In this feature, published in the new S/S 2023 issue of Fact’s print edition, Serpentine curator Hans Ulrich Obrist asks a range of digital artists what elements every good video game should have.
In 2021, 2.8 billion people—almost a third of the world’s population— played video games, making what was once a niche pastime the biggest mass phenomenon of our time. Many people spend hours every day in a parallel world and live a multitude of different lives. Video games are to the twenty-first century what movies were to the twentieth century and novels to the nineteenth century.
The aesthetics and visual language of games first entered artistic practices decades ago. Artists have appropriated, modified, and often subverted existing video games to reflect on them and to approach questions of our existence within virtual worlds and the socio-political issues involved in the rendering of new realities. Other artists present a critique of games by exposing their often discriminatory elements and stereotypical depictions. More recently, artists have also entered existing mainstream games, opening up to massive new audiences and finding fresh forms of engagement.
Traditionally, video games were created by a small and insular group of people coming from the world of engineering, who produced games with a very limited perspective. This is now changing rapidly, with many more people having access to the tools for making games. Artists are increasingly developing the technical ability to invent, design, and distribute their own games on all continents to create virtual worlds of diversity and inclusion, contributing strongly to a plurality of voices and different perspectives. As Anna Anthropy writes in her book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: “I want games to come from a wider set of experiences and present a wider range of perspectives. I can imagine—you are invited to imagine with me—a world in which digital games are not manufactured for the same small audience butone in which games are authored by you and me for the benefit of our peers.”
Artists can be said to present an expanded notion of games. Worldbuilding, an exhibition I curated at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf, which will be shown at Pompidou Metz in summer 2023, highlights how the creation of games offers a unique opportunity for worldbuilding. Within games rules can be set up; surroundings, systems, and dynamics can be built and altered; and new realms can emerge. As artist Ian Cheng often told me, at the heart of his art is a desire to understand what a world is. Now more than ever, the dream is to be able to possess the agency to create new worlds, not just inherit and live within existing ones.
C. Thi Nguyen, in his book Games: Agency as Art, argues that games are unique art forms that offer a temporary alternative experience of life and allow players to enjoy new and expanded forms of agency. The games presented
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