By using virtual spaces and changing the perspective as an artistic strategy, game artworks allow a distanced critique of a simulated world. They tend to erase the boundaries between reality and fiction and redefine the transgressive power of the game. And in the purest hacking tradition, game artworks can be perceived as a « detournement » or a diversion of a mass media to become a means of expression, political or artistic…

Since the end of the '90s, the source codes of some “real time 3D” games are accessible. This allows artists to reprogram them and to divert them for artistic purposes. As we live in a 'everything technological' world, rather than using technology foolishly, artists divert it. It is a way of refusing a world that is bathed in an overflow of information, invaded of images, a universe on which one has rather little power. Michael Stora, a psychoanalyst who is using games as a therapy, says: “Playing time is a pleasure time, a moment where we can manipulate the image as it has manipulated us before.” The idea is to regain control and to submit to criticism a world where the borders between virtual and real, fiction and reality are more and more blurred, where individual liberties and privacy are threatened.

Video game manipulators can be seen as activists. But there are also game detournements/mods/hacks that are not political, but rather poetic, aesthetic or contemplative. Artists and game makers provide another point of view to the game industry by using the game aesthetic, or by hacking games to provide a gaming experience and create a distance towards the world we live in.

• Creation related to video games in installation, video installation, virtual reality, websites, cinema, visual or sound or network performances
• Films created with video games, such as machinimas
• Interactive works questioning the idea of game or information society
• Artworks questioning the notion of play space
• Collective performances that transform the space into a playground (the city as a play space to question social, cultural environmental and political issues)
• Playful collective experiences cracking urban architecture
• Workshops around gaming with artists, filmmakers and musicians
• Cracking game cartridges or consoles to create glitches or chiptunes music

• Radical games, political games, alternative games, games with a strong aesthetic dimension, games with an original or remarkable gameplay, game whose conditions of production are specific to the exhibition (games produced in the framework of workshops or festivals), Works or games that correspond to the theme, that make sense in terms of the message to be brought by the event, exhibition.
• Games that have been designed for an exhibition or games that respond to each other and make the whole exhibition coherent (narrative, story, sub-themes, etc.)
• Games that explore: the power of simulation and representation, collaborative networks in games, the transformation of urban and informational space into a playground, Games versus networks, The border between reality and fiction, The question of control, The critique of the interactive image, The transgressive power of the game
• Any type of game (computer/video/online/traditional/performance) can be exhibited but within its exhibition, we shift the perspective on games from their banal domestic use to create: a collective reappropriation of their gameplay; the backstage of their creation ( 2D/3Dartworks, design, gameplay conception, sketches); another dimension of playability (notion of spectacularization of the game, through set design, projection, playful context, collaborative experience)

The idea is to transform a game into a medium that will provide a distanced reading of a subject.

Notions that can be explored through a gaming exhibition:

• Games as structure (system, rules, complexity)
• Games as simulacra (aesthetic, immersion, simulation)
• Games as narration (scenario, writing, commitment)
• Games as exchange (interaction, networks, communities)

Isabelle Arvers

Jim Munroe