Play It! Make It!
Curated by Luke Munn >

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Writing by Emma Phillipps

Play It!1 Make2 It3!4
A one-night5 videogame show.
Play it. A handpicked selection6 of innovative7, unusual8, and experimental9 games10 from Bill Viola, Toshio Iwai, and more.
Make it. Join game designer Jeff Nusz in a lightning fast11, low tech12 workshop13 to create your own14 videogame in a couple of hours.

1. Proximate to words like “videogame” and “show” and followed by the pronoun “it” (1), “play” implies a specified action – locating the “play” button (or play/start function) on an electronic device or apparatus enabling one to watch / use / interact / “play” with “it”. Activating the start function initiates, bodily contact with and a continual flow of, material (visual, sound, kinetic) – which allows further interaction with “it” (usually for either a set or unlimited temporal bracket).

To a certain extent imperatives are utilized for dictatorial purposes or sound offensively self-assured, however in this instance “play” operates as a friendly invitation and less noticeably, because of its transparency, a practical instruction. The interactive nature of the exhibition requires its viewers to be physiologically involved / doing “something”. The syntactic arrangement of “Play it!” effectively summons an activation of and interaction with, the “game”.

Referentially projecting further away from its own immediate linguistic meaning, “play” conjures active participants or audience participation, and a game’s usability.

Making (2) “play” is a process of individual or collective occupation, moving or operating freely within a bounded space and with the game’s ideological stipulations.

2. Make, operates as a transitive verb, meaning to bring into being by forming, shaping, altering and composing, by some kind of “transformative” activity. Making “it” involved preparatory processes of creating the visual and acoustic material to be used for the game. The digitizing processes conducted by game designer Jeff Nusz, together with designer Andrew Johnson and programmer Luke Duncalfe, entirely depended upon the contributions of participants. Creating source material for the game, participant involvement was essential - without which, there would be no game.

Similarly written in an imperative form, linguistically mirroring “Play It!” and emphasizing the symmetrical arrangement of the exhibition itself, which was made from two main components, the workshop and the interactive playing of “exhibited” videogames.

3. “It” presumably refers to two different things, the subject/object or “play” and “make”. However upon further investigation the distinction between playing and making becomes blurry. While it was apparent that there were videogames that could played as separate from the opportunity to contribute to the videogame-in-making, interactivity bridged the gap between the two separate components of the exhibition creating fluidity and conceptual and dialogic linkages.

“Make it” operates as the title of the completed game created during the workshop – now online, users are able to “play it”.

4. Perhaps indicating unbridled enthusiasm, a question of emphasis and / or related to the imperative / instructive-invitational discourse discussed above.

5. “Play It! Make It!” part exhibition, part creative workshop was a one-off occasion. The exhibition opening was effectively its own closing approximately three hours later. However after the videogame created during the workshop was finished it was exhibited on Window’s online gallery. In a sense this “one night” opening / exhibition / workshop / closing has an afterlife.

Overlapping temporalities may be interestingly considered within the singularity of the exhibition and workshop as a once-off event. In effect, this “once-offness” is constituted by multiple individual and collective performances in both activities of playing and making. For example, the impossibility of playing a videogame in exactly the same way as another user, each “playing-becoming-making” of the game was different.

6. Pertaining to the specificities and particularities of the curatorial decision

7. And perhaps privileging the new…

8. …. non-normative, non-conventional, alternative… (for a change – or not, perhaps this is just a question of emphasis)

9. ….using different, diverse, fragmentary, and untried - strategies, forms, methods, processes, activity, thinking, conceptualizing and practices.

10. Games, certainly involve processes of playing and making, that which is involved in any art making (as suggested in footnotes 1 & 2) but perhaps, like a lot of internet based art, is not accorded equivalent recognition or status (although this is certainly changing, and is not to suggest that internet based artists and communities do not enjoy any institutional recognition). Interestingly, Munn has chosen to exhibit videogames made by artists, some who are also predominantly recognized for their work in other mediums such as Bill Viola. In effect this is doubly tapping into perhaps a medium or art form that is under-represented in exhibitions, and thereby giving the videogame work of a range of artists more exposure.

Curatorial decisions reflect an attempt to distinguish videogames from their popular forms and manifestations. While entertainment value still exists in these works, specific conceptual orientations for example, shift the kind of “entertainment” they are offering the user or fragment the normative meaning we accord it.

While Viola’s Night Journeyexplores narrative on the level of individual and archetypal journeying and movement, many other videogames (seemingly by default) explore this too, although, arguably, on a very basic level (avator + space = moving / journeying through the space). Aesthetics aside, Viola poetically shifting landscape subverts normative gaming rules and structures, the gameplay allows for a wandering, rather than a structured teleological movement through a given space.

11. Perhaps time-space compression …

12. … “[has meant the game has been kept] deliberately…simple - [and also to keep the] focus on collaboration” (3)

Playing the game simply, quite simply, involves following the following instructions: “To advance through the interactive diorama, simply click the elements in the correct order. An exclamation or buzz signals a misclick - just try a different sequence for that particular layer” (3)

13. A “handpicked selection” (4) of art and craft supplies, found objects, musical instruments / augmentative sound devices and computers provided the materials for the game-making workshop. Contributions consisted of character animations, drawings or sketches of objects and live sound recordings.

14. “Your” = pluralistic, an attribution to the collaborative nature of the game making process, “own” = perhaps ownership is only fundamentally dependent upon whether one participated in the workshop and / or to what extent. However “your own” invokes the creation of something new, although mediated and fully realized by the game designers, the endeavors of all who contributed to the workshop consequently transpired into the construction of something which all participants could claim as their own.

In this particular usage, “It” (as a neuter pronoun) refers to the subject/object of “play”. The above discussion of “play” illustrates that “it” could refer to the electronic device (a computer or handheld gaming device for example), and also to the videogame itself (all of the material components, properties and functions that constitute the videogame from the digital objects visible on the screen to the code and data). “It” relies on “play” for meaning, “playing it” ultimately refers to the performing functions and capabilities of a videogame and the actions a user must perform in order to play the game.
Making, referring to the active creation of play, assuming a particular kind of role, for example engaging in gaming activity relates to causality and specific kinds of bodily movement.
Both statements made by curator, Luke Munn.
Cut and paste aesthetics are in operation here too.