Systems of Struggle: History on a Tabletop

Curated by Naomi Clark

Whether devised by a single designer or emerging from a folk tradition, games have been used to depict human conflict for centuries. Wargames are one of the oldest and most familiar currents of this design practice, from classic boardgames like chess And go, tomilitary-training games like Kriegspiel, developed by the 18th century Prussian army, to consumer products like Risk or Stratego that further streamlined the simulation of warfare in the service of family entertainment. In , designers of board games and tabletop roleplaying games have stretched games’ capacity to abstract and represent further, depicting economic and political struggles, or re-enacting conflicts from specific historic moments. Although board games have frequently been thought of as light diversions or childhood fare, perhaps capable of educating or depicting a subject in a simple way, a number of the games shown here deal with horrifying and tragic episodes in human history, from the Nanking Massacre to the siege and death of the Cathars at Montsegur to the atrocities of the slave trade in the United States—and the resistance against it. In using pieces, maps, rules and choices to depict events and circumstances, the designers of these games frequently eschew simplicity to try and capture the processes at work in history, asking players to cope and think with rationales, options, and systems that are frequently inhumane or cruel. How might we be affected if we plunge deeply into a complex set of logic to take up the role of a general, an abolitionist, a campaign manager, or a corrupt tycoon in a dictatorial regime? Conversely, how might we be changed if we tell stories and improvise drama by roleplaying a member of a persecuted religious minority or an all-female air squadron living with and loving each other while fighting Nazi Germany? Systems of play are turned towards very different methods of historical re-enactment in the hands of independent roleplaying game designers, and towards a distinct kind of challenge for players, who are asked to portray human drama by improvising their own scenes, motivations and even characters in settings rich in historical detail. -NC

Replay: Re-enactment practices in video games

Curated by Matteo Bittanti

This exhibition focuses on the practice of reenacting, restaging, and replaying seminal artistic performances in/with video games1 by contemporary artist. The show will focus on a several international artists (full list below) whose projects suggest new ways of understanding the past while simultaneously creating an alternative history of art. Situated at the intersection of gaming, contemporary art, and new media, these practices exemplify the appropriative tactics of practitioners who use gaming to perform fraudulent acts of identity theft and playful impersonations.

Through a clever technical and conceptual manipulation, video games become playgrounds for a number of artistic interventions where simulacra roam the streets of digital cities replaying seminal performances, practicing the re-gesture of re-creation, revival, re-imagining, and re-vision. This should not come as a surprise. After all, games, like many art performances are rule-based and time-based. The performers’ actions are defined by (often strict) instructions, and narratives are scripted. Likewise, videogames are performative spaces in which players compete with each other in order to achieve clear, quantifiable outcomes. In an art performance, however, goals are not necessarily transparent, or empirically measurable. Nonetheless, game spaces are flexible enough to allow alternative kinds of interaction. Players can also subvert the logic of the game by modifying or altering the game rules, behavior, or aesthetics. In replays, the the “original” game performance is replaced - or displaced - by another kind of performance, an art performance, based on a previous historical event.

The ludo-artistic replay, however, is not meant to dematerialize the “original” experience, but to reframe and recontextualize it. The replay does not strive for historical accuracy either. Its function is not to affirm the past, but rather to question the hic et nunc by re-staging events, situations, and conditions. These performances both decontextualize and recontextualize spatial and temporal coordinates. By bringing the artist’s “original” ephemeral performance into an intangible, algorithmic space, these artists raise questions about the kinds of temporalities these practices of recovering and redistributing past performance signify. The ludic re-enactments generate anachronisms and historical glitches as artists from the past (the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s) are recontextualized.

Videogame re-enactments foreground and question issues of originality, authorship, identity, history, documentation, temporality, agency, intentionality, interpretation, and performativity. Since most of these performances are developed through a careful examination of existing documentation of direct, lived experiences, i.e. photographs, texts, videos, and other media artifacts, they can be considered a scrutinization of art history itself, a playful investigation of archives, and of collective memory. Rather than replacing the existing documentation of artistic practices, they add an extra layer of information.

The exhibition raises a series of questions: Are game re-enactments meant as homages or parodies? Who are the intended players, i.e. audiences, of such practices? Are video game re-enactments emphasizing the performative aspect of gaming, thus suggesting that game playing is akin to performance art?

-MB