As the title suggests, scroll down ↓↓↓ and you will find 100 art games by 100 artists. Why? Well, because 100 seemed like a reasonable number to aim for, a round figure with connotations of completeness. Although this article - or listicle to use Buzzfeed-esq parlance - is far from complete and can only portray a partial sample of a genre that, having arguably existed for over forty years, has continuously pushed at the boundaries of any simple definition. Skip ahead if you like or linger at the top of this page a few paragraphs longer for a chequered history of a term.

The art game or otherwise artist-produced-computer-game was [seemingly, I can’t be definitive] first proposed by Tiffany Holmes, who in the paper Arcade Classics Spawn Art? Current Trends in the Art Game Genre (2003) identified it as being “interactive, usually humorous” and by the virtue of being produced by a visual artist as having a tendency to challenge “cultural stereotypes” and offer “meaningful social or historical critique,” or otherwise tell a “story in a novel manner.” (p.46) As implied by the title of Holmes’s paper, this origin definition of the art game was shaped by a focus on genre examples that adopt and subvert gaming formulas birthed in the arcade. Forming what she calls “retro-styled art games” and which we should understand a sub-genre itself. (ibid. p.46-47) Included amongst her analysis are Thomson and Craighead’s Trigger Happy (1998), which amended Space Invaders (1976) to have the player fight against descending sentences from Michel Foucault’s essay What is an Author? (1969); and her own ​​a_maze@getty.edu (2001), which was produced via a commission by the J. Paul Getty Research Institute and utilised surveillance cameras in the museum to “pillage the galleries and grab faces” that were then loaded into the blocks of an art game based on Breakout (1976), a classic in which players move a paddle horizontally back-and-forth to bounce a ball against a suspended wall of bricks. (ibid. p.47-48)

Although Holmes provides a conditional that art games should meet two of three criteria:

“a defined way to win or experience success in a mental challenge, passage through a series of levels (that may or may not be hierarchical), or a central character or icon that represents the player.” (ibid. p.46)

…it should likely be assumed that these are more accurately applicable conditions to the retro-styled sub-genre that is the truer focus of her writing. Elsewhere, she puts forth another characteristic as being that art games are “decidedly noncommercial” and may “function primarily as single-use” with “limited playability.” (p.47) Suggesting two useful ways to distinguish an art game from a computer or video games being their distribution and the differing valuation of replayability. Approximately, we might only expect to play an art game once, as the artist may have prioritised message over highly engaging mechanics; and we may encounter it in galleries, museums or other similar situations where a financial transaction doesn’t determine access. It is in short not a product to be distributed and that players may assess in terms longevity versus cost. Corresponding with Holmes’s formulations, Kristine Ploug wrote an early article on the genre for artificial.dk - a news resource reporting on net.art, software art and other computer based art forms that ran between 2004 and 2007 - in which she confers that “in most cases the art games are neither addictive nor meant to be played over and over, but merely shorter comments.” (2005) Adding that whilst art games have interaction, this interaction “doesn’t always have an effect on what goes on in the game.” (ibid.) A given example being Natalie Bookchin’s The Intruder (1999), in which the play progresses narrative but the narrative is decidedly fixed. Though this isn’t untrue of many commercial games either.

Ploug goes on to partition the art game into two thematic categories, “political games and aesthetic games.” (ibid.) Yet also admits that several examples at the time of writing do not easily fit within these categories. Moreover, she notes another technical division being the distinction between “made-from-scratch games and the art mods”. (ibid.) Of this latter category - the art mod - Anne-Marie Schleiner, Erkki Huhtamo and Rebecca Cannon offer some of the earliest explainers, which notably precede definitions of the art game. In her text Parasitic Interventions: Game Patches and Hacker Art, Schleiner writes that a patch (or mod, or wad) is an “add-on to an existing game engine that alters the original code or state of a computer game.” (1998) She traces this genealogy from the first computer game Spacewar! (1962), that was created by students hacking a PDP1 computer at MIT; to Homebrewer Computer Club that formed in the San Francisco area in the 1970s; and finally to the 1990s when games released by id Software were packaged with their source codes available and thereby allowed “fans began to write their own software programs for editing computer games and distributing them as shareware on-line”. (ibid.) Though the vast majority of these modifications would adhere to the logics of these games, typically first-person shooters, a small portion of patches were more artistically framed, intervening in the “accepted semiotics of game worlds and game play.” (ibid.) Schleiner would go on to organise an online exhibition of these art mods called Cracking the Maze: Game Plug-ins and Patches as Hacker Art (1999), bringing together pieces including BlackLash (1998) by Mongrel and bio tek kitchen (1999) by Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski, amongst many others.

In Game Patch - the Son of Scratch?, an essay accompanying Schleiner’s downloadable exhibition, Erkki Huhtamo proposes that we might see the game patch artform as a type of tactical media, a means of “engaging in a creative/destructive conversation with the activities and the products of industrial media culture.” (1999) Going on to frame the genre in relation to Situationist activities, as well as drawing technical relations to the production of scratch media video tape editing in the 1980s Thatcherite Britain. (ibid.) Finally, Cannon’s essay Meltdown (2006) - which was included in the book Videogames and Art (2007) - echoes this media criticality, writing that a successful art mod can be recognised by its “Intelligent self-reflexivity upon the inner-workings of the medium”. (2006, p.7) Recognising a breadth of activity and nuance within art modding circles she proposes the need to “develop a lexicon” which “builds upon the visual and aural fine arts”. (ibid., p.8) Ultimately identifying areas including ‘Narrative + Abstract Machinima’, ‘Real-Time Performance Instruments’ and ‘Abstract Interactives’. (ibid., pp.12-14)

As evidenced by the above, an easy and clear definition of the art game is not forthcoming. Due to technical advances and artistic ingenuity the parameters any author tries to set around the genre will likely be smudged or entirely overwritten. Part of the purpose of Side Quest is to constantly probe the edges of this term and to see how it might be stretched. Compiling the following list is one step in that process, as selecting examples for inclusion naturally requires an editorial or museological decision as to whether the artwork being looked at fits. It also provides a historical overview from which we can begin to surface thematic linkages that bind together practices dating to the 1980s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. Fitting into Ploug’s grouping of ‘political’ and ‘aesthetic games’, whilst also opening up questions about how to categorise other traits and agendas. In subsequent gather quest articles I will carefully stumble towards some propositions for how we might term those.

Before the list itself, a few closing words on the selection process. Since Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) funding from the Arts Council England allowed me to begin this research in earnest, around two-and-a-half months ago, I have been leveling up my knowledge of the artist-produced-computer-game through numerous forays into rabbit warrens of online resources, archived websites, academic papers, books and the general networking capabilities of social media. Frequently I find myself discovering a source which unlocks a swath of new artistic references and jumping the tally of artworks I need to look into. It is probable that in the days following publication, I will find other troves of art games that I wish I had included. So at best this edit of 100 art games is an attempt to make sense of a constantly growing long-list, based on personal instinct mitigated by a commitment to represent different periods, sub-genres, techniques, agendas etc. and a condition that an artist only be featured once. With the occasional exception to this rule in cases where an artist may be involved in a collaborative practice and also have produced their own independent art games. I hope that the list can be used as a resource by students, by educators and by artists. And I welcome anyone who wants to put forward other pieces to write in the comments!

See the full list of the 100 art games by 100 artists, here.