Book Review: Works of Game

 I found this book because it is part of a series that I had read two other books from. The series is called "playful thinking" published by MIT press. I originally got interested because I had heard of Jesper Juul one of the editors and also an author of some books in the series and I was interested in reading one of his books. The other two books I have read in the series are "The Art of Failure" and "The Beauty of Games". I like this series because it takes on some interesting topics related to my interests in philosophizing about games but the books are meant to be "readable". I guess this means less of the academic jargon and stuff like that. I feel they achieve this goal in that they are pretty fun to read but also do a good job engaging with the issues. Overall I would say that I liked "Works of Games" less than the other two but still found it worthwhile and interesting to read.

Sharp is interested in bridging the gap between the worlds of modern art and games. The books is a series of case studies of different approaches to this project. He covers a number of specific artists and projects but places them in three groups. 

The first is what he calls "Game Art". In this section he discusses people who primarily identify as artists who use some game related material in projects that aren't themselves games. This includes things like taking still images from buggy games software and then displaying the images as art. Or a couple of projects where the artist hacked Super Mario Brothers to make a purposely pointless experience. 

The second category he calls "Artgames". These are games that meant to be played but that have some deeper significance that can be understood by playing them. Of these, "Braids" seems to be the one that is most clearly a game in a sense a gamer would understand. But the other games he considers are also clearly positioned as games although through various methods they are attempting to deal with issues that are deeper or more complex than we usually understand with games.

The third category is what he calls "Artists' Games". These are works that do seem to straddle the boundary better than the other two categories. They seem to be artistic experience projects. These are projects that are found in museums but that have a clear participatory aspect that does seem to resemble games. The art work seems to be the experience of playing the game rather than as in the first group more something that is passively experienced by the audience. They are however positioned more as art installations that seem to be experienced in museums and things like that. Some of these do seem to have significant gameyness to them in that they are actually played by the audience. 

In the conclusion, Sharp seems to be leaning toward this third category as his preferred means of crossing the divide although in some ways he seems to be relying on examples that fit a bit better into the second category.

So to start with what I liked about the book. I thought it was very different from "The Beauty of Games" in that it is much more interested in modern art and using that as an avenue to bridge to a much broader notion of game. This brings out a lot of stuff that I hadn't heard of or thought about before. So it was interesting in terms of broadening my horizons. I feel reading the book has made me more conscious of somehow interpreting games (particularly video games) and getting some meaning from them. It's a very different tack to my own approach to some of these issues. I feel in these ways it was an interesting and thought provoking read.

On the other hand, it's difference from some of my thoughts is also why I liked it less than the other two books. I am significantly less interested in modern art than Sharp seems to be. Both its theory and praxis. I think Sharp's project here is interesting and worthwhile but to some extent it very different to my approach. I am much more interested in games as a medium for meaning in their own right. I am less interested in what I see as the extreme fringes of game design and trying to play by the rules of modern art. I feel the other two books I read were more clearly written by gamers who were wanting to think about their experience. Sharp seems to be more of a theoretician. This is reflected in his use of terminology. I felt the other two books were pitched in a more popular tone. Sharp's book seems to have some of the academic fixation with terms such as his use of the term "affordances" and the terms he invents for the different categories.  I think he also seems to have more tolerance for work that slides into the sort of hamfisted social critique characteristic of a lot of academic work that seems very divorced from the concept of fun. Overall, I thought it was an interesting read but that it is going in a different direction from the one I am going in.