"If Shakespeare were alive today he'd be writing for games". Professor Emma Smith
The decision to experiment with gaming as a medium was in part informed by the work of the artist Cao Fei, who strives to address this age of rapid technological development by engaging with the slippage between the physical and the virtual world.
In 2008 she built the piece RMB City within the online platform or MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) Second Life. This was a fictional metropolis suspended in cyberspace which appeared out of nowhere like a chaos of colourful architectural form. For three years players could meet there, get involved in its events or simply enjoy swooping around it like a surreal urban playground.
Another inspiring and genre bending piece of work that chose to appropriate the online game world as a medium is the 2024 film Grand Theft Hamlet, where a production of Hamlet was staged and filmed within the gloriously imposing landscapes of the mega game franchise, Grand Theft Auto. Ethical concerns aside, GTA is now so visually sophisticated that artists have started making landscape photography from pictures taken within the game.
In their paper ‘Art games: Interactivity and the embodied gaze’, academics Elizabeth and Graham Coulter-Smith wrote in 2006: “the creative game is potentially a powerful strategy that will enable deconstructive art to escape its current assimilation into the traditional values of the precious work of art and the apotheosis of the artist as genius". Values, they describe, that are now for the most part "(up)marketing exercises".
The paper concludes by stating that if art is to continue to exist as a "democratic force that uses its licence for freedom of expression wisely”, then there must be an awareness that “interactive digital art could be of valuable assistance in helping art bring a liberation of creativity into everyday life”.