In this interview I talk to Julian Oliver aka delire who is an artist, free-software developer, composer and media-theorist working with game technology.
The list of art works that Julian has either created, collaborated on or initiated includes: q3apd, Deathjam, Quilted Thought Organ, Escape From Woomera, Acmi Park and Fijuu. In 1998 Julian established the art based game collective selectparks one of the most important groups in the development of the genre.
In this wide ranging interview we talk about the way serious art that uses the genre of games is received, virtual spaces as art / public spaces and the importance of Open Software.
Ren: Thanks for taking time to talk to TN. There is an increasing use of games or the game genre as a platform for serious art, but I still wonder whether the established art community and community generally take these works seriously or whether the medium is getting in the way of the message i.e. the ‘it’s just a game’ attitude that gets in the way of taking games seriously in any way.
Julian Oliver: It's working very well. Where political and politicised games are concerned Escape From Woomera and 911 Survivor propagated into the public domain widely and rapidly. Both games have been mentioned in dozens of international newspapers. When NYT did an article on these games we were inundated with 1.2M visitors and emails from organisations and groups worldwide.
Speaking about game art more generally, it is increasingly accepted as a medium alongside less than traditional mediums like video art and installation. Most modern-art museums have, or have planned a show incorporating game art into their programme. Of the 73 works we have in our link archive on selectparks, 90% of them have already appeared in a gallery context, or were commissions at some point.
Outside of the shrine of the gallery context there will always be distortions to the original intention, whether strategic or careless. Most game art is distributed online and so is begging to be misinterpreted as it doesn't carry a context with it, even when referentially bound to a recent or current event. This is part of the challenge.
Ren: I guess the danger of misinterpretation or to put it another way the difference between authorial intent and received meanings is an issue with any creative work but with games this problem seems huge right now. You mention 911 survivor, that got massive coverage like other political games, the coverage seemed to entirely miss the point.
Julian Oliver: Sure, though even Kinematic Collective's '911 Survivor' can't really be considered a political game. It was however, a highly politicised project to the point of becoming a source of threat to the makers.
In this sense if there is any danger, it is already present in a public frightened that the game format implicates the user as a moral agent in the game experience. A documentary or X-Rated film however can contain far more controversial content, but because the user isn't a decision making operand, they aren't morally implicated as a result of using the medium.
We tend to see really irrational outbursts toward games in this way, for instance Escape From Woomera encouraged blood curdling screams from the immigration minister, Phil Ruddock, "You can't escape from my detention centre!". Of course no one was escaping the real world detention centre by playing our game, though for Mr. Ruddock, the symbolic breakout was bad enough. 911 Survivor spurred similar responses, but for different reasons. Again, the game is curiously neutral given it's content, no commentary is being made on the attack to the twin towers, no aftermath, prehistory or conclusion is drawn. By very virtue of the fact that one could re-visit and 'jam' with being a victim in the attack, 911 Survivor was hailed as treason, as immoral and 'sick'. At the same time the game was being made, we were seeing high-tech recreations of the disaster, using fictional actors, orchestral music and Special FX. How is this different? 911 Survivor taught game artists everywhere alot about the power of game to these ends.
Ren: Looking at virtual spaces these seem to be wonderful sites for artistic work, and here I don’t mean the kind of sculptures that you tend to get in MMORPGs or even much the work in Second Life, but the more interventionist art work such as Eddo Stern’s Summons to Surrender and Anne-Marie Schleiner's Velvet Strike. One thing that I think this type of work does is question the political nature of a virtual spaces is, what kinds of speech are / should be valid there – do you think the are public spaces?
Julian Oliver: MMO's are corporate foyers struggling to become public space.
What is interesting about this is the ongoing question of how much of realworld regulation should these worlds be expected to inherit.
This gets especially tricky for a number of reasons. Following on from a web hosts responsibility to the content they host, a MMO's regulations seem to be ultimately derived from the geographical/legal context from which it is served in the realworld. If this is the case, from where are the rules for 'citizenship' derived in order to become legally attestable in a realworld court? Is buying a MMO subscription the same as being born into the realworld (with it coming legal responsibility)?
In other words, if every player is a 'client', what are they buying? Is it citizenship (as it is so often sold as) or is it rights to use a product in a particular way?
Really it is still the latter. A player is still not allowed to freely use screenshots of their activity in some MMO's for instance, because they do not own the experience, the Publisher does.
Sony Online legal's page is an excellent read: sonyonline.com/tos/tos.jsp
I do however have rights, in most cases, to take photo's in the realworld. If my own game-play is copyright, why then does the Publisher not take responsibility for my actions in game? There are still big discrepancies there.
On the level of geographical inheritance of regulations, what then happens when the world is served from several countries simultaneously?
Secondly MMORPG's promise opportunities to experience things inaccessible to us in the realworld, as the 'virtual' always has. For this reason they will always be canvases for ulterior operation, especially given that the consequences are only a termination of player contract at worst.
It's on this level that interventions are really assisting in charting the limits of operation as citizens, they are being tested as public spaces valid for free speech. Interventions are for this reason really important, and are very much outside of the realm of art.
As our financial, social and performative dependency on these worlds increases, this will be more rigorously challenged. With our realworld investments (more than just time and a little money) will come a sense of obligatory responsibility toward the public condition and it's at this point that developers will conduct various fascisms over player behaviour. They will wish to protect their investors, their clients who demand more legal rights derived from the realworld.
Ren: The first line of your select parks bio states that you are a ‘free-software developer’. Why is why is free / open source development so important to you as an artist?
The right to develop and the right to citizenship are both economically defined in the world of games. As tools to produce games increase in cost, the ability for smaller teams to create unique and new universes decreases. I am pretty disappointed with this trend, especially after we made our own MMO for a museum (it was very expensive to produce) I started to look at opensource alternatives.
Part of the problem is platform dependence, like Windows only development toolkits like DirectX from Microsoft. As they become more popular, hardware vendors have greater demand to produce graphics and sound cards to meet this specification at the expense of Open Standards (like OpenGL). Vendors of development software then follow suit.
Games then become dependent on the Microsoft platform, which is like saying you can't become a citizen unless you are of a certain nationality. If my nationality is Linux (as it primarily is in this case) then my options for play are reduced. Worse if you are an Apple user. Open Standards in game design are the national equivalent of multiculturalism, so yes I support OpenSource game development wholeheartedly.
The other part of the problem is financial accessibility to tools. With software license costing so much, game developers rely on selling IP to a Publisher in order to get development capital to produce a game. Because of the developers obligations to their market, the game must be popular and so this reversely but directly affects the design of the world itself. If we want to explore other kinds of worlds, other kinds of games, then open-source will help us a lot. I believe game development budgets should be spent on humans, not on third-party code.
Luckily this is changing rapidly with more free and open source toolkits built on open standards. 'NeL' the opensource toolkit behind the game Ryzom is a great example of this.
In this sense if there is any danger, it is already present in a public frightened that the game format implicates the user as a moral agent in the game experience. A documentary or X-Rated film however can contain far more controversial content, but because the user isn't a decision making operand, they aren't morally implicated as a result of using the medium.
I wonder how much of this can be tamed by explicitly acknowledging the moral choice within a game world. Would Knights of the Old Republic be somehow more or less controversial (not that it was particularily, but an example) should it have shipped without the player choice of walking on the light or dark side. In other words, a game world which allows the participants to choose to be "lawful evil" rather than assuming it might be able to get away with more? Thoughts?
Posted by: Nathan Combs | Sep 11, 2004 at 23:39
An interesting thought, as though one prepares other players to expect the best or worst as a function of alignment.
However, this of course largely applies to in-game social dynamics. From the perspective of censorship more generally, it's the fact that role-play can occur at all that is controversial, and this is a game external phenomenon. Popular opinion is that all games are a form of role-play, and that by doing so we are experimenting with alternative expressions of a moral or performative nature. For this reason games are still considered dangerous contexts for the generation of dissenting cultures, as 'laboratories of being'.
I remember how my local church reacted so badly to Pen and Paper games, something I played alot. It seems the same neuroses find anchor with MMO's and games generally. However as games become more ubiquitous these fears seem to be increasingly relaxing..
Posted by: Julian | Sep 12, 2004 at 15:23