(char)playable podcast

Douglas Edric Stanley

2011.06.29

I have no idea how he did it, but Shane Hinton took a typically rambling, 1+ hour interview, and compacted it down to about 10 minutes without losing any of the central arguments. I really wish I had his editing talents. And his choice for an opening rant is pretty funny :-)

Invaders! @ Leipzig

In the interview I go back over the whole Invaders! controversy, give some pretentious-art-&#@*%’s perspective for gamerz debating the whole art/game issue, and then tie that in somehow with Antonin Fourneau’s ENIAROF concept for a contemporary play festival. The transition might not be obvious, but it was in fact Eniarof that first recycled Invaders! and was the reason the piece actually got a second life. The Leipzig Games Convention version was in fact a very late iteration of the piece.

My interview is followed by an interesting essay by Trevor Owens from Play the Past about in-game terminals, and reconstructing (a) history from pseudo-documents in Fallout 3. I didn’t know Play the Past before, it looks like an interesting blog. For fairly obvious reasons, I ended up reading Rebooting Counterfactual History with JFK Reloaded and this interesting follow-up discussion which uncovers an irreverant necrophiliac comment buried in the WAD file of the game : A Revisionist History of JFK Reloaded (Decoded).

I was less impressed with the third story, but whatever. Apparently I missed a chiptune flame war. It would seem that my 8-bit subculture culture is incomplete.

Original Comments:

2011-09-28 21:50:40

Fakey McFakeson

I’ve studied and viewed lots of modern art, so I’m not jumping to discredit this piece as anti-American or insensitive or bogus or trying to cash-in on emotions.

However, in my humble opinion it is simply BAD ART. I don’t enjoy it. It doesn’t push any boundaries. It’s not beautiful to look at. It might make me think, but so does any opinion piece I read in any newspaper ever. In other words, it doesn’t take much to make people think about an issue.

This is quite simply just a swing and a miss, and the fact that you (the artist) defend it so strongly is not surprising. The worse the artist, the harder they defend their artwork. A true artist wouldn’t vocally defend his art against critics - he would let it speak for itself as it is meant to do. If a work of art comes with a disclaimer that if you don’t like it then you’re a plebeian, then the viewer is no longer judging the art on its own merits, and the artist is overstepping his bounds and ruining his own artwork by explaining it.

2011-09-27 22:44:58

American

This is a just a disgrace.

2011-10-19 16:30:14

Douglas Edric Stanley

Actually, I don’t think I’ve really defended the piece all that much. And I certainly haven’t been showing it all that much, despite several requests. Sure, when people ask me to comment it, I sometimes do, but usually I don’t. For me, it is what it is. Take it or leave it — obviously you’ve already made your choice.

That said, I’ve been making art for some fifteen years and never once have I heard about making bad art other than this controversial piece. So while theoretically I could eventually accept your argument, the means, manner and context you use to discredit what we both agree is a fairly minor work of art lead me to think otherwise concerning your intentions (assumed or otherwise).