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[We're partnering with game criticism site Critical Distance to present some of the week's most inspiring writing about the art and design of video games from commentators worldwide. This week, Ben Abraham looks at art game history, QA, and The Beatles: Rock Band, among many other things.]

This week Frank Lantz was at the Art History of Games conference and he reports back to say that, ‘Doom is too Rock ‘n’ Roll to ever be confined to a museum, man’! But not in quite so many words.

The AHoG conference was talk of the town this week, and Charles J Pratt wrote up some of the speakers he heard, covering the opening panel and a talk by the above mentioned Mr. Lantz and John Sharp on ‘avoiding the domestication of game art’ for GameSetWatch.

As a response to some of the things that came out of the conference, Corvus Elrod talks about how dictating what games aren’t through manifestos, etc, can only reduce their cultural relevance.

But if you’re looking for a more satirical take, you really can’t go past Matthew Burns’ “The new debate on games as ert” (sic). In the same week he also comes back to finish his series for Edge Online about QA testing ‘In the Dungeon’ with parts two, three and four.

Another new blog began its life this week, by one Amanda Cosmos, and her first post talks about the Global Game Jam and her team’s game ‘Quest for Stick’.

Elsewhere, Michael Abbott writes about Mass Effect 2 and what it says about the evolving nature of video game genres. Abbott notes: “Bioware knows what we who write about games ought to know better. Genre classifications are essentially meaningless, and it's time to drop them and move on.”

It’s a sentiment echoed to some degree by Jim Rossignol in Rock Paper Shotgun’s latest podcast, episode 38, and the resultant audio includes a great contextualized discussion of game genres throughout history.

Gus Mastrapa at Wired’s GameLife blog says ‘21st-Century Shooters Are No Country for Old Men’, noting: "Young gamers are somehow better than older gamers. Is it because they have fewer responsibilities and more free time? Or is it their youth that keeps them sharp?" At a mere 23, I think even I count as old in this scenario.

Via fellow blogosphere overviewer and synthesiser Erik Hanson comes a tale of ‘Myst as mythology of the hyperlink’.

LB Jeffries adds to the previous week’s discussion of No More Heroes 2, picking out some of its problems. Also on NMH2, Chris Dahlen writes for his Edge column that what the sequel is missing is really ‘the loser mechanic’ from the original.

Denis Farr this week examined the rather baffling choice Bioware made with regard to male-male relationships in Mass Effect 2. Farr highlights a quote from executive producer Ray Muzyka in which he explains the choice to limit any and all Male commander Shepard’s to an essentially straight male role. As Farr notes: “This tells me that I can create my Shepard, but he or she isn’t mine, actually.”

In other commentary, Grayson Davis uses a discussion of Uncharted 2 to argue quite convincingly that our vocabulary for discussing video game graphics remains an ephemeral, hard-to-pin-down thing.

Davis wonders: “…why can I quote decade-old reviews of a game that's only distantly comparable to Uncharted 2 and find the exact same statements, almost verbatim, that I find in today's criticism? These statements aren't wrong, but they're shamefully insufficient.”

Peter Kirn at Create Digital Music runs down the new music based game ‘Chime’ that I’ve been hearing good things about. The game is part of a charity-based collective, OneBigGame that aims to raise funds for children's charities.

After a negative piece early in the week explaining how difficult the Bioshock 2 hacking mini-game is for people with colorblindness, Dan Griliopoulos (who is colourblind himself) writes about the issue for Rock Paper Shotgun.

And lastly, Nicholas Shurson -- formerly of the Form8 blog -- has started The Game Journal, hoping to attract a mature audience interested in reading about and talking about videogames. This week he’s written about the The Beatles: Rock Band in ‘Come Together’, the second post named for a Beatles song we've mentioned in as many weeks.

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's semi-regular link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Continuing a fun - if slightly ancient - trawl through some of the best video game-related links we've seen in recent times, we start out with an old standby - a big list of neat free games, courtesy 1UP, and it even includes a number of titles that we haven't had a chance to check out.

Also in here somewhere - classic games of 20 years ago in pictorial form, a paean to the Nintendo DS, a look at whether indie games are dead, Frank Lantz on art and games, Tim Rogers wanders along to his own happy place, and more besides.

It was a swan:

101 Free Games 2010: The Best Free Games on the Web from 1UP.com
Another excellent annual list from 1UP and the Sharkey.

can videogames make us happy? - tim rogers - Kotaku
Dunno, but articles as silly as this can def. make us happy.

Interview: Frank Lantz | Edge Online
Nice chat from Art History Of Games conf.

Is Indie Dead? :: Culture :: Features :: Paste
An amazing cover article from Paste Magazine about indie music which has some serious relevance to indie games too - I think in the next couple of years, they will be here too.

IGF 2010 finalists overview at Big Download Blog
Finished up all the finalist overviews, they have, and some really nice write-ups are to be had.

1UP's Retro Gaming Blog : Advertisement Gallery: The Games of January, 1990
'The following is a gallery I put together of magazine advertisements showcasing games released in the United States in January of 1990 which, for a few more hours anyway, is exactly twenty years ago.'

Retrospective: Listen, We Have to Talk Article | Retro | Eurogamer
Some of the best writing in the world is on Eurogamer recently: 'DS, we have to talk. I'm sorry that I'm doing this in a letter rather than face to face, but I need to express all my thoughts and feelings carefully. I need to make sure you understand.'

[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.]

[The second Charles Pratt-authored write-up from the Art History of Games conference, after the intro/John Romero combo, this one sees John Sharp and Frank Lantz contributing some more intriguing commentary on games, art, their history, and where we go from here. Above all, the fact that this conference exists is important for video games.]

At the new Art History of Games conference in Atlanta, GA, professor John Sharp references the Renaissance period to explore the relationship of games with a burgeoning art movement.

In a separate lecture, Frank Lantz, creative director and co-founder, argues that games should embrace their "wild" side, and avoid the "domestication" of more established forms of art.

The Art History of Games - John Sharp

The question "are games art?" is often asked without a careful understanding of the long, complicated, and intertwined histories of both games and the fine arts. John Sharp, professor of game design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, tried to correct this oversight by surveying the role of both art and games in culture through the ages.

Games and art have been living side by side for a long time, and only recently have they started to intermingle in people's minds.

"If we look at a definition of art we can see that games meet most criteria," Sharp said. "Games have the potential to deliver deep meaning, just not in the places we're used to looking."

Sharp laid out the history of our concept of art, which he argued began in the Renaissance. Before then the role of art was almost exclusively for the personal use of a religious person. Beyond that, artists weren't precious about how they worked, often doing any job for which they were commissioned.

This changed in the high Renaissance, when art became part of the leisure culture of the aristocracy. Art was now considered primarily visual entertainment and the "artist" became a mythological character. "Game makers", Sharp pointed out by way of somewhat acid clarification, "were not given the same respect."

While games were an important part of life they were mostly associated with what were considered 'baser instincts', not the science and mathematics that the people of the Renaissance believed underpinned the elevation of art.

Through the 18th century games had become recognized as an important part of a well-rounded life. The poet Friedrich von Schiller saw art and creativity as only possible with play, but made clear that the games of his time did not live up to his ideals.

"As much as games mattered in life" Sharp commented, "they were not given the status of the arts." But at the beginning of the 20th century, conceptions about both art and games started to change.

Marcel DuChamp, who was influential in changing people's conception of what could or could not be art, was a devotee of chess and asserted that the play of chess was an art in itself. In the years that followed artists began exploring and taking on games.

Even so, Sharp pointed out "by the late '60s the art world is really open, but despite all this games still had trouble finding a place in the new order."

At this point it's not uncommon to see a game in a gallery. Projects by artists like Cory Arcangel have incorporated game elements, and the games of Mark Essen, such as Flywrench, have been featured in a number of shows.

In the end though, Sharp said that the relationship between games and art remains fraught. "To display a game in a gallery is to take away a part of its game-ness."

Doorknobs and Butterflies: Games after Art - Frank Lantz

Games are more and more recognized as an important art form, but Frank Lantz, creative director and co-founder of game studio area/code (Drop 7, Spore Islands), argued that there's a downside to this situation.

The move to more legitimacy can also be seen as a kind of "domestication" of games; a hemming-in of their wildness and often unruly nature. Lantz argued that perhaps the trick is not to change games to make them more like our conceptions of art, but to change the way we think about art in light of games.

Lantz opened his talk by talking about something that had been bothering him. He was concerned about the status of games as an aesthetic form. Video games have done much to bring people around to recognizing the value of games, according to Lantz, but there's still something strange and unruly about games that doesn't fit into common conceptions about art.

"This moment we're in offers an opportunity to look at art in a new light." Lantz said. "I like the feeling of wildness. This is what aesthetics should feel like."

Lantz argued that we should try to see games for what they are, rather than what we would like them to be. We should ask when we talk about games, what games are we talking about? Lantz asserted often when we talk about games we're really talking about single-player games. These games, according to the area/code co-founder, are easy to talk about because they seem like a tidy package of attributes, much like a painting or a film.

"However," he continued, "I can't help but thinking about the other games I play. Some are single-player, but some are not."

Looking at games like golf and chess Lantz pointed out that as much as single-player games might feel like films and photography, they're also undeniably similar to more traditional games. "They don't feel different, or even look that different." he said.

What we shouldn't be doing, he continued, is putting off talking about these games while concentrating on games that might be easier for us to discuss. Beyond that, we shouldn't suggest that single-player games are more important than other games.

"Are we going to say that Super Monkey Ball is inherently more valuable than golf?" Lantz asked. "We make it easy on ourselves by excluding these games. It's lazy."

The problem, Lantz pointed out, was that games like golf and chess don't look much like what we recognize as art. They don't resemble a painting or a novel. "They're more like ways of life." Lantz said. People devote their entire lives to just one of those games.

Finally, Lantz asserted that while games might not fit into the normal templates for how we think about art, this doesn't mean that we should exclude games from our conception of aesthetics.

Instead, he concluded, if aesthetics cannot take games into account then we should re-engineer our ideas about aesthetics: "The way we think about aesthetics needs to change."

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

[Do video games have an "art history"? A new Atlanta event, the Art History of Games symposium, is trying to explain, and GSW correspondent Charles J Pratt was there to see the organizers kick off the conference by tackling this very question.]

It may not be obvious that games have an "art history," or why there needs to be a conference that's entirely focused on that particular subject.

So, in their opening panel for the Art History of Games conference in Atlanta, Georgia, which Gamasutra will be covering in-depth, organizers Ian Bogost, Michael Nitsche, and John Sharp entertained those very questions as to why an art history of games is needed.

The overall event is a three-day public symposium in which, according to organizers, "members of the fields of game studies, art history and related areas of cultural studies gather to investigate games as an art form."

Also featured in the conference is the premiere of commissioned art games by Jason Rohrer, Tale of Tales and Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman, of which there's more information available on the official Art History Of Games commissioned game site.

So, how about the concept of "an art history of games," and whether it's valid?

"It's interesting that we have to justify this question in the first place," said co-organizer, author and IGF Nuovo Award finalist Bogost (A Slow Year) in his opening remark.

Fellow organizer John Sharp added that the idea for the Art History of Games conference was to "start the process of looking at the question of art and games more closely."

They presented three ways of looking at the art of games. "Is the art of games found in the visual arts?" Sharp asked, adding, "Another place we can look is that the art of games is in their worlds. This lends itself to thinking of games as sculptural."

The speakers pointed out that, of course, games can also be enjoyed from a technical point of view. "We can appreciate all video games from the technical perspective," Bogost said, and noted wryly that "this is how we tend to market games."

"Finally, is the art of games in the game design?" Sharp asked. There are plenty of examples of beautifully designed game systems, as the game designer and art historian noted. "Basketball is a great example," he offered. "There's an abstract system, but the experience within that system can be quite magical."

None of these issues are clear-cut. Pointing to Rod Humble's art game The Marriage, Ian Bogost mused, "What if we stripped everything away? What would remain? What makes Wii Sports different from real tennis?"

Sharp laid out one final way that one could claim games are art. He pointed out that the act of play itself has creative aspects. "Is the art of games found in the player's performance?" he mused. "This suggests that the real power lies with the player rather than the designer."

Co-organizer Michael Nitsche added, "If we think that the art happens in the process of playing, then we have to look at the artist in front of the screen -- the Doom god or the SoulCalibur dancer."

There are other areas in which video games are perhaps underappreciated, said the panelists. Sharp pointed out that "you don't usually see games in a museum. A lot of our historical understanding of games comes from representations in art. There's a sort of paradox there."

But what's important, the trio concluded, is that these issues continue to be discussed out in the open, to improve the lot and standing of games alongside the medium's creative counterparts. As John Sharp offered in conclusion, "If we knew [the answers to all of these questions], we wouldn't have organized this symposium!"

With speakers spanning industry veterans like Brenda Brathwaite (Wizardry series) and newcomers like Jason Rohrer (Passage), as well as former id Software superstar and keen game historian John Romero, now of Slipgate Ironworks, those issues are sure to be discussed further.

[UPDATE: Vital to any art form is its living history -- embodied the craftsmen and women who have pushed it forward. The development of games is no different.

So in his keynote address at the Art History of Games Conference, industry veteran John Romero -- formerly at Id and involved in Doom and Quake, and now heading up MMO house Slipgate Ironworks -- talked about the masters of game design, and how the pioneers had some advantages over modern developers.

Romero started his talk by honoring some of the masters of the game industry that are still with us, or have recently passed on -- living notables like Nasir Gebelli and Bill Budge, and those not still with us like Dani Bunten Berry and Gunpei Yokoi.

"Our masters worked within a lot of constraints." Romero pointed out. "The Atari 2600 was created to play just two games. However, designers today are more constrained."

Romero then walked the audience through the history of the first-person shooter, the genre he helped to create with games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. "The shooter genre exploded after the release of Quake," Romero said -- "and now our design patterns are being 'genre-fied'."

In fact, the Id veteran noted, with today's expanding budgets and relatively mature mainstream game industry, opportunities for big-budget diversification are dwindling: "We have five or six types of games that are going to be funded."

Romero then turned to games on Facebook, saying that -- even in the nimbler areas like social gaming -- the same thing was happening with games like Farmville. He mused: "A publisher is going to look at the numbers for a game like Farmville, and say to a developer: 'That's what I want!'"

Continuing the theme of constraints, Romero said: "Another limitation we have are APIs... the more we put between us and the hardware, the more we're constrained."

But all is not lost -- in his final remarks, Romero noted that plenty was still possible in games, and called for students to go back and study the early masters of the game industry. He reminisced: "We need to go back to the beginning. There was unbridled creativity."

[Charles J Pratt is a freelance game designer and a researcher at NYU's new Game Center. He will be covering the Art History Of Games event for Gamasutra.]

With the Art History of Games symposium opening tonight in Atlanta, indie game developer Tale of Tales (The Path, The Graveyard) launched its first iPhone/iPod Touch title, Vanitas, one of three "art games" commissioned for the event. It's now available through the handset's App Store for $0.99.

Short for "Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas", or "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity", Vanitas is a meditative piece designed without rules or rewards (aside from the gold star that appears when three identical objects appear). The game offers 35 different 3D objects that you can interact with in 12 different stages.

You can tilt, push, and drag the objects with your finger, as well as observe them without interfering (e.g. some objects decay, a flower blooms, a bubble pops.). Vanitas features cello music from Rasputina's Zoe Keating and quotes from The Bible and famous others (e.g. Nietzsche, Sappho) on topics like life and vanity.

The other two games commissioned for the three-day symposium are Jason Rohrer's PC game Sleep is Death (Geisterfahrer), and Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman's life-size board game Sixteen Tons. Atlanta gallery Kai Lin Art will exhibit all three titles starting tonight and until March 2nd.

The Art History of Games, a three-day Atlanta-based public symposium investigating games as an art form, has announced its February 2010 event.

Organized by Georgia Tech Digital Media and SCAD Atlanta, the event will take place February 4-6 at Atlanta's Woodruff Arts Center. Along with several talks and Q&A sessions, The Art History of Games will premiere three commissioned games from Jason Rohrer (Passage), Tales of Tales (The Path), and Eric Zimmerman (Gamelab co-founder and former CEO).

The symposium will feature experts from the fields of "game studies, art history and related areas of cultural studies", like game designer and artist Brenda Brathwaite, who worked on the seminal Wizardry series, Jagged Alliance, and more.

First-person shooter pioneer John Romero, known best for his work on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, currently EVP of MMO company Gazillion Entertainment, will present a talk at the event, too. Academic video game researcher, game designer, and educational publisher Ian Bogost is expected to speak as well.

Other speakers for The Art History of Games include A Casual Revolution author Jesper Juul, Area/Code (Parking Wars, Spore Islands) co-founder and director Frank Lantz, and Stanford University's curator for the history of science and technology collections and film and media collections Henry Lowood.

Also slated: John Sharp, professor in the interactive design and game development and art history departments at the SCAD; Christiane Paul, The New School media studies graduate programs director and media studies associate professor, as well as adjunct curator of new media arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and Michael Nitsche, digital media scholar and Georgia Institute of Technology assistant professor.

You can find more information on the event, its slated speakers, and registration details on the The Art History of Games' official website.