It is hard to know to what degree the artists responsible for game-themed art welcome this idea of independent dispersion. It can certainly have its benefits, and there are doubtless those that hinge an aspect of their work on that very dynamic. There are also sure to be others who don't even consider themselves artists at all and react indifferently to their LEGO sculpture/Photoshop prank/pervy Mario drawing reaching an unintended audience. Still others use actual game visuals to make poignant statements. Sprites are a fantastic base subject matter; their retro appeal goes way beyond their aesthetic temperance. The uncomplicated blocky sprites from the Mario series offer a simple and congenial pluralism when utilized as an artistic subject matter. They are cute and elicit nostalgia, but when blown up as a painting or assembled as a collage they become poignant reminders of a simpler time in gaming's past.
Turning this innocence on its head is an obvious source of artistic fascination, and the likes of Mario and other cutesy gaming characters have often been featured in an array of less than childlike misadventures. Paintings that incorporate real-life humanity into game art are mainstays of the medium's biggest annual exhibition, "I am 8 Bit," and it's easy to understand why. There is a perverse joy to be had in taking a character like Mario and adding a moral or human dimension; what is his sex life like, what if Koopas could bleed, what if Princess Peach ran off with Luigi?
Distinguishing between the puerile daubing of a gifted teen bent on luridly sexualizing his world and the true thematic exploration of more dedicated artists is never easy, especially given the obsessions with sex and death many artists share with their lower brow brethren. Some game artists have side-stepped this issue by farming their creations from the ground up, giving birth to their own game characters specifically for the purpose of presenting them in a paradoxical reality. Revered "I am 8 Bit" regular Luke Chueh is famed for his anime inspired art, which features hordes of cutesy characters in an endless array of ill-fated predicaments, many of which pertain directly to the typical mechanics and glazed-over moral truisms of the world of videogames.
This is where game art has the scope and potential to be truly explorative, expressive and beautiful, but contemporary games are yet to surface as subject matter. And is it any wonder? As game developers pander more and more to the goal of achieving hyper- or photorealism, there is much less of the artistic to be extricated from the games themselves. Even those that have made concerted attempts at establishing the notion of the artistic (Okami, Killer 7, Shadow of the Colossus) were absent, and yet I found a bounty of creations that borrowed heavily from the 8-bit era.
The icons that define the industry are near inexhaustible, considering gaming's short history. Add to that the emergent trend for convergence between game worlds and real life, and trying to squeeze game art under a single umbrella seems as absurd as placing all games under one genre. In this sense, gaming culture and history is fecund with opportunity for artistic interpretation. Yet as the game industry approaches an apex of visual realism, it seems that art about games looks much more likely to peak before games are ever truly considered to be art themselves. But then, who knows? Perhaps 10 years from now virtual photographers will exhibit their best snaps of the Crysis world, or maybe some sort of Henri Cartier-Bresson-alike will come along and immortalize the PS3's Home with a series of cunningly observed images of digital social interactions. In an exponentially evolving digital world, anything's possible.
Fraser MacInnes is a freelance game journalist for pocketgamer.co.uk. He is a Scotsman but currently lives in Munich, Germany, where he loves the weather but hates the queuing etiquette. His website is frasermacinnesbitsandblogs .googlepages.com.
