more movement range than normal.

That sort of customization is now available. It's not like a spy can transform into an anti-tank gunner all of a sudden, and as a result of that, making every team member play his or her specific role to the hilt plays a far more important role in this game. The level design, naturally, follows from that.

It must require a lot of play-testing.

TO: It does.

SM: Every day.

TO: Every day!

At what point did you begin the playtest cycle?

SM: Well, the project runs on milestones, and before the alpha - at certain points in post-production whenever we had a sizable chunk of the game up and running - we'd run playtests and make that part of the milestone. Then when we’re wrapping things up, we can look across the entirety of the game and checking the balance and "fun factor" behind each section.

[Just a note on my colleagues' new Game Developer Research report - probably a bit expensive for GSW readers unless you're a senior tool company exec, heh, but with some interesting public conclusions anyhow if you're reading for free.]

GameSetWatch sister service Game Developer Research has debuted its latest report, the 2009-2010 State of Game Development Survey, revealing among other things a surge of iPhone developers and a lull in those making games for the Wii.

The 100 page report is a result of a survey of more than 800 video game professionals from North America and beyond who read Gamasutra, subscribe to Game Developer magazine, or attend Game Developers Conference. Those complete results are available as a 100-page report from Game Developer Research, and more information from the survey is also available in the February 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine.

The results of the comprehensive 55-question survey help to illustrate which platforms Western game creators develop for, which market sectors they work in, which tools they use and how much they spend on these tools, and sheds light on which factors determine the target platforms for game development.

As a reflection of recent economic difficulties and resulting layoffs, this year’s survey reveals that many experienced developers have founded smaller studios, or have begun developing games on their own.

This trend is marked by a 7 percent growth in the proportion of developers employed by companies of 50 employees or fewer, while in sharp contrast, the proportion of developers at companies of 500 or more employees has fallen by two percent since last year’s survey.

As shown from the results of the survey, another increasingly prevalent trend has been the growth of the mobile space. Due in large part to the success of Apple’s iPhone software platform, mobile support shot up to 25 percent of developers, more than doubling last year’s 12 percent.

Of these mobile developers, nearly three quarters of that group are targeting iPhone and iPod touch development, a number more than twice the reported support for traditional handhelds like Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.

Meanwhile, the choices of development platform showed relative stability. Just over 70 percent of developers said they were developing at least one game for PC or Mac (including browser and social games), rising slightly from last year; 41 percent reported working on console games. Within that latter group, Xbox 360 was the most popular system with 69 percent of console developers targeting it, followed by 61 percent for PlayStation 3.

While those console figures stayed within a few percent of last year's results, the change in Wii adoption was much more significant: reported developer support for the system dropped from 42 percent to 30 percent of console developers, supporting numerous publishers' claims of a recent softening of the Wii market.

When it comes to choosing target platforms, more developers cited ease of development and market penetration as incentives, more than any other factors. Other important considerations included team members’ existing skill sets, portability of code to a given platform, and the acquisition costs of development kits and materials.

“Like any other medium of entertainment, video game development is subject to change with the ebb and flow of the economy and any hot new trends, and this year’s survey continues to reflect this evolution,” says Simon Carless, global brand director of Think Services Game Group (and publisher of Gamasutra).

"The full, detailed survey document, with its plethora of raw data and wealth of insight, is an important resource for any industry-watchers looking to navigate the changing seas of the games industry."

The full 'State of Game Development 2009-2010 Survey' includes dozens more data points about the preferred software, hardware, and tools of game developers across game engines, AI tools, production machines and beyond, as well as game genre and sector statistics, geographical breakdowns, budgetary information for the past year, and upcoming product purchase intent.

The survey was conducted with a sample of 814 users of Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra, and attendees of the Game Developers Conference, and can be projected to the overall game development community with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percent at a 95 percent confidence level.

Those complete results are available as a 100-page report from Game Developer Research, alongside numerous other reports delving into the key facts and trends that define the modern game development industry. More information from the survey is also available in the February 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Vince Noir: Welcome to the Mighty Decider!

Howard Moon: Where... you can decide things... as and when... you need to.

Noir: What is the Mighty Decider, Howard?

Moon: It's a... it's an incredible way of deciding about things.

Noir: Really.

Moon: Yeah.

Noir: It's a decision-maker?

Moon: Someone comes at you with a...nnn.... option.... You have a quick way of finding out... which one you... which way you want to go.

Noir: Really.

Moon: Mmm.

Brian "Doctor Popular" Roberts -- and I only know his actual, given name from an earlier GameSetWatch entry, incidentally -- flew out to LA late last year to meet with the men of The Mighty Boosh, where they recorded soundbytes for an upcoming iPhone app. Now, after several months of hard work, the game is finally ready for download.

Just four minigames-of-chance comprise the Mighty Decider. "Naboo's Wisdom" and "Ask the Moon" each are especially witty little fortune-telling games. The "Spin the Bottle" game is exactly everything its name implies, except that peripheral Boosh character Bob Fossil (played to the hilt by Chicago's own Rich Fulcher) deliberately desexes every bottle's turn. And in the boringest app, "Flip the Coin," you attempt to defeat the Crack Fox (voiced by Howard Moon himself, Julian Barratt) in a series of coin tosses.

Certainly this software is but a passing amusement, intended for a particular audience. But for fans of surreal UK comedy, or for fans of handpainted backgrounds, or horoscopes -- and I am all of these -- the Mighty Decider is great.

The game is currently listed as just $0.99 at the iPhone App Store.

The Mighty Decider [via DocPop and Boing Boing]