Computer Games As Landscape Art

This book proposes that computer games are the paradigmatic form of contemporary landscape and offers a synthesis of art history, geography, game studies and play. Like paint on canvas, the game engine is taken as the underlying medium, and using the Valve Source Engine as the primary case study, it analyses landscapes according to the technical, economic and cultural features this medium affords. It presents the single-player first-person shooter ( Half-Life 2 ) as a Promethean safari, examines how the economics of gambling and product placement shaped the eSports landscapes of Counter-Strike and reveals how sandboxes such as Garry's Mod visualise the radical landscape of Web 2.0. This book explores how our relationship to the environment is changing, how we express this through computer games and how we can move beyond examining artistic influences on games to examining how historical connections flow through games and the history of landscape images.

Computer games are the paradigmatic form of contemporary landscape art and this book gives us the language to read them Our relationship with the environment is changing, and we are expressing this through contemporary computer games This book allows us to understand computer games in a new way by bridging art history, game studies and play

Auteur

Peter A C Nelson is an artist and academic, originally trained in painting, drawing and art history, who publishes on computer games, graphics and aesthetics. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Contenu
Introduction.- 1: What is a Landscape?.- 2: What is a Computer Game?.- 3: Half-Life 2: Could I Apocalypse?.- 4: Tourism and Gun-Running in CS:GO.- 5: Autosave: Redoubt.- 6: Garry's Mod: The Computer Game Becomes Photoshop.- Conclusion.