Avant-Garde Videogames: Playing with Technoculture

Abstract

Avant-Garde Videogames: Playing with TechnocultureBrian Schrank Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Notes, references, index, images. 232 pp. $32.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780262027144In his 1991 book The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, Paul Mann declares, "The avant-garde, we know, is dead; nothing could appear more exhausted than its theory, its history, its works." This provocative claim warrants reevaluation in the early twenty-first century, which has brought with it numerous experimental art movements, many enabled by the increased centrality of digital media. Brian Schrank's Avant-Garde Videogames, declares that the avant-garde is alive and well, especially in what are often called art, serious, and "DIY" games. An avant-garde game, for Schrank, is one that "opens up the experience of playing a game or expands the ways in which games shape culture" (p. 3). He argues that unlike mainstream games that strive for universal literacy, avant-garde games seek to foreground their medium, defamiliarize conventional mechanics, and disrupt play flow. They also interrogate the ideologies, technologies, and systems that are central to contemporary culture.Schrank's core taxonomic argument is that we can only think of experimental video games as belonging to multiple avant-gardes. He organizes these games into two broad categories: the formal (as understood by art critics such as Clement Greenberg) and the political (as elaborated by literary critic Peter Burger). The formal avant-garde focuses on medium specificity, while the political avant-garde privileges collective play and social change.Schrank's art historical method departs notably from more common starting points of game studies that include narrative (Marie-Laure Ryan), rhetoric (Ian Bogost), and design (Mary Flanagan). To link historical avant-garde movements in painting, performance, film, and mixed media, the book reviews the work of figures such as Edouard Manet, Filippo Marinetti, Bertolt Brecht, and Augusto Boal. The video game avant-garde, then, appears in the context of a broader history that includes movements such as Dada, futurism, Fluxus, the Situationist International, performance art, video art, and net art.Rather than offering an absolute definition of avant-garde games, the book presents a menu of artworks that explore the formal and political possibilities of play. One of the book's greatest virtues is as an introduction to a broad range of experimental games. Schrank begins with works that have been more frequently discussed in art historical contexts since the late 1990s- such as Jodi's Untitled Game (1996 - 2001) and Brody Condon's Adam Killer (1999). Schrank then explores games that he places in the categories of radical formal (Arcadia, 2003), radical political (Toywar,1999), complicit formal (Cockfight Arena, 2001), complicit political (World without Oil, 2007), narrative formal (Game, Game, Game, and again Game (2007), and narrative political (Darfur is Dying, 2006). This catalog of games should prove a useful resource for game studies scholars.Schrank's text offers another noteworthy feature in its use of the lens of a comparative media studies approach to avant-garde video games. Though the play, mechanics, and interaction are important, Schrank departs from media theorists such as Alexander Galloway to argue that video games can also have experimental value through their visual, audio, and narrative dimensions. For example, in discussing Tracy Fullerton and Bill Viola's game collaboration The Night Journey (2007), Schrank reads it as more of an "explorable video" (p. …