Talk descriptions are available at via the linked speaker names or at the bottom of the schedule.

Date	Time	Session
Thursday, February 4	6:00 p.m.	Introductory remarks
	6:15 p.m.	Ian Bogost, Michael Nitsche & John Sharp “What is an Art History of Games?”
	7-:00 p.m.	Opening keynote: John Romero “Masters Among Us”
Friday, February 5	9:00 a.m.	Opening Remarks
	9:15	John Sharp “The Art History of Games”
	10:00 a.m.	Jesper Juul “The Pure Game: A Short History of Video Game Aesthetics”
	10:45 a.m.	Break
	11:00 a.m.	Frank Lantz “Doorknobs and Butterflies: Games After Art”
	11:45 a.m.	Panel Discussion Sharp, Juul and Lantz with moderator Christoph Kluetsch
	12:30 p.m.	Lunch Break Shuttle to exhibition will be available during lunch break
	2:00 p.m.	Jay David Bolter and Brian Schrank “Videogames and the two avant-gardes”
	2:45 p.m.	Celia Pearce “Play’s the Thing: Games as fine art”
	3:30 p.m.	Break
	3:45 p.m.	Henry Lowood “Players are Artists, too”
	4:30 p.m.	Panel Discussion Bolter, Pearce and Lowood with moderator Michael Nitsche
	8:00 p.m.	Opening reception for commissioned games Kai Lin Art, 800 Peachtree St N.E., Atlanta, GA 30308
Saturday, February 6	9:00 a.m.	Nathalie Pozzi & Eric Zimmerman “Sixteen Tons”
	9:45 a.m.	Tale of Tales “Over games”
	10:30 a.m.	Break
	10:45 a.m.	Jason Rohrer “Interactive Storytelling is our Project Xanadu”
	11:30 a.m.	Brenda Brathwaite “One Falls for Each of Us: The Prototyping of Tragedy”
	12:15 p.m.	Panel Discussion Pozzi, Zimmerman, Tale of Tales, Rohrer and Brathwaite with moderator John Sharp
	1:00 p.m.	Lunch Break Shuttle to exhibition will be available during lunch break
	2:30 p.m.	Closing keynote: Christiane Paul “Image games”
	3:15 p.m.	Keynote Panel Discussion Romero, Paul, Rohrer, Tale of Tales, Zimmerman and Pozzi with moderator Ian Bogost
	4:15 p.m.	Closing Remarks
	7:00 p.m.	After party co-hosted by Indiecade and IGDA-Atlanta W Hotel Midtown, Studio I. 188 14th St NE

John Romero

Masters Among Us
Thursday, 7:00 p.m.

Artists in other mediums look back upon their masters and, intrigued, inspired or challenged by their methods and works, they innovate upon them in dramatic ways. Just as Cubism followed Impressionism, so too did RPGs follow war games and 3D follow 2D. Since the dawn of the digital industry, game designers and programmers pushed technology beyond its bounds, and on the granular level, millions of seemingly trivial mechanic innovations made the medium and cultural art form what it is today. Our masters still walk among us.

Interestingly, however, few practicing game designers and even fewer experiencing their works know the masters among them. Study of their methods has fallen to consumption of modern output. Careful consideration of design methods has given way to repeating past failures. Regrettably, many of our works, like the works of the Renaissance, are simply lost or the design process unrecorded.

John Romero discusses the masters among us, who they are, why we need them, how they have influenced today’s greatest games and what we will learn from them in the future.

John Sharp

The Art History of Games
Friday, 9:15 a.m.

From the origins of culture, both games and art were often appreciated, sometimes feared cultural forms woven into the experiences of life. But starting with the Renaissance, the two took divergent paths in terms of their cultural role, value and study with art more highly valued. Games, however continued on as an integral part of culture. This talk will strive to understand the cultural relationship between games and art by surveying the cultural status and role of games from an art historical vantage from the middle ages into the early modern era and up through the industrial revolution and the early twentieth century.

Jesper Juul

The Pure Game: A Short History of Video Game Aesthetics
Friday, 10:00 a.m.

With the continuing recognition of video games as a cultural form comes an ongoing discussion about what video games should be. In this talk I will sketch a history of aesthetical arguments for “pure” video games. Such arguments have worked by identifying a single important quality of video games that is then to be protected against dilution. Examples include the idea that video games should only be rule-based systems, and the newer position that video games should be “immersive” simulated worlds. These, I will argue, are flawed arguments, but arguments that nevertheless play a significant role in the history of video games.

Frank Lantz

Doorknobs and Butterflies: Games After Art
Friday, 11:00 a.m.

Videogames have shown us that games are works of culture and should be
considered as such. They are an artform or something very much like it. On
the one hand this is good news, it represents a bold evolution in our
estimation of what games are and an ambitious upswing in our expectations
for what they can accomplish.

But this move can also be seen as a kind of domestication of games. An
attempt to fit their sprawling and unruly wildness into a framework with
which we are more familiar in order to make them easier to discuss, compare,
and analyze.

In this talk I will attempt to make a case that the serious thinker who is
committed to understanding games as an aesthetic form must recognize that
they represent a major challenge to our existing aesthetic assumptions.

This responsibility is also an opportunity, an invitation. Instead of adding
games as one more tidy rectangle next to novels and films and poems and
paintings we can, and must, radically re-think our basic ideas about how art
works in order to accommodate games. This is the demanding and exciting
challenge presented by the present moment and its historic collision of
games and art.

Jay David Bolter and Brian Schrank

Videogames and the two avant-gardes
Friday, 1:30 p.m.

The term “avant-garde games” keeps appearing in the game community, but uses of the term vary wildly. What is lacking is an awareness of the history of the avant-garde in the 20th century. Our strategy is to map today’s most creative and unusual videogames and gamemakers against that history. There are many avant-gardes, each with its artistic-cultural agenda, but we can distinguish two main groups: the formal and the political. Applying this division to videogames, we can see how the formal avant-garde explores the essence of the videogame medium (e.g. action, procedurality, story) and that the political avant-garde challenges or critiques technoculture through the videogame form.

Celia Pearce

Play’s the Thing: Games as fine art
Friday, 2:15 p.m.

When the words “video game” and “art” are used in the same sentence, the discussion tends to revolve around the question of whether or not video games are art, the art and graphics of commercial video games, and, less often, the use of video games in fine art. Contemporary digital game art is a growing movement, comparable to the rise of video as a fine art form in the 1980s; however, fine artists have harnessed the expressive power of games for nearly a century. Beginning with the dada and surrealist movements at the start of the last century, through movements such as Fluxus, Happenings, New Games, the Situationists and others, modern artists have had a longtime fascination with the game, not so much as an art object or artifact, but as a process, a means of deeper engagement, a participatory performance. Some artists used play and games as a method, from Duchamp and Cage’s experiments with randomness, to Pollock’s procedural painting techniques. This presentation explores use of games throughout 20th Century modern art, demonstrating how analog artists laid the groundwork for the contemporary fine art video game movement.

Henry Lowood

Players are Artists, too

It is easy to provoke debate by posing a simple question, such as, “Are digital games a form of art?” A less controversial observation would be that it takes a lot of artists to make a digital game. This dichotomy between the theoretical exercise and the practical observation frames my interest in the creative player. As I have written elsewhere, it strikes me that rumination about the status of games as artistic works, while stimulating and useful, often distracts attention from more important aspects of expression through the medium of interactive computer and video games. Let me say before I am misunderstood that critical attention to game design, art and programming, all as parts of defining the authorial or artistic roles of game developers is a core problem for game studies. Players would not be using games to express their talents if game developers had not given them compelling games. Now that I have said that, let me reveal my point-of-view: The creativity of players is as compelling as game design. Player creativity has defined the digital game as a platform for personal or artistic expression. Player creativity, including the multiple forms of performance and spectatorship that it has spawned, deserves more attention from game studies. Players are artists, too.

Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman

Sixteen Tons
Saturday, 9:15 a.m.

Sixteen Tons is a game for four players designed for a gallery setting, created by architect Nathalie Pozzi and game designer Eric Zimmerman for this conference. Sixteen Tons provides a case study that illuminates some of the core issues of the Art History of Games conference. In what way can the project be considered art? What is Sixteen Tons “about?” The talk will mention precedents for the work within the history of both designers, outline some of the intentions behind the game, and describe the process of its creation.

Tale of Tales

Over games
Saturday, 10:00 a.m.

Videogames have stopped evolving. They have found their comfort zone: fun activities that nurture our inner child.

While our inner grown-up is starving!

We need a new medium that can help us cope with the complexity of our post-historic universe. The interactive, non-linear and generative capacity of computer technology offers such a medium.

But videogames have taken computer technology hostage. It is time to liberate the medium and start feeding our starving hearts and minds. We have the technology. We have the desire. So let’s get to work!

Jason Rohrer

Interactive Storytelling is our Project Xanadu
Saturday, 11:00 a.m.

Imagine freshly-generated dramatic experiences unfurling before your eyes and changing based on your inputs. Imagine dynamic characters that react—grow angry at you, laugh at your jokes, or even fall in love with you. Interactive storytelling is our medium’s artistic holy grail. It has haunted almost all of us, stolen decades from some of our brightest minds, and indefinitely postponed “making great art” pending future technological advancements. Our destination is no closer now than it was when we started this 30-year windmill quest. But turning around reveals a curious perspective: perhaps we’re there already. Perhaps we’ve been there all along.

Brenda Brathwaite

One Falls for Each of Us: The Prototyping of Tragedy
Saturday, 1:30 p.m.

Incorporating 20,000 wooden figurines, incense and dozens of leather hides, Brenda Brathwaite’s latest game is One Falls for Each of Us. Currently in development, it is the fourth game in the Mechanic is the Message series and chronicles the experience of the Native Americans as they walked and died upon the Trail of Tears.

Like the other games in the series, Brathwaite uses the medium of the game mechanic much like traditional artists use paint to capture and express difficult events. It is a form of historical system design which provokes both player and designer to look and interact more deeply than they otherwise might. Influenced by the works of Jackson Pollock, Richard Serra, Marcel Duchamp and Gerhard Richter, Brathwaite’s works push games in directions not yet considered.

From the game’s initial conception through to its current state, Brathwaite discusses the inspirations for One Falls for Each of Us and the series, recent iterations and expands upon the prototyping of tragedy.

Christiane Paul

Image Games
Saturday, 2:15 p.m.

Starting from a brief outline of the art-historical connections between games and art, the presentation will explore how game art projects have expanded or redefined traditional characteristics of “image spaces” and the moving image. Also discussed will be the current representation of game art in the contemporary art world and museum and gallery context, as well as the challenges in curating and exhibiting game projects.