Extra Life

Limit and Measure

Condon's mods, like those of many game modders and game artists, aren't usually downloadable but playable only in a gallery setting or viewable on video. While this can seem to be antithetical to the whole point of mods, keeping the work confined to a gallery is as much a statement as anything else. Perhaps one of the famous art mods, Waco Resurrection of 2003 (by Condon and an art collective known as C-Level) used the Torque engine and some C++ coding to let players resist the destruction of their cult's compound with special powers and a range of weapons. The game was presented to players and gallery-goers with a David Koresh mask, made in polygon-derived form. To really play Waco Resurrection, you had to don the mask before you took to the keyboard.

Cory Arcangel has been taking another route with art modding, delving into the hardware to end up with almost existential results. For example, Super Mario Clouds of 2002 deleted all the game information from the original NES cartridge, but kept the passing clouds and sky. His Space Invader of 2004 narrowed down the hordes of attackers to only one alien. Lonely business, that invasion racket.

What seems to bind all these works together is they strip away some of the games' basic elements and ideas, rather than adding on or multiplying the things you can do. In that sense, art mods pull back the technology a little to reveal the little human decisions we take for granted. Violence is slowed down, exaggerated and poked fun at. Sexual politics in games are examined, mocked and re-organized. The ingrained mania for control and power over the game universe we think is so normal and basic is pulled like a loose thread.

So, if anything, art mods limit and measure games, drawing the players and viewers to the little questions - "Hey, don't you think it's odd to have a 'sexy' voice option in UT2004?" "Don't you feel weird when you curb-stomp someone in Gears of War?" - questions gamers are all too familiar with, and may otherwise have no place to be answered.

What surprises so many is these works are radically popular with gamers on first contact. It could be because it is intensely satisfying to see our much-maligned medium getting complicated and legitimizing itself. What's more likely, however, is game art speaks directly to the gamer psyche.

By the same token, we constantly daydream alternative plots and scenarios for games that go far beyond fandom or idle mental drift; they are the continuation of the mind playing on without us. So it is that game art affects us immediately on an instinctual level. In the case of art game mods, the thirst for chaos and anarchy the game industry sublimates is quenched by weird deviations and weirder possibilities.

Christian McCrea is a game writer, academic and curator based in Melbourne, Australia.