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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - Videogames as Visual Art: Tools for Artistic and Historical Analysis of Videogames
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Projects & Abstracts
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2021-09-06
2020-03-11
2024-03-11
Cinéma & Cie
Roberto Cappai
2020/03/01
Università di Pisa
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Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - Videogames as Visual Art: Tools for Artistic and Historical Analysis of Videogames
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16236/20255
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Videogames as Visual Art: Tools for Artistic and Historical
Analysis of Videogames
Roberto Cappai/ Ph.D. Thesis Abstract1
Università di Pisa




   In 2000, Newsweek published an article written by the film critic Jack Kroll,
in which the author denied that videogames could be considered as an art form,2
giving voice to many other film critics who shared this opinion. Five years later,
Henry Jenkins, in his essay Games, the New Lively Art argued that:

    Games represent a new lively art, one as appropriate for the digital age as those
    earlier media were for the machine age. They open up new aesthetic experiences and
    transform the computer screen into a realm of experimentation and innovation that is
    broadly accessible. And games have been embraced by a public that otherwise been
    unimpressed by much of what passes for digital art.3

   In 2010 film critic Roger Ebert, in response to designer Kellee Santiago’s talk
at TED (Technology Entertainment Design) Are Video Games Art? claimed on
his online journal that videogames can never be art.4 This statement provoked
strong reactions especially between media scholars, spreading a worldwide
debate which had started at least twenty years before, when the founder of the
New York Museum of Moving Image, Rochelle Slovin, curated the exhibition
Hot Circuits: a Video Arcade (1989).
   A couple of decades after the debate on the artistic potential of videogames
started, today videogames are officially considered an institutionalized art
form. Nevertheless, though the twentieth-century avant-garde changed our
perception on art, suggesting that ‘art doesn’t have any sort of stable meaning in
contemporary culture’,5 there is still no methodology for videogame analysis to
which we can refer, at least from a visual art studies point of view.


1
  PhD Thesis supervised by Professor Sandra Lischi. Dottorato regionale Pegaso, XXXII ciclo. For
information: roberto.cappai@hotmail.it
2
  Jack Kroll, ‘Emotion Engine? I Don’t Think So, Newsweek, 5 March 2000 <https://www.
newsweek.com/emotion-engine-i-dont-think-so-156675> [accessed 25 May 2020].
3
  Henry Jenkins, ‘Games, the New Lively Art’, <http://web.mit.edu/~21fms/People/henry3/
GamesNewLively.html> [accessed 27 March 2018).
4
  Roger Ebert, ‘Video games can never be art’, <https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/
video-games-can-neverbeart> [accessed 27 March 2018].
5
  Ian Bogost, How to Do Things with Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2011), p. 9.

                                                     Cinéma & Cie, vol. XX, no. 34, Spring 2020
                                        Roberto Cappai


   My research develops some theoretical tools for an artistic and historical
analysis of videogames, that are considered as audiovisual objects (video objects)
instead of games. Taking into account expanded cinema theories, videogame play
experience is, therefore, analyzed as an audiovisual experience, and the term
videoplay is used in opposition to the most common (although not accurate)
term gameplay. On the basis of Mary Flanagan’s book Critical Play,6 revolving
around the idea of an avant-garde game design which undermines and reworks
popular game practices, this part of the project provides a useful framework for
the artistic analysis of videogames.
   In his foreword to the book A Game Design Vocabulary,7 the director of the
NYU Game Center, Frank Lantz, notes that:

    Something is happening in the world of video games, something that is changing the
    way we think about how they’re made, how they’re played, and what they mean. The
    authors of this book are part of a new generation of game creators for whom video
    games interface fully with all the complex machinery of contemporary culture. For
    Anna [Anthropy] and Naomi [Clark], video games are not merely sleek consumer
    appliances dispensing entertaining power fantasies, they are fragments of shattered
    machines out of which new identities can be constructed; sites where disorderly
    crowds can assemble for subversive purposes [...] smart machines that allow us to say
    new things; and, when correctly operated, beautiful machines that kill fascists.8

   In accordance with Lantz, this research focuses on alternative and underground
movements, developers, artists and players using videogame design, videogame
modding and videogame play as a means of self and artistic expression. This
made possible to detect some groundbreaking milestones in order to develop
a videogame art history divided into three periods, following Matteo Bittanti’s
Innovazione Tecnoludica:9 the ‘Experimentation Age’, the ‘Variation Age’, and
the ‘Subversion Age’.
   The main objective of the second part of the research project is, in effect,
to construct a videogame art history conducive at the same time to Videogame
History and Art History, taking into account technology, specific artworks,
artistic and cultural movements, manifestos, and personalities, the latter following
the Italian Cinema Studies pioneer Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s writings. A
perspective borrowed from media and visual art studies is applied to videogame
history, and is argued that videogames could be not only considered in the context
of videogame industry, but also positioned under the umbrella-term “video art”,
according to Michael Z. Newman who wrote that:



6
  Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
7
  Anna Anthropy, Naomi Clark, A Game Design Vocabulary (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2014).
8
  Frank Lantz, ‘Foreword’, in Anthropy and Clark, p. xiv.
9
  Matteo Bittanti, L’innovazione tecnoludica: l’era dei videogiochi simbolici, 1958-1984 (Milano:
Jackson libri, 1999).

148
      Videogames as Visual Art: Tools for Artistic and Historical Analysis of Videogames


  As tube, tape, and disc are replaced by file, pixel and cloud, the present moment in
  media history offers a vantage point for regarding video as an adaptable and enduring
  term that bridges all of these technologies and the practices they afford. At different
  times video has been different things for different people, and its history is more than
  a progression of material formats [...]. It is also a history of ideas about technology and
  culture, and relations and distinctions among various types of media and the social
  needs giving rise to their uses.10

   Following Newman, alternative and experimental videogames are seen as a
means of artistic video manipulation, just like A. Michael Noll’s early computer
art or Woody and Steina Vasulka’s video art. At the same time, they could be
considered a means of artistic game manipulation, on the heels of New Game
Movement and Fluxus. Artists like George Brecht and George Maciunas indeed
made games that ‘break art museum’s cardinal rules of no touching and no
talking’, emphasizing ‘joyful absurdity, curiosity, and collective life’.11 Bearing in
mind the dual nature of videogames, this project ultimately embeds videogame
in Art History.




10
   Michael Z. Newman, Video Revolutions. On the History of a Medium (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014), p. 1.
11
   The University of Iowa, ‘Game’ in Fluxus Digital Collection <https://thestudio.uiowa.edu/
fluxus/categories/game> [accessed March 28, 2018].

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