Playing Duchamp is a net art project and game developed by Scott Kildall, a new media artist whose work often translates between the virtual and the real. In this project, Kildall has programmed a chess computer to play chess as if it were Marcel Duchamp, thus birthing a virtual Duchamp in the form of an AI personality. The question of machine intelligence in game play has become especially relevant with the defeat of chess grandmaster Kasparaov by Deep Blue in 1997. More recently, we have seen IBM’s Watson crush its human opponents in a televised 3-day Jeopardy contest. In his online artwork, Kildall combines new media with the legacy of conceptual art to create digitally coded personality for game play.

Image courtesy of Scott Kildall.

Duchamp (1887-1968) was a French painter turned conceptual artist, film maker, chess player, mathematician, composer, and much more. In art circles, Duchamp is remembered for the desertion of retinal art in favor of the mind. This courageous break from established academic conventions in the arts opened the door for radically avant-garde adventures that wreaked havoc in 20th century art world. Duchamp’s foray into the mind gave birth to readymades,  paving the way for artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons.

While turning the tables in the art world, Duchamp’s other passion was the game of chess. He was a first-rate chess player and a member of several French teams, participating in Chess Olympiads during the late 1920s and early 1930s. He achieved the rank of Master and, with Vitaly Halberstadt, co-authored a treatise on endgame strategies in chess. By playing chess, Duchamp realized the beauty of the game and that a player’s actions resided in the mind, like conceptual art.

Duchamp once commented that “I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.” Francis Naumann eloquently draws the analogy of Duchamp’s art career to a game of chess in his co-authored book, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess. Naumann even suggests that Etant donnés (the peephole artwork) is likened to the endgame of a chess match.

The connections between Duchamp and new technologies are often overlooked in his biography and discussions of his works. Duchamp was intoxicated by the new technological innovations of his day, such as the discovery of X-rays, electromagnetic energy flowing through bodies and the universe, the creation of the incandescent lamp, the hydraulic generator, the skyscraper, cinema, and the automobile. Some of these remarkable innovations found their way into Duchamp’s popular works such as Nude Descending A Staircase and the Large Glass. He even produced a series of Rotoreliefs, which were optical disks placed on a vertically oriented turntable to produce illusions of motion in perspective.

Image courtesy of the artist.

I recently spoke with Scott Kildall about how he developed Playing Duchamp; his process was a chess game in its own right. Kildall maneuvered different pieces of code: a Flash-based chess interface, custom CGI scripts, and a modified open source chess engine to assemble Playing Duchamp. Kildall also took time to include details such as 3D-rendered chess pieces based on Duchamp’s original hand-carved set. Such work raises a few questions: What is a readymade in new media art? Who owns the invisible lines of the algorithm?

Playing Duchamp is a statement about Duchamp’s place in the art world and the role chess plays in his art. For Duchamp, the game is played out in the mind and the beauty is found in the moves. Chess is likened to performance art combined with abstract thinking. The legendary 20th century artist would have been intrigued by the technology used to create Playing Duchamp and thrilled to reemerge as a specter hovering over chess games that he played over a career spanning 40 years. Kildall’s Playing Duchamp makes Duchamp relevant in the Digital Age and gives him a place in cyberspace by virtual existence.

Other artworks inspired by chess such as Yoko Ono’s White Chess Set and Gabriel Orozco’s Horses Running Endlessly have recast chess as a metaphor for peace, rather than a game of conflict. Like these works, Playing Duchamp asks us to rethink this original war game by dismantling the usual mode of conflict; how can you feel like you “lost” the game when beaten by Marcel Duchamp himself?

Kildall’s Playing Duchamp was unveiled at the 2010 exhibition titled “The Seduction of Duchamp: Bay Area Artists Respond,” which took place at the Los Gatos Museum of Art last fall. Duchamp’s core interests such as science, technology, and chess converged at this exhibit and endowed Duchamp with a virtual presence on the internet, inspiring a debate about the virtues of new media art.

Duchamp remains the king of the art world with no contender in sight. By playing virtually, Kildall challenges us to rethink art’s purpose, the place of new media, and video games within the context of Playing Duchamp and asks us to reevaluate our relationship to the late artist. Are all artists going to be checkmated by the legacy of Duchamp?

The digital code of Playing Duchamp protects the enigmatic artist’s legacy. Marcel Duchamp would have been championing the merits of wireless communication, the world without boundaries, and the digital revolution. It is safe to speculate that he would have been pleased with Kildall’s embrace of new technology and bringing him along to play the game. Though Duchamp passed half a century ago, he remains relevant and powerful. When the art market is driven by investments and speculations, we need to step back, look the possibilities in new media, and ask: What is art’s endgame?

The game can be played at: www.playingduchamp.com

Playing Duchamp was commissioned by Turbulence.org

The Relationship Saga is a game by captaincabinets, which  tells the story of a brief relationship in a series of short games. The game is unpolished and buggy and at times sarcastic, but it is very honest. Some of the games have dopey, self-conscious mechanics, like the game wherein you wait for your love interest to contact you by staying near your computer, but have to maintain your morale by walking away from the computer to drink beer. The game does not put the player in his partner’s shoes even though that is something that games can do and is oh-so-often demanded of games about relationships. The game does not tell the story from the other perspective because it is autobiographical. At any moment during any of the games you can press “c” to smoke a cigarette. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that lets you smoke cigarettes that I didn’t enjoy.

In A Sad Tale, by Lurk, you play as a young boy who lives in a cabin in a blizzard. You have a doting mother and an abusive father. There is a gun, a confrontational neighbor, and a lake with thin ice, along with a few other props. One of the buttons will make your character cry. The game  is very open-ended and every time you play it you will create a new narrative, but all of them are very sad. One time you might steal your neighbor’s daughter and fall into the lake. Another time you might wander out into the forest and freeze to death. The game is excessively morose in a way that isn’t overly sentimental or sarcastic. Lurk doesn’t think it’s an art game.

Metro Rules of Conduct from Kian Bashiri on Vimeo.

In Metro Rules of Conduct, by Kian Bashiri, you try to stare at people’s possessions on the metro without having them look at you. If someone looks at you while you’re looking at their stuff, the screen flashes red and the game makes a horrible noise. It is a much worse punishment than the fact that you don’t get any points. The game is piercingly insightful about a completely mundane action, and addresses the power of the gaze and the unspoken rules of social interaction and anomie—it doesn’t need an artist’s statement to tell you this. Kian Bashiri also made You Have To Burn the Rope and when he didn’t win any IGF awards for it he took down his website for a while and I was worried that Metro Rules of Conduct would be lost forever.

So, in conclusion, play those games, make more games, and stay honest y’all.

Xoxo

Marek

THE WORLD’S A STAGE AND WE ARE PLAYERS

Often, games—particularly digital games, with their use of video and audio—are compared to film, probably because the videogame publishing industry strongly resembles the Hollywood studio system. But I don’t think this comparison is particularly constructive, in that it gives us little insight into what the game, as a form, is capable of. Film tells a static story; what’s exciting about the game is that it allows the audience to interact with a set of rules. This doesn’t mean the game can’t tell a story: in the role-playing genre, the players aren’t merely watching a story but playing the roles of the characters within the story.

Rise of the Videogame Zinesters by Anna Anthropy.

A better comparison than film is theater, which is where a lot of our game vocabulary (“the player,” “stages,” “set pieces,” “scripting”) comes from. A play defines the roles, events, and scenes of a story. An individual performance of those roles and scenes will always be different: different actors will perform the same role in different ways. Every performance and interpretation of a particular play is different—sometimes in minute ways, sometimes in radical ways—but we consider the play itself and the scene itself to be the same.

Compare this to a game story, particularly a videogame story. Every player will perform the story called Super Mario Bros. differently (and the same player will perform the story differently each play), but the role of Mario and the actions Mario is capable of taking remain the same. There is always a scene called “World 1-2,” although each performance of “World 1-2” will be different. In a more contemporary videogame such as Half-Life 2, a very clearly cinema-inspired game, each player will always pass through the events the designers have scripted in the order in which they are presented, but each player’s (and each play’s) performance of Gordon Freeman, the game’s protagonist, will be at least subtly different. The player will always get chased across the rooftops by cops, but in one performance she might hesitate, unsure of where to go, in one she might head straight for the escape route, in one she might panic, almost getting Gordon Freeman killed, and in another she might walk a little too close to the edge of the roof, fall, and have to start the scene over.

As game storytellers, we are not directing static stories take-by-take but rather arranging the scenes that will comprise the shape of our story. We can begin to think of the player as someone performing a role we’ve written rather than as an audience who experiences our story without any input as to its outcome. We allow room for improvisation, room for the player to make a role her own. The audience of a game can be more usefully compared to the audience for a play than the audience in the movie theater. In videogames, the audience is there, live, with the actors—or as the actors—experiencing a single performance that is unique, despite the story having been performed and continuing to be performed many times.

Some players record videos of their performances, either for documentation or for the purpose of recording a specific achievement, such as reaching the game’s conclusion as quickly as possible—what is usually called a “speed run” (YouTube has given lots of these videos a means of reaching an audience). That there’s an incentive to capture individual performances of a game testifies to the amount of variance there is within a game depending on who’s playing it.

GAMES AND CHANCE

The board and card game traditions have also given a lot to digital games. What I think digital games have taken the most from board games and card games is the way they manage chance. Both contemporary designed games and older folk games have invented many systems for managing chance. The six-sided die, for example, allows for the random selection of six equally likely outcomes (and can then be further used to access other percentages and ratios; for example, three outcomes, each represented by two sides of the die, or eleven outcomes with different likelihoods represented by two rolls of the die, and so on.)

Card games themselves are designed as a system for managing chance and gradually revealing information. When all cards are in the deck, every card in the game has (as far as the player knows) an equal chance of being in any position. Once a card has come into play and been seen by the players, though, the players then know where it is and can use that information to make guesses about the remaining cards. Cards also allow players to manage the pace at which they reveal information: a player might have a hand of seven cards hidden from the other players, who don’t know whether those cards have come into the game yet or not. Poker is a classic game of using limited knowledge of the cards in play to predict the positions of cards not yet in play. This is what makes Poker an elaborate game of bluffing. One player tries to see through the other’s “Poker face” because the decisions she’ll make are based on what she can predict about the information the other player is concealing. Contemporary game designers have contrived even more rules to control the reveal of information.

Aside from hiding information, chance is frequently used to break symmetry. Having different starting conditions between players prevents both players from having the same set of ideal moves, and thus having the game become a stalemate. Having different, randomly selected values between one play and another, or having different game events happen at different, impossible-to-predict times (or not at all), means that each game will demand a different strategy, keeping play from becoming stagnant.

Franz-Benno Delonge’s and Thomas Ewert’s board game Container, for example—a game where players trade and transport commodities—uses chance to ensure that all players do not value the commodities identically. At the start of the game, a number of cards are shuffled and randomly distributed, one to a player. These cards describe how valuable the different commodities are to the players who hold them, and each card values the commodities differently. The cards are also kept hidden until the end of the game, each card seen only by the player that holds it. Because each player is aware of the entire possible set of values on the cards—she knows which cards are in the game, and which card she, and therefore not the others, possesses—she can watch the other players’ decisions and make deductions about which players have which cards, and therefore which commodities are valuable to which players.

Computers have an innate capacity for manipulating chance. Though true randomness doesn’t exist, computers handle numbers easily and are capable of generating reasonably unpredictable probabilities of any size on the fly. Every computer has access to an infinite number of monkeys rolling an infinite number of dice.

Why is this useful? Because, as we’ve discussed, games have a unique capacity for improvisation! Though each scene has the same shape—Link battles a gang of Moblins—each performance is different. So what if, in one performance, one of the Moblins comes from the left instead of the right? Digital games have the capacity to create variations on many subtle details in every play, keeping the experience from becoming stagnant.

The differences don’t have to be subtle, either. In Chris Klimas and Joel Haddock’s online game, Where We Remain, for example, the player is a boy searching for a girl on an island patrolled by monsters that are intended to evoke characters from Greek mythology. The layout of the island—what tools are hidden in which caves, what areas which monsters patrol, and in which cave the girl is hidden—is different every time, decided by a random number generator. In effect, this randomness makes the characters and events of the game more archetypal because the emphasis is on the shape of the game—the boy’s search for the girl while monsters pursue him—rather than on the details like what treasure is hidden where. Games have lots of room for improvisation, for every play of a game or scene to be unique, and digital games in particular have easy access to a great degree of chance.

Playable online at http://twofoldsecret.com/games/whereweremain

The Future of Gaming

by Jenene Castle

Emergent gaming trends increasingly connect virtual in-game space with “ordinary” or geophysical life space. Inclusion of real world interaction within game play is eminent. For example, the online virtual environment of Second Life has a working relationship that combines the in-world monetary system (the Linden) and real world currency. Additionally, Blizzard—the game development company behind World of Warcraft (WoW)—is currently investigating ways to synchronize WoW’s auction house with real world currency.

Game worlds seem to be more inclined to partner with components in life space as opposed to the reverse. That being said, the unfortunate reality of gamification has started to take shape with both realms. Gamification, in this sense, is the use of trivial or monotonous game-emulated dynamics developed to reward individuals for participating in the consumption of goods and services.

There is, however, an alternative to this diluted perspective. Game designer and professor Ian Bogost notes that “serious games have given its advocates a way to frame the uses of games in governmental and industrial contexts, by making the claim that games can tackle consequential topics and provide profound results.” These can range from simple games, those employed to engage students in enjoyable learning processes, to more complex systems which may aim to critique various social constructs. For instance, the artist collective Third Faction works within existing game environments to educate and raise awareness by drawing parallels to real world experiences.

Recently, at ISEA 2011 in Istanbul, Third Faction presented “DPS” (Demand Player Sovereignty): a project promoting social activism and civil disobedience. In-game marches were held to protest the top-down governmental structure and the pornification of female avatars; this is one way artists have begun merging real world politics with the game space in a non-trivial way.

The future of gaming is morphing. However, until the majority of people begin to consider games as an alternate form of reality, the pendulum will remain unmoved. Avant-garde artists and educators are acting as a catalyst for this change. The result will be a merging of both the virtual and the geophysical world. Instead of integrating games into reality, as with gamification, reality will be integrated into games.

The Future of Gaming

by John Bruneau

There is a lot of buzz right now over gamification, which is the process of infusing the monotony of  reality with gaming elements. We are already witnessing the incorporation of game mechanics and design techniques into all aspects of daily life. Businesses are jumping on the gamification bandwagon to push profits up, engage the consumer, and maintain popularity. There is a strong push in academia to gamify education and research. On the one hand, we have Serious Games and Games for Change, while on the other hand, we have foursquare America’s Army and Badgeville all vying for our attention and trying to up the ante. Finally! We have the means to make learning fun, make buying fun, make taking surveys and giving away your personal information… fun. But all this is happening right now: Gamification is the present of gaming. So what about the future?

DevHub, a website website, increased the number of users who completed their online tasks from 10% to 80% after adding Gamification elements.

The future is full of intensity, excitement, and stress. Every aspect of life is so deeply infused with game mechanics that separating game and life is an impossibility. The constant need to grind, to level, to rack up points and experience points leads to unparalleled levels of anxiety. The necessity to continually keep up with the Joneses’ achievements takes its toll on the human psyche. We need an exit. Desperately, people begin searching for a way to escape into a world of peace and mundane simplicity; a place where they wont be weighted, measured or scored, a place where quest-lines all come to an end. Banal is the new fantasy and games, as always, are there to rescue us from our reality.

“Games are the new normal” – Al Gore

When life is a game, escapism becomes life – a simpler life, an ideal life. The kind of fantasy our parents reminisce about. We already see it happening in art, film, and television. Indeed, this future is not so distant. Several independent game titles currently indulge this sentiment. flOw, Flower, Passage, Desert Bus, MFAPrep Course, Dinner Date, Metro Rules of Conduct are all signs of things to come. As this new genre of games begins to rise in popularity, marketers and academics will begin looking for ways to introduce life-like elements into life. For better or worse, future schools, businesses and altruistic nonprofits will all try to lure us away from the leveling rat race with “Lifeification”. Who could resist a website offering an embedded chance to unwind with a dying of old age simulator? The future of gaming is not the Gamification, but rather the Lifeification, of life.

“The lifeification of games is where we want to go in the game industry” – Chris Hecker

The Future of Gaming

By Marek Kapolka

3rd faction. San Jose State University.

If, as Duhamel said, video replaced our thoughts with moving images, then games will replace our thoughts with systems (dedicated gamers can attest to this—ask them about their fever dreams). Whereas non-interactive media provide representations, games provide simulations. As such, the cognitive processes used to understand a game are completely different from those used to understand passive media. Even on a basic level, the player is required to learn a complex network of causes and effects in order to successfully navigate any game. This mode of thinking has the potential to create a framework for scientific curiosity. In science, as in game analysis, the observer asks a series of “why” questions down through layers of complexity in order to understand the systems that drive their subject. A game-savvy population would have an immense effect on culture. With the systemic fluency provided by playing games and a finely developed sense of agency (a requisite faculty of the gaming aesthete) players will not only have a lucid vision of the social order they want to live in, but will be able to design the rules of such a society.

The Future of Gaming

by Thomas Asmuth

In Homo Ludens, the act of play was quoted as being “older than culture” itself by Dutch historian and theorist Johan Huizinga. In his argument, play transcends milestones by which we would frame “civilization” and “culture.” The impetus for play and gaming is an innate drive in mankind and other mammals; when framed in Huizinga’s theory, the topic “Future of Games” sounds hyperbolic. The desire to play and game is instinctual stuff that we carry with us everyday: it resides deep within our psyche.

Contemporary popularization and interest in gaming (formally Ludology) is firmly rooted in the massive rise of personal computing and networking industries. The game industry regularly outsells Hollywood with yearly sales in hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars. These cyclopean revenues—as well as the critical mass of a world-wide ludo-centric culture—have inspired a creative generation comprised of software engineers, artists, and sociologists. These game culturalists are all focused on the nature of gaming and the possibilities it can create.

This emergent global gaming culture transcends geographic, social, and national boundaries: this is where the Future of Games attains traction. There is a very real sense of community within and around gaming systems. The citizens of the game inspire others and engage in research, criticism, debate, reflection, and derive pleasure from these things. Despite humanity’s best attempts to segregate and become tribalistic around other kinds of local culture, the instinctual drive for gaming has the potential to subvert these identity issues. It may be one of the best ways humanity can collaborate and collectively bring forth models for discourse, change, and cultural improvement. The Future of Games is in the massively interconnected society which thrives within games and the evolving culture surrounding them.