For this final writing assignment I wanted to choose artists that in someway connected with something I was either interested in or wanted to do. As such, the two artists I chose are game artists. The way in which they approach these games are very different though, both different from eachother and different from what one would typically consider to be a game. Eddo Stern creates games that are both physical and digital in nature, his bio explains it as exploring the uneasy and otherwise unconscious connections between physical existence and electronic simulation”. His games are as detailed and as realistic as he can get them, requiring an installation to play. Pippin Barr,on the other hand creates simple flash games. His games only take him a month or so to code and then he unleashes them on the interwebs. Both of these digital artists, however, have an interesting introspective aspect to their games that is quite different, and the reason I chose them. The games I chose to focus on were Waco Resurrection by Eddo Stern, and War Game by Pippin Barr. These games caused me to question the accidental meanings found in games as well the level of detail necessary to create an engaging game.

                Eddo Stern has made a few of these partly physical and partly electronic games, but the one I wanted to focus on was Waco Resurection. Waco Resurection revisits the 1993 Waco, Texas standoff between members of the Branch Davidian cult and federal agents, which lasted 51 days and ended with the deaths of at least 86 people, including the leader of the cult David Koresh. In Waco Resurection the players play as the resurrected David Koresh. Each player wears a “specially designed voice activated, surround sound enabled, hard plastic 3D skin” designed to look exactly like the animated Koresh. Players voice texts from Koresh’s writings on the book of Revelation to wield weapons and influence the behavior of both followers and opponents, even turning opponents into converts. ­After ten minutes Koresh dies, either in a fire similar to the one that killed him in real life, or he is killed by hordes of FBI agents. Either way, the game ends and the scores are tallied. Players earn points based on how many converts they have “dropped off”.

Pippin Barr has many games to choose from, all very simple flash type  games. The one that seems to stand out the most though is called War Game. War Game is based off of the old LED games, complete with stages, a boss level, and a psych evaluation, only where as time goes on the game starts to glitch and replaces characters and bullets with the wrong character or bullet. Well, maybe that psych evaluation part is somewhat less typical. For him as a game designer, he says that “In some ways every decision I made about the game was for a kind of detached aesthetic effect.” After either “five confirmed kills” or being shot the player is sent to the a psychiatric evaluation. The psych evaluation asks the player a question, such as “How do you feel about your mother?” or “what would you like to talk about?” or “how do you feel about your country?” and then after the player types 100 characters the game abruptly says “Everything seems to be in order, you’ll be fine, return to active duty” and places the player back in the war stage. Eventually the game just ends, with a screen saying “war is over” and a vague feeling of purposelessness.

There are many things that make these two games very very different, but one thing that makes Pippin Barr’s game very different from Eddo Sterns is the amount of meaning intentionally vested in the game. While Eddo Stern’s games can, somewhat intentionally, seem a little heavy handed with the meaning, Pippin Barr’s games are unintentionally very subtly vested with meaning. In Waco Reserection the player is David Koresh, the cult leader that molested and married children and was responsible for many deaths. This creates an odd sort of antihero situation, where the player knows that the person they are playing as is a terrible person, and yet they are put in a situation where they will try to make him win. According to Stern’s description of the game it “draws on the rhetoric of conspiracy theory, cult activity and apocalypticism to investigate the Waco siege as a cultural milestone. It addresses the multi-layered dynamics of a 51-day media-event that served to mobilize the militia movement, radicalize Timothy McVeigh and cause a reevaluation of the role of religion in society.”

While some of Pippin Barr’s games, such as Jostle Bastard, address maybe one of these things at a time (Jostle Bastard addresses the antihero concept), the meaning is often almost an afterthought. After writing up war games and posting it, Pippin Barr wrote on his blog about how he had noticed “this phenomenon by which bits of code and art and game mean things you didn’t mean them to, whether you like it or not.” War Games ended up being a very introspective piece. The 100 character limit on the psych evaluation was for Pippin Barr initially simply a lazy coding decision. However, in game play, it ends up being a commentary on whether or not the government really cares about the psychiatric health of the soldier. The occasionally relentless and undodgeable waves of bullets were neither coded for nor prevented, and yet they provide comment on the hopelessness of war. Even the name was chosen simply for its generality, however, as Pippin Barr noted, it sounds “falsely weighty… [like] the final word on games about war”.

What becomes difficult about analyzing this difference, is the question which is better. In the end I think this is a question that would be answered differently for everybody. Personally, I find that the accidental nature of the meaning in Pippin Barr’s games make me think more about every aspect of the game. I find the need to “[ensnare players] in the custom ‘Koresh skin’” heavy-handed. I think that if the game needs to be more detailed to be good and meaningful, then it really isn’t all that good or meaningful in the first place. However, I also think that that might be a matter of personal taste and opinion, and higher levels of detail and content can add to a piece. Given that the “Koresh skin” is a barrier to my being able to play the game, I really can’t say that it detracts from the game, only that it means I cant play it and find out.

This leads me to another thing I wanted to talk about with these two games, the physical component of Eddo Stern’s games and the very basic pixel art of Pippin Barr. These two game artists have very radically different approaches to the medium. Eddo Stern’s games have a physical component, such as the mask or “Koresh skin” one wears while playing Waco Resurection. These games strive to take on a hyperreal aspect. They are as realistically animated as the technology can easily allow, and create heavily detailed games. The mask of Waco Resucrection is meant to increase that level of realism, with the surround sound within the mask, as well as the mental association with putting on the mask, and a new identity for the players. Eddo Stern was not able to create the game alone either, but made it in collaboration with other artists in C-Level.

Pippin Barr is able to achieve a similar, if not higher level of meaning with far less effort and far less detail. In War Game your character takes up roughly 50 pixels, if that. However, the simple mechanics of the fact that you are controlling him causes the player to associate themselves with him. The direct nature of the psych evaluation questions, inspite of the lack of gameplay effect, further places one within this so-called war. The very flat and completely unrealistic graphics in no way detract from gameplay or the gameplay experience. The fact that these games can be so absorbing without even halfway decent graphics create an interesting question about the obsession with ever better graphics and ever more complicated gameplay within the gaming industry. Good writing is worth far more than good graphics in many ways.

To conclude, Eddo Stern and Pippin Barr are both very different game artists. Most of Eddo Stern’s work involves a physical component to increase the realism of the games, however, all of Pippin Barr’s games are extremely simple and make no attempt to be realistic, yet are fully engaging. Their games Waco Resurrection by Eddo Stern and War Game by Pippin Barr when viewed together create an interesting look at the nature of meaning in games as well as raising the question as to how much detail is needed in a game to make it engaging. I veer toward the side of less is more, however, that is also in many ways merely an aesthetic concern, and would be a matter of taste. While I wanted to ask Eddo Stern and ask him about the physical component and his reasons for using it in so many of his games, I was unsuccessful in contacting him. I also wanted to ask Pippin Barr about his game design process and what gives him the ideas for his games. Sadly, that was unsuccessful as well.

Bibliography

Stern, Eddo. "Waco Resurrection." Eddo Stern. N.p., n.d. Web. Apr. 2014. <http://eddostern.com/works/waco-resurrection/>

Stern, Eddo. "Eddo Stern BIO – Updated October 2006." Eddo Stern. N.p., n.d. Web. Apr. 2014. <http://eddostern.com/texts/ESTERN_BIO_CURRENT.htm>.

Barr, Pippin. "War Game." Pippin Bar. N.p., n.d. Web. Apr. 2014. <http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/wargame/WarGame.html>.

Barr, Pippin. "Pippin Barr. War Game Blog." Pippin Barr. N.p., n.d. Web. Apr. 2014. <http://www.pippinbarr.com/blog/?tag=war-game>.

Hannaford, Alex. "The Standoff in Waco." The Texas Observer. The Texas Observer, 18 Apr. 2013. Web. Apr. 2014. <http://www.texasobserver.org/the-standoff-in-waco/>