"Copying From Videogames
Is The Art Of Our Days."

THESE GAMES ARE NOT “VIDEOGAMES”.

They are not made for video recorders but for computers, and they are not “games”.
Or at least, they are not just games. They are instead extended versions of reality: the process which started with the poems of Homer and Mahabharata and later the Bible.

According to the Christian religion, God was very upset when people discovered how to multiply themselves and even worst, start having fun while doing it. He expelled them from paradise and later he had to send his son to bring some of them back-a paradise without people was probably such a lonely place as a television without a Playstation connected to it.
But people, who were conceived initially as God’s mirror-images, discovered from very early, how to mirror themselves not only by facts, (sex), but also by words, (fantasy).

Well, now God was really in trouble, because a human creature-the product of love making, is mortal, while a “fantastic” hero, can be immortal, or at least stay alive for many centuries like Buddha and Jesus.

People, made also some serious research and they found that the appearance of the World is nothing but an illusion and that the best way to reveal this fact is to build other “Worlds” and put them in competition with God’s” corporate” illusion.
Cold is not cold for whoever wears a warm uniform and the night is not dark if you are supplied with some laser visors.
But still, our memory of cold and darkness creates a restriction on what we know. That-fake- information builds a very bad operating system, something like today’s computers, which are still very slow, and they crash so easily. To “calculate” the World successfully, you have to emulate it, step after step. It’s not enough to walk around and misuse it(philosophy), you have to imagine a creature which walks, you have to write down it’s story (literature),paint its picture(visual arts),record the sounds around it(music),compare the creature with yourself( photography and cinema) and finally make it able to have its own feelings(videogames).

Videogame characters are truly animated, exactly because they actually have feelings. Yoy may say that a SuperMario cannot really feel anything, that its a piece of programming after all. But that’s only because we still limit the concept of a game character only to the cartoon on our screen. The “complete SuperMario” instead, is a combined creature: the cartoon plus the player. It’s the player’s energy what “powers” the puppet: if you don’t play with him, he falls asleep:” Mario”, is nobody else but you.
Or, the “new You.”

NOW YOU ARE IN THE PICTURE, NOW YOU ARE NOT

Mario, starts his adventures in the Nintendo 64 game, by throwing himself inside paintings. By doing so, he enters a scenario and collects some experience (gold coins in the game). When he is exhausted, he doesn’t die, he just returns to the castle-where the paintings are hanging- he can relax and choose what to do next. The game is a multi leveled experience, exciting and also boring, exactly as our “real life”.

But of course, a videogame is a commercial product after all so it’s revelatory power is limited. Feelings-which could be direct and simple, become complex and confused. Purpose takes over the “gamer”. After a while, the player is not discovering anymore but he is working.

Beauty, collapses into entertainment, what started as the opportunity of a new socialization-humans together with cartoons- becomes just another page from the “society of the spectacle” script. Videogames are just the same narrative after all.. It may sound strange but they end up to be ”Reality”. That’s where Art steps in and saves the day!

THE ZEN OF NON-PLAYING

An artist who works with videogames, doesn’t create or changes anything himself. He/she just extracts the hidden notion by looking carefully the parade of symbols which the game is offering already. An explosion is captured and turned into a Turner-like landscape. A monster becomes romantic when instead of shooting it, you take photos of it. Pokemon are presented exactly as Pokemon- little pocket monsters out of proportion. As well as a painter is not the one eats a piece of bread but the one who paints it, a videogame artist is not someone who creates a videogame, but someone who copy it. It’s easy and beautiful and for that reason, the coolest thing to do.

Miltos Manetas, 2004