Passing through the work of Name June Paik, Participation TV, 1963, we arrive at the concept of new media, where the viewer is literally - and finally - co-creator of the work of art: from the proxemics we move now to the real interaction: the TV of the work of Paik shows in output light signals that correspond to the sound interference caused in input by the user / co-creator, who interacts through a microphone. It is from these experiments that the idea of a television is born, which is not only a device marked by a unidirectional communication channel, to be passively subjected: but a creative tool for everyone.
With the advent of the real videogame, the screens become pure interaction; now the users are called to develop dexterity and new skills to make their way in the ergodic process that every videogame text foresees; and the more difficult the challenge, the more the player is put to the test, the more specific skills are required.
The growth and development of skills is a topic very dear to those who practice speedrun, which is the attempt to get to the final screen of a game - of any kind, but most of the time it is a platform game at Super Mario Bros. - in the shortest time possible. To be competitive in this practice is not enough talent: you have to train constantly, know by heart the entire virtual path, pixel by pixel, which makes the speedrun of the real shows for the average player, who can only admire open-mouthed certain performances monster - games whose total duration is around ten hours are completed under sixty minutes, or platform games of the '80s completed in five minutes, as the aforementioned Super Mario Bros.
In Rainforest Scully-Blaker's essay, between performance and show, the implicit processes of speedrun and its reason for existence are analyzed: the challenge against the game itself, against its design given a priori, and that with the community of players who measure themselves in the same enterprise, around the same title; the speedrun that follow the "physical" rules of programming and those who try to exploit its flaws, going in search of the glitches of the system.
The show offered by the speedrun is a starting point to understand the phenomenon Game Video. But there's more to it than that.
Especially among the youngest, the form of fruition is represented by Let's Play. It's Josef Nguyen, in his essay Exhibiting himself as a gamer in Let's Play, who outlines this new type of post-television show, as simple as it is engaging: all it takes - in theory - is a videogame, a webcam and a microphone to go on air and attract the curiosity of hundreds of thousands of people.
Let's Play has a dynamic opposite to speedrun: you don't need any skill or dexterity to bring the game to fruition; on the contrary: the more you make a mistake, the more you make a fool of yourself, the better you entertain the audience. Because in Let's Play, more than the "sports" performance, it counts the entertainment, the histrionic ability of the player to make jokes, to keep alive his personal show, to create empathy with the viewer: it is a rhetorical performance, more than playful. The video game is essential, but it's as if it's overshadowed: it's a sort of premise.
The possibilities, the creative processes linked to the net and to the videogame are potentially infinite. Even the world of art, and for some time now, has begun to move its steps in this direction: and the form chosen is that of machinima. Essentially, the possibility of making game sequences of real short films or films, extrapolating contents and meanings from various game contexts, to give them completely new forms and meanings - often at the antipodes of the original ones. A dynamic that could make them digital ready-mades.
- The possibilities of 3D have allowed intrusions and artistic distortions already in the mid-1990s games, and the exponential increase in the computing power of the various PCs and consoles has made possible the creation of games in which the level of detail of the reconstruction of environments, places, people and objects has brought virtual reality closer to the real one. The result was works like EMPIRE, by Philip Solomon: the American director, using the game GTA IV, paid homage to the Warhol of the Empire of the same name, staring his camera at the Rotterdam Tower in Liberty City - both reconstructions, respectively, of the Empire State Building and New York City. As in the film by the father director of Pop Art, Solomon also pointed his camera - virtual - for a whole day at the gigantic building - virtual - without ever moving an inch - or a pixel, in this case.
Whether it's pure entertainment, as in Let's Play, or wanting to learn about how to improve your style of play, as in speedrun or playthrough (recorded game sessions with the sole purpose of showing what happens, step by step), or even indulging in contemplation and reflection, as happens for machinima, the macro set of Video Game is therefore a consolidated and living reality, which calls into question the main function of the video game itself, now no longer to be considered only as ergodic text, usable only for the pleasure of the individual player. And this is just the beginning: just think of the exponential rise of eSports, which are gradually gaining pages of newspapers and interest from sponsors and more and more people - and even here, the variety of games is unquestionable: from classic sports simulations, such as football and basketball, to strategy games and team shooters. eSports are actually competing with classic, real-world sports in terms of audience - as long as the distinction is still valid.
The question is, more than anything else, whether an overtaking is plausible at this point: that of the game watched on the game played.
