The new issue of Switch, the new media art journal of the CADRE
Institute of the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University,
is now online.

This Switch, "Art and Games" issue, also contains the "Cracking the
Maze–Game Patches and Plug-ins as Hacker Art" On-line Exhibit

http://switch.sjsu.edu
http://switch.sjsu.edu/CrackingtheMaze

Editorial notes by Anne-Marie Schleiner, editor and curator:

Forums of public intersection between computer games and art have
surfaced with accelerated frequency over the course of the last year. To
briefly chart some of the recent terrain, "The Doors of Perception
Conference" in Amsterdam took place in the fall of 1998 with its focus
on "Play" and included some games by artists, the "Synworld" conference
and exhibit at Public Netbase in Vienna occurred in May of 1999, the
"Interactive Frictions" conference and exhibit met at USC in Los Angeles
in June of 1999, the "Game Over" exhibit was presented at the Institute
of Design in Zurich in July and the upcoming on-line "Play Panel"
organized by Eyebeam Atelier and TechBC is scheduled for July and August
of 1999. Computer gaming is emerging as the dominant form of media
interpolation into shared social apparatuses even at the expense of
television and film. As an entertainment form linked to on-line network
data flow, computer gaming is at the present time more open than
television ever was to reinvention and rearticulation of its genres and
modes of interactivity, sign systems and politics of representation. The
time seems ripe for critical intervention from artists and theorists,
who follow in the wake of the fervid cultural sabotage and shape
shifting of the game fan players and hackers themselves. Equally
imperative is an examination of the historical underpinnings of given
computer gaming tropes in military and filmic simulation technologies
and early computer programming.

The "Art and Games" issue of Switch and the hosted (nested) exhibit,
"Cracking the Maze–Game Plug-ins and Patches as Hacker Art", offer a
variety of perspectives on issues pertaining to computer games and art,
gender, game hacking, game interface history, networked game play and
opportunities for new modes of game interaction, navigation and
narrative. Marsha Kinder describes the extensive research and thought
processes that went into the creation of "Runaways", a narrative, soon
to be on-line role playing game, that incorporates the melodrama of real
life stories of teenage runaways into the driving narrative structure of
the game. "Runaways" offers teens (and other aged players) from a
variety of ethnicities, genders and gender preferences an opportunity to
relate to one another in a game environment. Norman Klein's and Lev
Manovich's accompanying text to the "Freud/Lissitzky Navigator"
game/artwork traces the genealogy of the "Freud/Lissitzky Navigator"
with the device of a historical fiction that reveals convincing linkages
between architecture, 20th century theoretical frameworks, the
simulation technologies of fantasy theme parks, military simulators,
film and computer games. Interestingly, the dualistic character of
Freud's and Saussure's theoretical mappings seem to echo the secondary
signifying systems of simulation technologies in the "Freud/Lissitzky
Navigator" text. At the increasingly fuzzy border between computer games
and film, Jason Brown's "Paranoid Machines: Conspiracy Games and Desire
Control in Tron" probes the hermeneutic apparatuses of this 1980's
game/film. An interview with Vangie Beal of GameGirlz by Switch's
co-editor Geri Wittig and Switch's network Quake aficionado Max
Hardcoreis an expedition into the rough and ready world of female
gamers, who dont waste much time on chatting while they are busy
fragging their opponents asses. GameGirlz and their associated gaming
clans like PMS (Psycho Men Slayers) present a model for how women gamers
can network with both female and male players and participate in violent
on-line game play on their own female friendly terms.

In the "Cracking the Maze" on-line exhibit, besides my own curatorial
statement, are two articles which pertain more specifically to game
patch art by Erkki Huhtamo and Sandy Stone. Game patches, (or game
add-ons, mods, levels, maps or wads), refer to alterations of
preexisting game source code in terms of graphics, game characters,
architecture, sound and game play. Game patching in the 1990's has
evolved into a kind of popular hacker art form with numerous shareware
editors available on the Internet for modifying most games. In "Game
Patch–Son of Scratch?" Erkki Huhtamo contextualizes computer game
alterations within the historical framework of the 1980's subversive
media art interventions of the British scratch video artists, whose
re-edited, re-dubbings of broadcast television constituted an ironic
critique of mainstream broadcast television. Similarly, game patch
artists often subvert prevailing gaming genres and character
stereotypes, although Erkki Huhtamo is careful to delineate how the
parameters of the computer game industry differ from the one-way
character of broadcast television. The game patches included in the
"Cracking the Maze" exhibit are both patches created by game patch
artists who circulate their patches through on-line gaming venues and by
artists from outside of the usual game culture enclaves. From Josephine
Starrs' and Leon Cmielewski's "Bio-Tek Kitchen" killer vegetable patch
for the Marathon game engine to jodi's abstracted black and white hack
of Wolfenstein 3-D, all fourteen game patches represent a provocative
array of literal and cultural hacks of prevailing game interface and
spatial semiotics, of game scenarios and environments, of game character
identity and gender configurations, and of gaming modes of
interactivity. "Cracking the Maze" initiates a discourse at the point of
intersection between the hacker, the avid gamer, the artist and the
cultural interventionist. Situating itself within the network arena of
game fan homepages which offer shareware game patches along with gaming
news, cheats and guides, "Cracking the Maze" is a solely on-line network
art exhibit with all of the patches available for download or network
viewing from the "Cracking the Maze" site.