Fictional Videogame Stills | Hacker News Reader

Fictional Videogame Stills

suzannetreister.net

157 pointsdoener38 comments

This reminds me of a few game jams that were basically about one phase where artists create screenshots of games that don't exist, and then developers pick one of those screenshots and make it a reality.

It was as amazing as it sounds, and you had a lot of leeway as a developer to interpret so much about the game from the one screenshot. So multiple people could choose the same one and make completely different games.

One from Newgrounds in 2013 [1]. A more recent one on itch [2].

[1]: https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1342155#bbspost24671968...

[2]: https://itch.io/jam/cartridge-jam-3

Suzanne Treister's works are wonderful, I recommend her Hexen 2.0 project (https://www.suzannetreister.net/HEXEN2/HEXEN_2.html), which I call "mysticism of the 20th century". Counterculture, infomation revolution, CIA, LSD, quantum - presented as Tarot cards and Sefirot.

I've wanted that tarot deck for a long time but can't cough up the $300-$600 they now command.

I do have the Hexen 2.0 Tarot deck, and keep it as a treasure. (Though, I bought it quite a few years ago, I think in 2012 or 2013; plus 2 years of waiting time.)

Each time I go through the deck, I discover a new detail or reference.

How does a work of art that is "a video game that doesn't exist" get sold? In the case of Suzanne Treister's visions it could be a painting. Or a limited edition photo of the Amiga Paint screen. But conceptually, it borders on that famous creepypasta about the haunted cartridge. In the same realm as nightmares and faeries ;)

Underpriced at $1500 perhaps

https://www.artsy.net/show/annely-juda-fine-art-suzanne-trei...

And the source of endless post-internet remixing

https://rumpel.itch.io/anxiety-an-interactive-exploration-of...

> Underpriced at $1500 perhaps

Just goes to show how wildly subjective art is. I suspect that name recognition (of the artist) carries more weight than the work itself. But then again I'm no Ongo Gablogian.

Maybe we're all Ongo Gablogian.

So who's gonna set up thisgamedoesnotexist.com?

Perhaps you'd like "There is no game" then.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1240210/There_Is_No_Game_...

https://gamesthatdontexist.tumblr.com/

Damn it. I just lost the game.

Seems like it was registered in 2019 but never used.

The multicolored letters on the first piece brought so many memories of being just a kid and playing with poke commands and little print and go to routines to display rainbow colored moving letters and making the first steps into graphics on 8 bit computers. I suppose we were all artists back then !

> Many of these works were shown in London at the Edward Totah Gallery in March 1992 (view installation) and later that year at the Exeter Hotel in Adelaide, Australia.

Small world! The Exeter was my local pub all throughout university. Not surprising they'd showcase something like this, they were always pleasantly bohemian.

These sure are some images made by someone who just got DPaint 2 and is struggling with drawing with a mouse.

Is the ‘art world’ completely unaware of what games artists and the demo scene were doing in that era and with those same tools?

If they are aware of it, they probably don't consider it significant. The art world favors social critique and social impact over mere demonstration of technical prowess. At least since Bob Ross democratized landscape painting and put it within easy reach, it's not a significant artistic achievement to merely be good at painting landscapes. One must challenge the audience's preconceived notions and explore the relationship between land, space, society, race, class, and gender in order to be a successful landscape painter.

For this reason, the demoscene matters less than a footnote in the realm of high art, especially when compared with a masterpiece like Bolognini's Sealed Computers. (An art installation that consisted of several AT-class computers, all wired up and powered, running programs that display randomly-generated lines -- except the display ports are all sealed with wax, meaning that no one ever actually sees what they are displaying.)

A bitmap brush dragged over the screen, with Instagram-style caption: https://www.suzannetreister.net/Ampages/Amiga41.html

Art + technical prowess + the art values you mention: http://amiga.lychesis.net/artist/JimSachs/JimSachs_AmigaLago...

If the ‚art world‘ is unaware of the latter, then it what does it tell us about their artistic credentials?

The Sachs image is from 1t least 1993, as it's done in Brilliance, which was released then. It's also in 256 colors, versus Treister's images from 1995 done when the maximum number of colors was 32. Unless you had a paint program capable of Hold And Modify mode, which DPaint was not at the time. (And Extra Half-Brite did not exist until the A2000 and A500 came out in 1987.)

So let's have a more equal comparison: here's an image from Defender of the Crown (1986). http://amiga.lychesis.net/artist/JimSachs/DefenderOfTheCrown...

And here's an image from Avril Harrison in 1985, which might have been one of the demo images that shipped with DPaint - I know several of her works were on the disc: http://amiga.lychesis.net/year/1985/AH_Waif.html

And of course how about Harrison's 1985 image of Tutankhamun's death mask, which was both on the disc and on the cover of the box? http://amiga.lychesis.net/year/1985/AH_KingTut.html

Treister's images are dated 1991-1992!

Ah, yes, they are. I misread the dates somewhere. My bad.

The problem with "Amiga Lagoon" is that it's too twee -- it's kitsch. Like all kitsch it attempts to score points by appealing to our unconscious reaction to "pretty" things, as well as simplistic emotions like nostalgia or sentimentality. What's the theme or concept being explored here? That the Amiga's media fidelity is such that it can serve as a window onto another, paradisical world? There, I just solved the puzzle. You don't really need to think when observing this piece. It's all right there, spelled out for you.

By contrast, Suzanne Treister's work raises more questions than it does answers. Looking at them makes you feel a certain way, and you have to sit down and puzzle out why it makes you feel that way -- and even then, answers may not be forthcoming. The piece exists in a limbo of different possible interpretations; exploring these, and finding contradictions between them, adds depth to the work and the audience's appreciation of it.

Conversely, I believe that a true artist is one who has mastered the medium, and then uses that as a means of expression.

To be honest, I don't see that quality in this particular set Treister's images. Copying and pasting some bitmap brushes, adding inane captions, only give the illusion of profundity.

Nevertheless, I really value your comment - it's illuminating!

My impression from modern art galleries I went into was not "social critique". Very little of that was in social critique category.

The realism is not the achievement anymore, because people can do drawings that look like photos.

> My impression from modern art galleries I went into was not "social critique". Very little of that was in social critique category.

It's almost never quite so direct as that. Rather, the job of an art piece, especially in conceptual art, is to take some aspect of the way audiences typically view a work -- or any object -- and challenge it. Turn it on its ear somehow. Because there's nothing universal about what we find beautiful, what we find happy or sad, how we respond to color or light or space, etc... all these things are indoctrinated in us by the consumerist society that surrounds and pervades us. The purpose of contemporary art is to challenge that, to offer an alternative. To counter the desires and judgements that have been ingrained into us since childhood by capitalism.

As such, art isn't really art unless it's anti-kitsch, because kitsch affirms consumerism. Being "anti-kitsch" in this way is like being "anti-racist": inasmuch as you fail to adequately oppose kitsch you are kitsch. Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living was art because Hirst offered a novel challenge to how we view life and death, or living and dead things. Having done so, however, any subsequent pickled animals would not be novel. They would be kitsch -- trite reproductions, shallow copies of what Hirst had accomplished.

I'll bite... your bio says you draw. Do you really think this work took no skill, or is this an attempt at sarcasm?

This does not look substantially different from the stuff I was making when it was 1985 and I had a brand new copy of Deluxe Paint on my Amiga.

Actually wait no I think I was actually trying to think about making something pleasant to look at instead of randomly spotting around the default colors with the airbrush. This is idle doodling, at best. Experiments with the tool being sold for a ludicrously high price, because she was in the gallery system and there were a bunch of rich idiots who might be willing to pay that.

Looking around her site she does appear to have some actual skills at composition, palettes, and painting, but they are not on display here in the least.

Interesting. I'd say picking the right colors, textures and shapes to make a group of people feel nostalgic about video games that don't exist, that takes real skill.

It sounds like this art didn't do anything for you. But it did for others. This[1] didn't do anything for me either. But I sure as hell wouldn't be selfish enough to say it's not art.

[1] http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/chapter/01/

So, while individual pieces are fairly simplistic (and even amateurish, to a technical artist), taken as a whole they create a context and evoke a mood -> impressionism!

Is that a way to understand it?

Yeah, that's one way to understand it (though I wouldn't call this impressionism). At the most human level, I'd say if someone connects with it, it's art. I did connect with these pieces so was bummed to see someone insulting them -- and an artist, no less.

For example, I loved these: https://www.suzannetreister.net/Ampages/Amiga47.html

https://www.suzannetreister.net/Ampages/Amiga36.html

https://www.suzannetreister.net/Ampages/Amiga46.html

But it's hard to say why ... and that's where I can start to ask why and start engaging with the work.

Did I say this isn’t art? No. I said it looks like someone who just got a new tool fucking around with it, and that it looks much like what everyone who just got a copy of Deluxe Paint 2 tended to create. You make some patterns, you pick up some chunks of art and drag them around as brushes, you do some perspective fills. All this needs is some color cycling and it’s hit all the cliches of “I just got Deluxe Paint”.

And thanks for trying to turn this into a personal argument by dissing my own work. Very classy. I’d think someone swiping the name of a dead Expressionist would be all for my animation-influenced distortions or anatomy in the name of expressiveness, but whatever.

It is a critique from someone who works in the field: http://egypt.urnash.com

It's an insult, not a critique.

Get the same feeling. And many of them even don't feel like game art or even something that games would look like. There is no purpose with many elements. Just some elements pasted or moved as a brush.

This is vaporwave af, 20-25 years before we even knew vaporwave was a thing.

Perfection.

I really miss the Internet.

The structure may be proto-vaporwave, but the effect feels more like a curse. I think I'll clear my cache after this one, and recommend you to do the same.

whoa nice post i like a lot

Reply on news.ycombinator.com