An Open Field: Informal and Anti-Formal Approaches to Videogame Art History

The last two decades have seen the emergence and formalization of game studies as an academic discipline as well as a repeating cycle of debates over videogames legitimacy as an artistic medium. Using a speculative conceptual framework assembled from art history, media studies, and game studies scholarship, this dissertation investigates the ways that formalist analysis and institutional formalization have acted to influence the way that videogames have been created, presented, and discussed as art objects. As videogame art exhibitions have become increasingly common over the last twenty years, so too have the debates over best practices for videogame curation, collection, archiving, and preservation. The central question of this dissertation is not how videogames have been defined as art, but rather how these kinds of definitions have specifically impacted the way that videogame artists and curators choose to orient their practices.

In order to unpack the ontologies and aesthetics of contemporary videogame art, it is necessary to examine particular instances of its production and distribution in a variety of commercial and institutional contexts. This dissertation focuses on a collection of game art, art games, and videogame art exhibitions that were all produced between 2010 and 2020. The project is organized into a series of case study chapters that include the work of Bennet Foddy and Cory Arcangel within the context of failure and trash games; the autobiographical work of Angela Washko and Nina Freeman through the lens of mixed realism; the work of David OReilly and Ian Cheng as examples of lively, self-playing videogame art; and finally, Marie Foulstons recent eclectic work as a videogame art curator. Each of these case studies is used as a counterexample to productively disorient previous definitions of videogame form and to argue for a more explicitly fluid and mutable reconfiguration of the art history of videogames.