The game is the ultimate piece of art, capable of incorporating all artforms known to humanity, expressed with bleeding edge technology.
The making of a game is a process of great beaty, representatives from different artforms and technology working together (exposed) to make a piece which is finally completed by the player.
Making games and playing games is a tribute to life as it could have been.
We all read each other’s points and changed and cut and added. The ones I suggested evolved into this:
· The Game is the ultimate piece of art, capable of incorporating all forms of art and expression known to humanity, expressed using all forms of technology, from the ancient to the bleeding edge, without compromising its identity as a game. This in itself proves gaming to be the lost pre-Appolonian Ur-art .
// i remember Martin E adding the stuff about the Ur-art, which i absolutely loved.
· The making of a game is a process of great beauty, representatives from different artforms and technology working together (exposed) to make a piece that is finally completed by the Player.
·The Game is the Great Work.
// I think the third point was somehow transformed into this.
That was really a wonderfully nice period, when we sat together and wrote that manifesto. Today it feels a bit weird to read it again. We had so high hopes and we didn’t think about limitations - I think we quite consciously avoided thinking about limitations actually.
The full manifesto can be found here: http://zerogame.tii.se/manifesto.htm
Hmmm… strange, it’s only part II that is there.
Wonder why? I paste in the full version here:
The Zero Game Manifesto
Part I - Critique
· Games are not entertainment, since we reject the concept of entertainment. Entertainment is a concept created by the power structures of Kapital to denigrate activities that do not immediately function in the production of surplus value.
· Entertainment as a product is a reappropriation of paraeconomic activity by structures of Kapital, denigrated ideologically, and harnessed economically.
· The playing of games is an activity that poses a serious threat to all established power structures defended and supported by religions and ideologies.
· Kapitalist games are a reflection of the ideological basis of Kapitalist production. This is the trade in death in the name of genetic supremacy. Competition is the shadow of supremacism. Warfare is the natural process of fascism. A player of a Kapitalist Game plays at being the Primal Kapitalist, a creature driven by the reptilian brain.
Part II - The Nature of The Game
· Current concepts of the Game must be rejected and superseded by a vision of Games serving the higher potential of humanity, a form that is equitable, authentic, and validated as a core human process. Here we present such a vision.
· There are no virtual realities, but many different realities. Some of those realities exist within information spaces supported and articulated with the use of computational technology.
· The active nature of the Game holds a unique potential for exploring new modes of being. The active nature of the Game also supports subversive modes of thinking more directly serving creative and fulfilling purposes.
· The Game must be a subversive activity facilitated by ritual and aimed at releasing human awareness from established constraints. Those constraints are ideological, economic, cultural, historical, artistic, and physical.
· Game play is based upon understanding, implicitly or explicitly, some subset of a set of Game rules. The playing experience is then one of developing a gestalt, a pattern of cognitive and physical activity that supports movement through the game experience. The function of a gameplay gestalt is to facilitate entry into a state of consciousness typically different from states experienced outside the gameplay context. In this way, a gameplay gestalt is analogous to a mantra, chant, or ritual. It can deliver us into new ways of being, which can be like a dance, meditation, or possession.
· The Game is the ultimate piece of art, capable of incorporating all forms of art and expression known to humanity, expressed using all forms of technology, from the ancient to the bleeding edge, without compromising its identity as a game. This in itself proves gaming to be the lost pre-Appolonian Ur-art .
· The making of a game is a process of great beauty, representatives from different artforms and technology working together (exposed) to make a piece that is finally completed by the Player.
· By treating something as a Game we will be attuned to its magical dimension, and by playing it, we manipulate it by means of ritual magic.
· The Game is the Great Work.
Part III - Praxis
· Our games will not be dictated by the market.
· Our games will perform and extend various functions of art, representing an evolutionary step in generic artistic function, and a revolutionary step in the creation of unique forms and potential.
· We will cross boundaries and dissolve structures, in a continuous and ongoing process of destruction and reformation into new orders. Revolutionary practice is not teleological, leading to any kind of utopian goal. Instead, it is the essential core process of life. It is the defining character of life, a continuous process of patterning and repatterning at the phase boundary between static structure and chemical change.
· We will introduce gameplay as a virus into the concept of story.
· We will use and reuse the shadow ideologies of history as a catalyst for new visions.
· We will not be limited to articulations within a dogmatic language.
· We are architects of the third place.
· We will celebrate the universal dialectic of the binary code.
· We will be shamans of the posthuman age.
· We will walk the path of the trickster.
(//sniff... Re-reading this breaks my heart. We need to write a new one. Discussed a little bit about new names for our research group at the Uni, but didnt reach a conclusion yet.)
