Dead Bug Creek, Ashley Pinnick’s final project
Jessica Conditt via engadget:
Picture an art school. Visualize the hallways of a university dedicated to the arts, the classrooms lined with paint tubes, charcoal sticks and nude models. Imagine the galleries where outgoing seniors present their final projects. Consider the thick-framed glasses that sit atop students’ noses as they sketch, sculpt, write and design the things that lurk in their wildest daydreams. Now picture a creation so strange that the school’s professors aren’t sure how to critique it from an artistic angle, let alone how to assign it a grade.
In Pasadena, California, Art Center College of Design graduate Ashley Pinnick faced this problem in her last semester, with her final project: a video game.
Specifically, Pinnick’s project was a quirky exploration game for Oculus’ VR headset called Dead Bug Creek. It was wildly different from her peers’ creations in the Illustration degree program, but not because it was more experimental or nonsensical: It was the only video game on display because Art Center didn’t have a technical video game development program. Pinnick taught herself how to code and design a game, all in her final year of school and with the confused blessing of her professors.
“There definitely were [teachers] who couldn’t hold a video game controller when I tried to demo it for them,” she said. “It’s just not in their wheelhouse. They had no idea.”
It may seem contradictory for a school founded on creativity to not fully recognize the artistic merits of a modern medium. Pinnick’s teachers weren’t old-world leftovers disconnected from modern society and Art Center itself wasn’t a backward-facing school. Still, many of her mentors couldn’t critique the art that she created because it took the form of a video game. They could see individual pieces as art — the 3D models, concept designs and environment work — but presented as a whole, most of her teachers were stumped.
She would try to explain it: “This entire thing is art. But it’s not a piece of fine art that I’m just going to make to not make any sense. … You don’t have to be afraid to call it a game.”
The problem isn’t that video games are new. After all, Atari released Pong in 1972. But, video games have long carried a reputation of being childish, and recent mainstream stories about harassment and bullying do little to dissuade this perspective. Reluctance to see video games as art may stem from the fact that, to an academic audience, gaming is still infantile.
A lot like film used to be.
Déjà vu
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