Zero Gamer- Sometimes we just like to watch

Zero Gamer
Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett (HTTP/Furtherfield.org) and Corrado Morgana 2007

This is the second exhibition, produced by HTTP Gallery as part of the London Games Fringe Festival to focus on the intersection of media art and games cultures. In 2006 Game/Play, a networked exhibition focusing on the rhetorical constructs of game and play in a media art context, was installed alongside the World Series of Video Games in London. Visitors to the Trocadero moved between the frenzied competition of the WSVG events, part of the mainstream festival, and a more critical engagement with a selection of artworks presented as part of the Fringe. The exhibition comprised of a series of games that subverted the stereotypical genres and an installation of [giantJoystick] by Mary Flanagan which "highlighted the spatial and social role of the game interface." Visitors seemed to slip happily between modes of engagement.

The meaning of contemporary media art is often crafted by the context in which it is encountered by its audience or participants. The way in which participants interact when engaged (in games and art) remains an important factor for both artists and game designers, gamers and audiences for videogame-art. This provides a starting point for this exhibition. It considers on the one hand, avidly and actively immersed gamers, and on the other, the gamer-in-every-viewer of art games who encounters game modifications, appropriations and detournements as jolts to the mesmerizing flow and illusory worlds of regular game play. They are thereby placed in a more thoughtful and reflective relationship with them. This is the fertile antagonism that informs Zero Gamer.

So, what happens when the action is taken out of interaction?

Of course, the works in this exhibition don't remove all action from interaction, but they do shift the sites, times and agents of action. The works presented either document the results of a prior performative action or an automated performance defined by software affordances such as artificial intelligence and in-game physics.Much of the presentation of these works touches upon the arena of Machinima. Games creatives, whether videogame artists or amateur enthusiast producers have made Machinima, a contraction of 'machine' and 'cinema', a significant form. This form uses videogame engines- hacking, modifying or performing within multi-player games- to produce normally a video document following some form of formal, cinematic intent. However this term may need some adjustment before we apply it to artists' documents of in-game performance or other activity- perhaps Experimental Machinima or MachinimArt (coined at the Gameworld exhibition 2006 in Laboral) will stand in for these more exploratory forms which belong to expanded forms of cinema or documentary not normally or intentionally associated with Machinima.

In Myfanwy Ashmore's game modification, Mario battle no.1 (2000), all the architecture, prizes, enemies, performance enhancing drugs and obstacles are removed from the game. In an existential impulse, all opportunities for purposeful action are excised and all the player can do is go for an aimless, solitary walk through the featureless digital landscape. "A solitary mission without an obvious goal." Mario battle no.1 forms part of a trilogy which includes, Mario is drowning (2004) and Mario doing time (2004), which deal with similar modifications to familiar environments.

Max Payne Cheats Only (2005) by the artists JODI is a series of ten video loops that document their activities within the video game Max Payne. This is a continuation of their approach in earlier net artworks where they deconstructed and abstracted familiar interfaces for networked interaction such as web-browsers and computer desktops. In this work, they first enter cheat codes (created to change the behaviour of the game) and then they go on to play/ perform, not to win, but to break the illusion of consistent reality within the game, revealing disjunctions and abstractions in its logic.

Axel Stockburger's Boys in the Hood (2006) presents yet another facet of video game art production and presentation. A documentary of interviews with players of the controversial computer game Grand Theft Auto in which players give detailed descriptions of their locations, movements and actions in games they have played. These subjective accounts of a shared space lead to flow at the borders between 'real' and 'virtual'.

The YouTube show reel introduces some subgenres of emerging gaming activity amongst audiences turned producers. The collectively created context provided by the mass of tagging 'collectors' is what has made the curation of these works for this exhibition possible. The ease with which it is possible now to label, exchange and share short videos and so, private obsessions, via web-based platforms runs in parallel with the immense popularity of online multiplayer gaming. As a result, showcases of mastery often gain quick notoriety across the blogosphere, as with TheGhost's Launch Line. This video documents the breathtaking skill of non-battling, anonymous 'players' within Bungie's Halo, the science fiction video game for Xbox, who initiate astonishing acrobatics with Warthog vehicles, using only well-placed grenades. This and the video of the grandmaster Tetris player are proof that sometimes we are right just to watch in awe.

Wo0Yay has created a Rube Goldberg (the American Heath Robinson) device in Garry's mod for Half Life 2. Garry's mod exploits the game's sophisticated physics engine allowing users to produce complex machines by bolting rockets, planks, barrels and balloons together. While the mod itself would never be considered a game as such, it offers potential for playful experimentation and the video has a direct parallel to Fischli and Weiss' chain reaction work, The Way Things Go.

A number of exhibits for Zero Gamer deal with the self-playing game, which is hinted at in the name of this exhibition. This springs from a technical term that describe self-playing games, simulations or demos; the zero player game. Once an initial seed state, premise or scenario has been selected, a zero player game runs itself with no user interaction. The human player is turned once and for all into a spectator. The prime example, albeit initially non-digital, is John Conway's 1970 cellular automata, Game of Life which still provides one of the clearest demonstrations of how complex effects emerge from combinations of just a very few rules of interaction within the simplest of environments.

Meanwhile CarnageHug (2007) uses the Unreal Tournament 2004 game engine, a hyper frenetic multiplayer future sports, first person shooter and turns it into a bizarre, self-playing spectacle. Morgana's contribution to the hundreds of bundled maps and community created game mods is to remove the weapons from the mix (for some of the time!). The video documents the game's bots, artificially intelligent computer controlled adversaries, as they spring about and over each other until they naturally come to non-combative rest, having played out their algorithmic destinies.

Progress Quest (2002), by Eric Fredricksen, parodies multi-player, fantasy, role-playing games, taking away the grind, the slog and even the graphics! With no more user input than selecting a character the (non) game plays itself. Similarly 1d Tetris, a browser based game by Ljudmila, a digital media lab, is a zero-player version of the classic Soviet puzzle game that tests the viewers' endurance in meditative inaction. When viewing these works one becomes uniquely aware of an altered and perverse relation between time, event, action, interaction and purpose in a way that is typical of the antagonisms that arise at the intersection of games and art cultures.

Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell in Video Games and Art acknowledge some of these conflicts, "The issue of contextualization is of crucial importance in spite of its basis in such an available medium as video games. Video game art is often difficult work for a general audience to approach, appreciate and understand."3 The gamer will often be disappointed by how little their experience of game art has in common with their experience of gaming however it is evident that there are commonalities between the artifacts produced by videogame-artists and amateur enthusiasts as evidenced in this exhibition. Zero Gamer attempts to create a space for enjoyable contemplation of these controversies at the intersection of art and games cultures.

One might imagine that by removing the opportunities for direct physical interaction with the videogame art presented in this exhibition, that the audience is somehow disconnected from the most compelling aspects of gaming; that by turning them into spectators of others' interaction, that their level of agency is somehow compromised. At first approach, we may assume that in order to take control, take power, it is first necessary to have our fingers on the buttons. However, the works in this exhibition are intended to serve as documents, inspirations, exemplars, instructions and catalysts for future subversions of the powerful medium of games, for a different kind of more engaged future interaction that involves claiming and recreating culture with a critical approach, on your own terms.

1 Christiane Paul, 2006, for Game/Play catalogue
2 Myfanwy Ashmore http://www.student.ocad.on.ca/%7emyfanwyashmore/mario.shtml 3 Videogames and Art 2007, ed Andy Clarke, Grethe Mitchell