OrtizGames

In the spirit of Play This Thing, I decided to talk a bit about some stuff that I usually don’t talk about.

So someone pointed me to this game, Coign Of Vantage, yesterday. New gameplay dynamics at work! So much an art game, but it’s lovely. Now we’ll try to think of how to implement this in a triple A title.

There’s also this game, The Fantastic Contraption, which is also quite interesting and has some lovely gameplay and all my friends from Mexico seem addicted to.

Lastly, and on a more serious note. Here’s the Invaders!, an installation interactive art piece by Douglas Edric Stanley featured at Liezpig.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6KnLWLgK_4]

When I first read about it, I was enthralled by the use of interactivity to provide a critique on the Iraq War. It was stellar. It was awesome. Games as art, right?

But then, as usual, people disliked it. It was too much message for brains that were just too small. The United States, a country that’s going to be permanently touchy about the fact that they were hit hard by terrorists, simply cannot accept any critique about its war strategy. So people bitched. And bitched. And the exhibit simply had to come down. Stanley’s blog states that he pulled it down simply because it was getting so much bad flak (from people at Kotaku, no less) and not because Leizpig organizers asked him to bring it down. And now TAITO is threatening to sue, since apparently this is an infreingement on their Space Invaders intellectual property.

Screw you, TAITO.

In a way, it’s completely understandable that good art should be refused by the masses and understood by few. It’s the same with a lot of controversial art contemporary to the time it was created in. We need artists to challenge us so that we may grow. But I’m still angry. The cream on the cake was TAITO wanting to sue. We didn’t have suing back in other times of controversial art. Suing really makes it difficult now.

Sorry for ending this post on a bad note, but it was just depressing news for this early in the morning.

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