Funny--I've used Modrian to illustrate the aethetic simialrities in modern art and video games. But the comparison I always used was Tetris. I mean, come on, Tetris and Modrian have a clear structural similarity.Maybe Pac-Man belongs with Pontillism, don't you think:)

Still, pretty cool idea.

David

David > I mean, come on, Tetris and Modrian have a clear structural similarity.

Good point. And I agree. But I suppose Pac-Man is perhaps more analogous with the artistic program of this specific painting, which was all about capturing the structure and noise of kinetic activity. There's also a physical shimmering in Broadway Boogie-Woogie (unpreproducible on the web of course) that mimics the flash of neon and lights in a city. Pac-Man also has an aesthetic of throbbing lights.

Leaving my own humorous attempts at sarcasm aside, I think you make a good point.

Perhaps the deeper relevance is fairly simply--by limiting himself to lines and right angles and reduced color palettes, Mordant ended up presaging pixel art.

A look at Broadway Boogie-Woogie stirs up images of many classic games. I see Dig Dug, SimCity and Robottron without trying too hard. And, of course, the dot motif is impossible to miss.

I stand corrected!

-- David

Yep, I thought of Dig-Dug as well. And you're right that there is a perverse relationship between Mondrian's technique and modern pixel-art. Both require an immense amount of precision work at the microscopic level to create what appears to be a much simpler product.

Perhaps this is the wrong forum to bring it up, but one other thing that I think is worth pointing out is that structural similarities in game art and fine art are probably both inevitable and a trick of the light.

I gave a lecture at the KC Institute of Art this past spring that was in part about this very subject. I showed a bunch of fine art juxtaposed with video game art, both visually and thematically. it's pretty easy to do.

But the bigger point of that lecture was that these similarities didn't make games fine art or even art. What they do help to show the potential of games as art!

What makes a game art? Well, I'll leave the bigger "What is art" discussion alone for now. Suffice to say that games as art really have to fight in the bigger arena of aesthetics and art history to solve that one!

-- David

David -- I think you are right that games that incorporate or mimic fine art are not automatically game art. In fact, one could argue that the artistic merit of Pac-Mondrian is more novelty than art.

This does remind me of something entirely unrelated. I am an unabashed fancier of Magritte. I have this fantasy of having a special game room based on Magritte's La Chambre D'Ecoute (The Listening Room). You'd need a house big enough to allow you to devote an entire room to the project. You'd build a big apple that takes up the entire room. Then you'd have to make some kind of trap door or something so you could get into the apple from below, where you'd have a swanky lounge game room.

> having a special game room based on Magritte's La Chambre D'Ecoute

For that idea alone I wish that you become the wealthiest of all ludologists and then invite me to your house to play in your apple room!

-- David

i don't get tetris + modrian. A better version- rotating around the artwork of a sculptor like richard serra, updated 3-d graphics included. it purposely fails in a way.
as for pac-modrian, it's suprisingly fun. the controls (L,R, up,down) re-create the movement in the painting, focuses on surfaces and the colors are dead on.

eventually museum art/interactivity needs to have a real dialectic- mixed up media. video games need to go thru some phase of co-option (theft), get institutionalized and then live independently from the picked-pickets of the rich.
pac-modrian is also a one-of-kind machine, so that's the price-tagged museum piece. it's kinda of cool that they re-simulate the video gamer's experience to that level, but the machine is already out of context. when will they tell them, "don't touch?" this game is those people who can't get over ms. pac-man, but art's history students.
can't wait to screw around with the level editor.

The only shame about this piece is that they didn't quite push it far enough. The idea is quite clever, but sort of toes the line between smugly self-referential and satire, and ultimately produces a much stronger concept than resulting game (although there are hopes for the level editor).

By basically mapping the classic Pac-Man structure (and there are plenty of poor clones to rip code from) onto the structure of a Mondrian painting, you pretty much just wind up with an out-of-place Pac-Man. Especially when you co-opt the visuals of a game as tightly structured as Pac-Man - this distended version seems sluggish and far less polished by comparison. Unfortunately, this seems to be the trend amongst "art games", not the exception to the rule.

However, take a game like UGA's Rez, which was inspired by the art and writing about Kandinsky, but at no time do you jump up and say "that looks like *** painting!" Instead, the game works as a whole experience, creating its own vocabulary while incorporating the aesthetic beyond visual similarities.

Not to knock the work of the designers of the piece - when I first saw it, I recognized how clever it is. But as a gamer, it felt like a chore to play. High concept should compliment the experience, not supercede it.

Chris -- you raise a good point here, namely that the game is oppressively mindnumbing to play, if you try to actually complete the board. And I'm certain that this drole monotony significantly undermines the visual cleverness of the Pac-Man/Mondrian connection by injecting an insufferable tedium into the mix -- a trait which characterizes neither the game nor the painting.

I'm a bit surprised that the designers of Pac-Mondrian chose to retain the Pac-Man and ghost characters in original form. I wonder how the experience would be different if those characters were abstracted. Certainly abstraction was the principle artistic principle driving Piet Mondrian.

It kind of gets into the whole "games as art" arena, but it is interesting to think about how most games that do make it into museums are games stripped of their playability for the sake of expressing a single concept, like Super Mario Bros. minus obstacles and goals (the 'Game On' ehxibition being one notable exception), whereas gamers tend to lament the lack of playability when reviewing a game (i.e. a game like Xenosaga, or Dragon's Lair to be a bit more arcane).

Shouldn't good interactive art be as much about the "interactive" as the "art"?

I do think that the idea you mentioned is interesting - wouldn't it be possible to maintain the "essence" of Pac-Man while abstracting the characters and tweaking the gameplay to fit the environment?

The game is not a direct clone, as the wraparound effect now has a lot more entry points (which can be frustrating because dead ends look just like wraparounds, although I suppose that can be an artistic license interpretation of an actual New York Street), and there are open spaces (which seem counter-intuitive for a character with only 4-directional movement). But the issues seem all the more glaring, I think, because of how close it looks and plays to the original.

pac-mondrian is kitsch (referencing Greenberg's Avant-Garde and Kitsch). that is what makes it easily disposable, which is a requirement of kitsch. at the same time, it's one of the most successful reproductions to enter into artworld, utilizing modrian's techniques to sell pac-manlike art. everything is too familiar, too obvious, too acceptable to challenge either the video game player or the art theorist.
A mass production video game meets expensive modern painting. who cares about this distinction? modrian sells, pac-man sells- it's all part of a big, reproducible image system. that's why it's little more than a new, fashionable look for games. they even have a gimmick- play for money.
its politics are as ineffective (or acceptable) as recent advergames. for instance, the beastie boys anti-bush frogger game is the same concept, but doesn't steal from modern art. it attempts to disguise the point of the game (to buy the album) in empty politics. the player wins when a beastie boy makes it to level 10, and then after a quick role reversal becomes a member from the bush adminstration that makes to level 20, and then the game ends. nothing happens. game over. you, a beastie boy, and bush have been successful. at what? also the gameplay is ridicuously easy, hold down the up arrow key to get to to the top in less than a second, regardless of the obstacles. really mindless/ apolitical.
my point is that pac-modrian and the like only sell video game art as a fashion statement if they don't move into disrupting the concept of art. dadaism + videogames or something more aggressive and less like a new form of cool consumerism pac-modrain needs to move away from this kinda kitsch that can only familiarize us with art. change its distribution. release a series of games that turns art history course into a videogame textbook tool. at least that's more than fashion. video games are already part of pop-culture, so why continue to use them to sell-a-vision.
offer new forms. check out- http://www.atari-noise.com/ this has much more potential because it creates something new, unpredicable, spontaneous.
destruction&invention- moving beyond, boring class antagonisms in art.

I think that Atari-noise is a great example - it takes something that is familiar and recognizable (Just about anyone who had a 2600 has experienced similar "snow" patterns, usually during a reset), but is even accessible to those who haven't played with the 2600 before, because it is accessible as a concept.

Beyond that, the experience is truly interactive - it has a pick up and play experimental quality that most video games have, allowing the user to experience something familiar in an entirely new context, not just in a different wrapper. Even the web-based Director version, removed from the tangible familiarity of the 2600 console, still captures the essence of the experience while creating something entirely new and with many possible outcomes and choices given to the user.

On a related note, thanks to Ruder Finn Interactive for a link to their piece Mr. Picassohead. They bill it as "a marriage of Mr. Potatohead and Picasso." While it's not really a game, it does seem related to Pac Mondrian in purpose, namely using an interactive medium to extend and explicate an artist's original vision.

If you wish to check out some free unofficial Tetris clones, visit the link