A producer/designer of a digital game-based learning product has a big
job. He or she has to come up with a game that is enough like other
games—even board games like Chess and Monopoly, or card games like
Solitaire—yet different enough to be a
challenge. Or, take the risk of inventing something completely different.
In my case, the task is hard for me because I’m not big on game-playing. I am an artist and a
teacher; also, I like to tinker. Computer games haven’t interested me
until now, but I
believe my life work is in the design of a game that happens to require
digital instruments to play.
This occurred to me just a few moments ago when I was creating an electronic
stamp (I had already created another one based on my artwork from
1973). The question arose, “On which of the Emeralda islands would I
find this stamp?")
The reader needs to know that my game plan is for a lake containing ten
islands, and each one is named for the main arts activities that people do
there.
At first I thought it was ArtsPort, for it was there
that I’d made a reference to it in connection with an artist, a former
student in my classes,
Sherry Markovitz. She owns one of my works, the one in the 1973 stamp.
A conflict arose, however, when the sequence of my 40 years’
retrospective had placed that 1973 work stamp in my collection on the island known as MacRitchie’s Fast Free Fine Arts (or MacRitchie’s).
The question as to
where the stamp really belonged, then, posed a dilemma for me: Should it
be found on ArtsPort or MacRitchie’s? What does the fact that Markovitz’
collection has the original got to do with its location in the linear
sequence, i.e., that the stamp is on MacRitchie’s?
The question is wholly of an imaginary nature, but I think a chess
player experiences the same dilemma or decision-making when he or she
considers the moves open to them when it’s their turn at the chessboard.
The chess piece and its position relative to the opponents are constrained
by the rules of the game. The pieces have various “powers” vested in
them. Can it be true of stamps and artworks, too?
My stamp designs have an image and words or numbers on them. Playing
cards, too, have these and they relate to the “power” or “value”
of the card in accordance with the rules or method of play.
Can a stamp
image on a computer screen (or on a real, paper-based, signed, embossed or
otherwise authenticated) endow the player with power? If there is a
“power”, how is it linked to the real world?
I recall the collectible cards used in Magic: The Gathering as
having tiny symbols imprinted on them that were supposedly the instruments
of empowerment. Emeralda is distinguished from this kind of pre-programmed
(printed) game because Emeralda depends on the player’s input; players
only get out of it as much as they put in (in the language of computers in
which Emeralda was conceived, input).
In chess, you put in your mental agility, your ability to recall rules, your ability to forecast the consequences of your move, your
input--or action.
The output is your success in the game: Winning.
Your output in Emeralda
is also winning, which is to see your assets become accessible to many
more people than the old technologies. This is my opinion, as
the inventor of Emeralda. I created it for my asset management and the dissemination
of my assets for a wide an audience as is possible in these times.
In chess each piece is endowed with abilities. In Emeralda, each
artwork is endowed with abilities, too, but these endowments are based on
the conditions of their creation and the state they’re in.
The art's endowments depend to some degree on the audience, too; in instances where
there are owners of the artworks, like Sherry Markovitz, (in the case of prints, there may be many
owners) because it is their willingness to “support” the work that
contributes to the energy, validity and merits of the art. This is
interaction between the artist and the audience.
Prior to the digital age we live in now, mechanical reproduction had a great deal to
do with the value of artworks. Mechanical reproduction may even have meant
the difference between the life of the visual arts and their loss.
Reproductions allowed more people access to the artworks and the art gained value.
Imagine a world
in which artworks were only viable as objects owned by a few priests and
kings. An artwork might literally lose its life when the owner died. There
would be no “art education”, so art would be condemned to mere
artifacts of dead civilizations.
In the age of digital reproduction, the cost of reproducing the visual
image is less compared to mechanical reproduction. The human energy and material resources needed are very
small compared to printing with ink on paper in multiple colors.
Writing,
too, using digital media, is cheaper if it doesn’t have to be ultimately
put to paper printing. Critical, laudatory words of writers (or the words of
the artist) need not be refused by digital publishers as they must be by print-based
ones. The market for
printed matter does not dictate whether opinions about works of art can be
published and shared in the digital world.
Digital reproduction, as I saw it developing in the 1970s, led me to
the idea of Emeralda because it is apparently more powerful than
print-based reproduction considering the expense and the reach an artist
can have via the Internet and the Web.
At a critical point in my career as a teacher, I knew that there would
evolve some changes in the way art is created, sold, and maintained. A new
input/output system was in the making. Where old-fashioned slides had been
the mode of communication in the 20th Century, digital images
would be the mode in the 21st Century. Art education in the
past century depended on slides, magazines and books; art education in the 21st
Century will depend also on digital reproduction.
However, the digital reproductions on computer screens today are as
weak as slides were in their day. I predict that as more artists become adept at input
and output in digital systems, a new kind of art form will emerge, and it
will grow not out of slides and visual communication, but rather out of
interactive games.
That these games should be learning games is, to me, a given. In the
same way that a painting from the past several centuries, reproduced in a
textbook, advertisement (or whose creator’s name is merely mentioned on
a radio or record) carries more than the face value, artworks, based on
digital game-based learning, will have greater value than their visual appearance
alone.
I am already a beneficiary of this revolutionary event. I am already
capable of capturing and manipulating both the real image and its virtual
counterpart. I’m able to invest more information about the art than any
textbook could - or would - ever do. This is an ability that is building on my part as
an artist and potential mentor.
The work of art in the age of digital reproduction will more likely be
experienced in the context of games than in the ways it was experienced in
the past. |
Above: The 1973 lithograph by the author, "Target Heart with Plume," converted into an electronic stamp. You can find it in several places in the game Emeralda that the author is describing in the essay at left. The original print is in the collection of Sherry Markovitz and Peter Millet.
Bill H. Ritchie is an Itinerate Professor based in Seattle. He
taught college (UW) and after promotion to full professor of printmaking
and media arts, he resigned at 43. He then launched several teaching,
research and practice companies. In 1992 he discovered Emeralda, a fantasy
region accessible only by computer. He invented the rules-of-play and
created an operating system for online interactivity for himself.
He writes for the benefit of discipline,
using a PDA when he's wandering around and a desktop PC to organize his
essays. He has a thousand or more saved, which you can see listed on the
ten "islands" on the Web. An example is www.seanet.com/~ritchie/spzine.html,
on the island of RIISMA in the Emeralda Region.
For
further information contact Bill H Ritchie via e-mail at ritchie@seanet.com.
His professional Web site is at www.seanet.com/~ritchie.
The company name is Emeralda Works, 500 Aloha, Seattle, WA 98109. He can
be reached by telephone at (206) 285-0658. |