"How exactly does a game get made and then come to the player?"
In the "Tank No. 4" exhibition hall of the Shanghai Oil Tank Art Center, the exhibition site entitled "Youtopian: Game Scene", the audience who come here will undoubtedly get the corresponding answer.
"Youtobang" officially opened at the end of last month. In this art gallery that once hosted French President Emmanuel Macron, 19 independent games were "cut" apart and presented to the audience in a special "exhibit" form: "Looking for Heaven", "Peeping in the Cage", "Word Game", "Perfect Day"...
Booth for "Peeking into a Dream in a Cage"
Video games have long been the subject of popular pop culture exhibitions around the world, most notably the Game On art exhibition. In 2002, the first ever major international touring exhibition on the theme of video game culture opened for the first time at the Barbican Centre in London, aiming to explore the cultural and historical boundaries of video games.
First Game On art exhibition in London, 2002
In the following decades, Game On toured more than 20 countries around the world, and its inspiration also spawned a large number of similar game exhibitions: generally different game categories and major labels to show the magnificent "history of game development", leaving valuable industry information and artistic heritage for the expression carrier of games.
In contrast, the theme of "Youtoban" is particularly special - it is more like an exhibition starting from the "details of the game". Rather than displaying games and equipment like museum specimens, or telling stories from a longitudinal historical perspective, the curators of Youtopian want to express more about the concrete game production process: from R&D-production to circulation-consumption.
Viewers watch the story behind the game while experiencing Farm Simulator 20
To be more specific, it tries to show how an indie game starts with a crude idea, inspiration, or motivation, and gradually iterates into a "finished product" under the efforts of developers and publishers, and finally what kind of experience it brings to players.
Most of these indie games are provided by domestic developers/publishers, and the main collaborators of the curators are TapTap, Coconut Island Games, and Indienova, which happen to cover three indispensable links in the game industry chain: Coconut Island is the "producer", focusing on the development and distribution of games; Indienova is the "communicator", dedicated to publishing, dissemination and the "evangelism" of the independent spirit; and TapTap is the "bridge" between the game, the player and the studio. As a terminal for showing the game, it realizes the final connection between the player and the work.
Under the joint thinking and planning of game industry forces such as TapTap and art curators, the "game scene" concept of "Youtobang" can be landed in the venue.
At the scene, the audience can see a large number of developers' original ideas when designing the game from the production link, such as the storyboard manuscript of the in-game performance, and the studio's "production pipeline" reality:
A storyboard manuscript of the trailer for Finding Paradise drawn by Gao
The opening shot of "Monkey King vs. Machine King Kong"
You can also feel the pure visual art that supports a game skeleton from the game's art and concept display:
ASCII. character art for Word Games and Stone Age
As well as a large number of installations: for example, "100 Views of Jiangnan" brought a set of three-dimensional miniature landscape models of Jiangnan in the Ming Dynasty, and "WILL: A Beautiful World" directly restored the workbench scene in the game.
Even in the "communication" stage of the game's production/consumption link, TapTap also tries to use a real sense of how the above excellent works are promoted by the platform to meet with players: an iterative process of a game, the establishment and exchange of details of a community, how lists and recommendations can make excellent game works get evaluation among players and accelerate circulation, in fact, they are achieved in such a small App countless times between refreshes and scrolls.
This is also what I think is most special about the perspective of "Youtobang", in the past, the perspective of a game's development and distribution scene was often absent, and generally everyone would only look at it from a pure product perspective. But in fact, the process of any game from scratch and from existence to "fire" itself has a lot of information and stories worth adding and preserving.
In other words, the game itself is not only a profitable commodity, but also has a content value and artistic value that is relevant to people – if we stop focusing on the product itself and look at the collaborative process of studios, publishers and social platforms, we can see how hard it is for a game to bring players an experience (which is especially suitable for TapTap, a platform that values developer friendliness and community culture to participate in curating).
Compared with the exhibition of game software as a "cultural commodity" and the game hardware as "part of consumer electronics", the curatorial concept of "Youtopian" is more like presenting every subsection in the chain of game production and consumption as an object of viewing - more importantly, its exhibition site does not have abstract or obscure artistic concepts, but uses actual visible installations and images to pave a game, which is intuitively quite fun.
The various installations on the exhibition have also become the focus of many visitors' photography
Although large-scale video game exhibitions such as Game On have also toured China, from a worldwide perspective, the concept and presentation of "game art" has always been "decoupled" from the domestic game industry. At exhibitions like Game on, you can see PONG! And the medieval figure of Atari 2600, see the spectacle left by Nintendo and Sony in the history of the game industry, but even on the "modern" timeline, there are few Chinese game developers.
But in the 19 indie games co-selected by curators and tapTap and other content providers, you can see a silhouette of an indie game created by Youtobang that contains a large number of local works: the game is not only the tip of the iceberg in the hands of players, but also the heavy parts below the sea surface that are worth our attention.
The exhibition lasts until March 13, and interested friends can visit the Shanghai Oil Tank Art Center.