Written & Photographed | YIFANG
Source | Interface art
What is it like to play a game in an art museum? On December 30, 2021, the exhibition "Youtopian: Game Scene" exhibited 19 breakthrough creative works and 3 different cultures of Chinese game institutions in Tank Art Center TANK Shanghai, starting from the whimsical ideas in the minds of game artists and designers, to see how they go through the steps of prototype, iteration, testing, user generation, etc., at the same time, we can also see the architecture, characters, art, animation, text, narrative, etc. in the game. The appearance of the various subsystems such as levels being split apart. In the exhibition, you can not only experience many excellent game works, but also learn how game developers have implemented ideas step by step.
Can video games be art? Everyone will give a different answer based on their own understanding, but it is clear that fewer and fewer people are voting against it. The games in this exhibition can be played on mobile phones or computers, including "Jiangnan Hundred Views" and "Mr. Pumpkin Adventure" with high recognition from game lovers, "Anomaly" and "Stone Record" with a relatively narrow audience but can accurately strike at its audience, "WILL: A Beautiful World" and "Looking for Heaven" that focus on narratives, "Perfect Day" and "Heroes in the World" with nostalgic colors, as well as award-winning works such as "Word Game" and "Cage Peeping" with creative gameplay.
The developer's live
Through this exhibition, we can more directly perceive the scene of game developers, and some doubts that are hovering in the player's heart may be partially answered in this exhibition. For example, Coconut Island Game Studios shows the "legacy" of some of the questions in the company's internal history: What are the standards for good games? Is the cultural impact of the game important? Can games not easily lower the moral bottom line? Many of the issues that ordinary players are concerned about have been raised and discussed countless times among game practitioners.
Some of this confusion is also reflected in the display area of the platform jumping game "Tide" developed by Coconut Island, the creator was criticized by players because the game was too difficult, and once fell into thinking in the office, writing "difficult, single solution" on rice paper over and over again. The production team resented the addictive mechanics of the game and did not want to use the game as a service product, such an insistence would not necessarily be accepted, and the developers could not be indifferent in the face of criticism. A corner of the exhibition area restores the mood of the creator at that time, and the computer that is smashed on the ground is juxtaposed with the lantern that often appears in "Tide", as if the original creation that embodies beauty and hope enters reality and tortures the creator.
"Ten years of work under the stage"
By showing the game's creative process, we can also see the developer's strong control over the details. It looks like a very concise system, and the effort behind it is not much at all, such as "Under the Shadow of the Moon" is a game with a very small amount of text, and from the research and development files, we can find that the developer's things are not huge, level design, main vision, plot conflict settings, storyboarding, world view design, etc. have detailed document descriptions.
"Dark Cuisine King" is a game of restaurant management and breeding monsters, curator Liu Xiaoyi made the strange dark dishes in the game into a physical object, and excerpted the urban legends behind each dish, and the producer Yang Jing invited the creator's wife and daughter to read the story. This information is usually the part of the game that is ignored by the player, and in this exhibition, they are transformed into "protagonists".
The indie game "Word Game" introduced by the independent game agency in Beijing, indienova, uses Chinese characters to play, interface, narrative and art, which is a game that only Chinese character users can play, and the character design is also based on the form of Chinese characters, such as making the "I" character a walking dynamic and so on. The developers have mentioned that the game was inspired by the work of artist Xu Bing. From it we can see an interesting form of game/art fusion.
Yesterday in the game is repeated
Female game developer Wang Miaoyi's two-dimensional style narrative game "WILL: A Better World" has a number of mailboxes in the exhibition area, which contains paper printed with the game's story text, and players can cut, stitch, and reconstruct their own version of the story.
There is no shortage of nostalgic works in the exhibition, such as "Perfect Day". "Heroes of the World" restores the 1990s in Guangdong, and this part of the exhibition area has also been transformed into the appearance of a video hall. "See the Fluttering Cloak" reflects the 1990s in Chengdu.
In addition, games related to specific occupations are also displayed in the exhibition, such as "Anomaly" is a programming game, which is quite popular with programmer friends, and there will also be two players playing at the exhibition site. "Farm Simulator 20" is a game that simulates driving a tractor, Yang Jing said that the R & D staff have really delved into this profession, including personally experiencing tractor driving, asking agronomists about water conservancy irrigation methods, cooperating with agricultural equipment companies, etc., and also holding agricultural e-sports competitions every year, allowing players to compete for who can harvest more wheat in the shortest time.
This time, we invited Yang Jing, the producer of the exhibition and a game researcher, to talk about the exhibition and the game.
Interface Art: Where did the name "Game Live" come from? Why is the game scene a scene of imagination and productivity?
Yang Jing: "Game scene" refers to both the exhibition site that needs to be attended by someone, and the scene of the game's lengthy production process. Here you can not only play the game as the final result, but also see what a game looks like in a "parallel universe".
Games are like an empty container, developers can inject many parts of themselves, it is perhaps the easiest to see or the most practical medium in the process of combining art and technology. We can't do game design in a purely personal way, unlike other art types, players actually invest time, energy and emotions in the game, "play" itself is an important part, game developers in the creative at the same time to be able to control, in a reasonable time to develop products, in the process of testing and then adjust and expand, like alchemy, the imagination digested into productivity.
Interface Art: Can you talk about the phrase "games are inherently cheaters of life" in the exhibition's introduction?
Yang Jing: "Victory and defeat are common things in the soldiers, heroes please start over", there are too many irreversible things in our lives, but the game can be manipulated on this, everything can be restarted, this is a luxury that cannot be had in life, so I will use the word "cheat".
Interface Art: What are the screening criteria for the games on display?
Yang Jing: Our exhibition is supported by three game agencies, including indienova, which focuses on assisting in the development and distribution of independent games, Coconut Island, which does its own research and development and distribution, and TapTap, a game social media center that focuses on mobile games. The game in the exhibition is very dependent on the help of the three institutions and the staff they connect with in terms of copyright and contact with research and development. The games we choose are easily accessible to us in China, such as computer games via Steam and mobile games through TapTap. In the large number of games that we can choose from, we are most concerned about the design, aesthetics, social, cultural influence and technical original and innovative works. Another curator, Li Xiaoxuan and I, invested a lot of time in the selection and trial play in the early stages of the preparatory work.
The artistic value of the game displayed in the art museum should not only be reflected visually, but also pay attention to the interaction and gameplay. Like "Word Game", its screen is minimalist, it is a rebellion and innovation for the genre, and choosing such a work can make everyone understand that the game can carry more. For example, in the 1990s, there was a big battle about the standard of good or bad games, one side focused on the narrative of the game, advocating that the game should be analyzed from the literary tradition and the tradition of storytelling; the other side advocated that it should be analyzed from the perspective of hyperlinks and databases, but now that the two parties have reconciled, everyone accepts that the judgment criteria should be diversified.
Interface Art: What impressed you in the process of communicating with developers?
Yang Jing: I feel that many game developers have a desire to be understood. In fact, making indie games is a bit of a gambling thing, everyone is not doing it to make money, some developers will choose to become a writer and director in the past, and in this era he will choose to become a game designer. Their talent and perseverance can ultimately be seen in the game.
Interface Art: What parts will visitors focus on? The mechanism of play is very sound, what are the unexpected scenes on the scene?
Yang Jing: Like "Sun Wukong vs Machine King Kong" showing bugs, there are many people who pay attention. Because it is strange to everyone, people who watch it will find it very interesting; for practitioners, it is like the secret of insiders, and it is also enjoyable to see. The emotionally focused game "Twins" is about the distance between people and people, and the two-person mode allows couples who come to play to play the game with their arms, which we call the area "dog abuse area".
Interface Art: In the development process, if there is a conflict between creativity and playability, what will people do?
Yang Jing: Some designers feel that expression is more important, zhang Zhechuan, one of the authors of "Twins", said that game creation must be balanced between the two, if you only do service things, it is difficult for your game to avoid being exactly the same as others; if you pay too much attention to personal expression, you will refuse many people to enter. Generally through the test to do the balance, such as adjusting the difficulty, more hints, but some people do not care, the work picks the player, this situation is also easy to be scolded by the player.
Interface Art: What are some interesting iterations of the design and production process? Are there any ideas and gameplay that have been unfortunately abandoned?
Yang Jing: A game to be done for at least one to two years, the time cost, manpower, and funds invested are very large, and there will be creativity and gameplay abandonment or abandonment. Sometimes these discarded parts may be used in other projects, such as the "Adventure of Mr. Pumpkin" of Shanghai Fat Pudding Game Studio that we showed, which was very niche at first, but after receiving more attention, some players will be curious about more stories of the characters in the game, and then it will slowly form a series.
Interface art: In the interview video between the main curator and the main beauty of "Perfect Day", we can see the creators showing their own interests at the desk, such as "Watching Movies" magazine, Quentin films, independent publications, and old books about Qigong, etc., we can often learn from the nourishment and experience of others, including your own creation of "Forgotten Engineer" also makes players think of their own stories, how do you think of the game's call to people's emotions and memories? Is the part grafted with art also related to this?
Yang Jing: Yes. In the game, the character you play is generally called "avatar", Sanskrit avatara, which in Hindu mythology refers to a being who voluntarily puts on the cloak of matter in order to participate in creation. "Avatar" can help a person solve some problems in his life, in the game you are basically like a god descending on the character, why do we feel that time passes so fast when playing the game? Some people believe that it is the so-called "flow", your body, thoughts and emotions are united, and your energy is particularly concentrated at this time. It's also a sense of immersion.
Interface Art: Has people's perceptions of games changed in recent years?
Yang Jing: There may be several games that are easy to attract attention, one is "Stanley's Fable" or "Bliss Disco", which attract people who love literature, philosophy or other fields that seem to have nothing to do with games; games like "Glory of Kings" are played by many people and will become a social phenomenon; the demo video of "Black Myth: Wukong" has attracted a lot of attention, and everyone feels that China has finally made a great game and has national pride.
A generation of players has grown up, even if he no longer plays games, but maybe his children are playing, or his job needs to know these things, once he pays attention, he will find that there is a lot to discuss, such as "Elysium Disco", which some people say is a love letter to the Soviet Union. Since the Nobel Prize in Literature can be awarded to Bob Dylan, can games also win a literature prize? Recently, the game "Hades" won the Nebula Award. Game culture has slowly grown from a subculture, and many people have begun to find that everything can be related to games. Now that we talk about the metaverse, the game can realize the metacosm. In the last century, Wagner said that opera is the overall art, because there can be literature, poetry, performance, etc., and I think the overall art of our time can carry more.
Interface Art: During the epidemic, a game called Animal Forest Friends was very influential, has it also attracted the attention of the art industry?
Yang Jing: Yes, this game has a great impact on the art museum industry, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum, and they will turn the collection of works into small icons for everyone to play. In fact, everyone comes to the art museum not only to see the works, but also to see the architecture, and people who know or do not know, now this wish is more difficult to achieve, and the demand still exists, just "Animal Forest Friends" is a scene-based game, there will be no bad things happening, only love, peace and beauty, and part of the function of the art museum can be matched.
In the past two years, many art spaces, institutions and art museums are thinking about developing online programs, because it is obvious that the flow of people visiting the exhibition is seriously shrinking, but the mission of the institution is still to hope that people can come to visit, in 2021 there is a period of popular audio social software Clubhouse, when I have paid attention to the art museum practitioners in it to discuss how to deal with the epidemic, a museum director in the Bay Area of the United States thinks, how many exhibits should be put on the Internet for free to show people? Should it be open 60% or 80%? I think the focus may not be on the percentage of the display, but on letting people know that the art museum has these exhibits, because once you are online, you are not competing with the art museums in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China, but with Netflix, Steam, and the game platform, how can you guide others to see? That's a problem.
Games may become a solution, but it's not so easy, and someone just came to me and asked to say two months to develop a game out, or a year to make a "Animal Forest Society" out. These games may seem simple to the layman, but they are actually very difficult to develop.
Interface Art: You predicted that the "Game Live" exhibition will be more controversial, about a week after the opening, do you think it is in line with the original prediction?
Yang Jing: The feedback is much better than I thought, there are game industry practitioners, players, people who visit art museums every day, families with children, the first two are expected, everyone is very concerned and supportive, and some people who are interested in design and art also want to try the form of games after watching it. In addition, parents will feel that children can learn something from the exhibition, which is very supportive. People who like to take pictures can also find a lot of scenes where they can take pictures.
Interface Art: Is the Entertainment Attribute of Excessive Attention a Problem that Curators Need to Face in the Current Art Ecology? What about as a game show?
Yang Jing: This exhibition is actually not immersive, like the area where "Perfect Day" is displayed, we can completely set up the scene, but we did not do it, which is a direction that I have insisted on since the beginning of the planning of the exhibition. For example, in this game, the nostalgic part has been done very well, and we want to show the process of making nostalgia, with a focus on work and production. The game has something in common with art galleries, they are all spaces, you build narrative threads in them for visitors and players to experience. The exhibition is about how magic is made, not magic itself. Two works, like "Word Game" and "Stone Record", are not gorgeous. Such a thing could be drowned out in this day and age. Gorgeous appearances will cover up a lot of other things, indie games are difficult to be noticed without funds, and we hope to explore and show the value of this part of the work through exhibitions.
Interface Art: What's the biggest misunderstanding you've ever heard about this form of gaming?
Jing Yang: There is a quote in our curatorial introduction that "the biggest scam that video games accomplish is to make people think that games are just games." The game is like a Trojan horse, secretly hidden in your life, "just a child is playing a game", no one takes the game seriously, but it will have an impact on the economy of the whole society, the division of labor, gender relations, and so on.
Exhibition: Youtopian: Game Scene
Duration: 30 December 2021 – 13 March 2022
Venue: Shanghai Oil Tank Art Center
Opening Hours:
Tuesday to Friday 12:00-18:00
Saturday and Sunday 10:00-18:00
Closed on Mondays