(check out those portables floating in space…whoa)

The Art of Play Symposium and Arcade, at CMU was a great success! Despite having to reconfigure the gallery plan on the fly (not entirely a surprise, since I was trying to do this remotely), we eventually got things up and humming. I myself was very impressed with the symposium– it was focused and intense (in a good way), and the conversations were at a nice high level, while still being grounded enough for my pragmatic taste. I think a lot of very smart people who have been thinking about games and art for a long time got to have a few discussions they’ve been dying to have (how many hours did Mark Johns and Jason Rohrer spend debating in the middle of the gallery?). The talks were all great– in particular, Jesse Schell, whom I have never heard speak before, blew me away. Everyone managed to get through without asking, or even fielding, the question: “are games art?” Nice dodge! On the arcade side, I managed to get 24 of our 25 games up and running in tiny Ellis gallery (although Jaron Lanier’s 1983 game Moondust only saw 3 hours before blue screening– good news is my c64 is still purring along, and in that 3 hours the game actually got press and developed a bit of a cult following). Unfortunately (yet as per usual), I missed a few things while devoting myself to keeping the arcade trouble-free and secure. But I did get to go on a tour of the ETC’s rather slick labs, and of course, there were famous robots. All a girl could ask for.

Here is the curatorial statement Heather and I wrote for the Arcade, which doesn’t seem to have yet found its way on to the Art of Play site.