"Man, Woman, Want to Game." With these prophetic words, Nolan Bushnell,
father of Pong and Atari, launched a lively panel discussion on video
games last Thursday at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The event, titled "ArtCade," attracted a sold-out crowd of nearly 300
gamers and art enthusiasts to explore the newly hip relationship between
video games and contemporary art.

Bushnell was joined on the panel with gaming legend Will Wright (creator
of top selling The Sims and SimCity), new media theorist Lev Manovich,
artist Margaret Crane, and former Wired Magazine editor Linda Jacobson.

"Can games be fun with bad art? Yes they can," said Bushnell, age 58.
Citing Pong (1972), an arcade hit that preceded the microprocessor,
Bushnell said the game's graphics were not a conscious minimalist
aesthetic; it was all the technology would allow. "The square ball was
all we could do!" he said.

But what makes for good gaming art? This was a question the event
couldn't quite answer, yet there was broad consensus that video games
have grown into a major cultural and economic force–surpassing
Hollywood in total revenue–and contemporary artists have finally taken
notice.

According to Manovich, there have recently been about two dozen art
exhibitions involving video games, including several currently on view:
the Lyon Biennale, MassMoCA ("Game Show"), the New Museum of
Contemporary Art in New York (Kristin Lucas & Joe McKay's "Electronic
Donut"), and Miltos Manetas' online show "After Video Games."

"There is no question that video games have recently saturated our
culture to the extent of art, film and music," said curator Kathleen
Forde, who organized the event with SMAC (a media arts group loosely
affiliated with SFMOMA). "But what's most interesting to me is how
(artists) have influenced those genres too."

To warm up the audience before the panel, organizers set up a temporary
arcade (dubbed the "ArtCade") in a museum function room. One half of the
room was filled with a dozen flashy arcade and console games–everything
from vintage Pong and Super Breakout coin-ops to some of the latest Play
Station 2 titles from Electronic Arts and Ubi Soft (who jointly
sponsored the event). The other half of the room featured a cluster of
PCs, loaded with a small collection of contemporary digital artworks
"influenced" by games–such as Minetas' "Flames" (1996/1997), Thomson
and Craighead's "Trigger Happy" (1998), and Mongrel's "Blacklash"
(1998).

Needless to say, the crowd seemed to largely ignore the "art games" and
headed straight for the real thing. Some of the artworks didn't seem to
work; others were probably too cryptic to engage the crowd, who seemed
happier to simply steal a glance on the way between the cash bar and
Donkey Kong.

"Art makes barely a ripple effect on society compared to gaming," said
panelist Margaret Crane. She said 35% of gamers are over 35, and 26% are
women. She then launched into a disgruntled lecture about the popularity
of Tomb Raider (repeatedly mispronouncing the game's protagonist Lara
Croft as "Laura" as audience members cringed.)

The art world may envy gaming's success, but artist and scholar Lev
Manovich dug his knives into the industry's aesthetics. He said today's
games largely ignore the innovations of modern and contemporary art.
Most have the same look, and a very unfashionable one at that (a rather
gaudy take on realism). Why aren't there different visual styles? Why
aren't there different representations of subjectivity? Why not borrow
from cutting-edge typography and architecture? "Let's get Frank Gehry to
design a game," he said with a smirk in his thick Russian accent.

The hero of the evening proved to be Will Wright, the mastermind behind
Sim City and The Sims. As game manufacturer Electronic Arts explains:
"In SimCity Will Wright gave you the power to build and control
cities… with The Sims you'll create and control people!"

(As Jules Beesley, 26, explained to me earlier in the ArtCade, in the
middle of a game: "My job is to keep the guy happy… I called up these
two girls to come over and have a dance party, but he was too tired and
fell asleep. He slept in the next day, the girls left, and he didn't
show up for work and got fired. Now he's cleaning up the toilet.")

After being praised by Bushnell and Manovich, the lanky game designer
delivered a highly entertaining lecture on the phenomenon of
"compression": how two minutes of an intense game can seem like hours,
and how our brains can see patterns and detail where none exist. For
example, characters in The Sims don't have faces or speak coherently,
but some players swear they see expressions or hear language–they're
"filling in the blanks," said Wright.

This was all very interesting, but what about the goals of the evening?
Is there much common ground or cross-pollination between contemporary
art and gaming?

For the most part, the panelists and audience struggled, even stumbled,
when they approached the topic of art, which was ironic given the museum
setting. Everyone seemed to get bogged down in semantics, trying to
define "art" (at one point Margaret Crane even suggested that we invent
several new words to replace "art"). Are games "art"? Who qualifies as
an "artist"? Etc.

There was surprisingly little discussion of the contributions
contemporary artists have made toward a new genre, call it "art games"
or what you will. [See Alex Galloway and Mark Tribe's recent "Net Games
Now" (http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2632) article for a good
introduction] What should we make of the artworks in the ArtCade? Will
artist-made game patches (like Jodi's raucous "SOD") be the next big
thing? What can game developers learn from software artists like Mark
Napier and John F. Simon, Jr.? The event provided little insight.

But there was strong consensus on other topics. The gaming industry
still has much to learn from 20th Century art. "Game play" and easy-of-
use are highly undervalued. Games are headed toward customization.
(Wright stunned the audience when he said that 95% of The Sims' content
is created by fan sites.) And both Bushnell and Wright said they were
fascinated by a new breed of games which break beyond the screen and
invade daily life (such as the forthcoming Majestic, which will send
players email and faxes as part of the game).

With so much to learn and so many unanswered questions, let's hope
ArtCade returns for another, more challenging level.