Game for arty action

Gaming buffs in the country are immensely excited. One of their favourites, Grand Theft Auto, came up with its latest installment last week. A game in which the players can roam around a fictionalised California, assume different identities and engage in numerous activities rendered through state-of-the-art graphics. Chances are high that if one puts forth gaming as a ‘popular artform’ in mainstream culture, it will invite blank stares or be simply laughed upon by art afficionados. But slowly and steadily, artists and designers in the country are beginning to experiment with the medium and are coming up with games embedded in Indian culture. “As a filmmaker, I have explored the medium of films and documentaries for my narratives. Games are a relatively new segment. Here also one has to convey a story but there needs to be a solid culling out of important aspects. It has a lot of scope as the audience is completely involved and even assumes the role of a character in the story,” says Gayatri Kodikal, a National Institute of Design (NID) alumnus, who has come up with a game The Travelling Hand, that is modelled on the dreams of a Georgian queen whose remains are buried in Goa. Be it the rising affinity of youngsters to games owing to gizmos, X-box 360 and Playstations or more focus on story and better graphical abilities, games are becoming a viable means to tell a tale. Games are a model of complexity as they deal with unresolved situations, where a player gets a kick when he can solve them or win them over, feels Prayas Abhinav, an artist and designer who has recently curated two exhibitions, Of Games: Theatre in Code and Of Games: Frameworks In Question at the Khoj Studios in the capital. “As a student of psychology, I believe that gaming is an important artistic tool since it helps in creating a convincing construct of a certain situation. We have an immediate way of breaking out of ourselves and being immersed in gameplay that offers us a system more logically consistent than the one in our consciousness. But at the moment, game development is restricted to a niche ecosystem constituting of students from NID, Srishti Design School and other premiere institutions willing to experiment,” says Prayas. For many artists, games can help in putting across political, economic and social questions in a relatively ‘less-intellectual’ manner. “Having roots in rural India, I had been researching the history of agriculture for a while. I decided to make a game on the plight of farmers and used the symbolic language of games to put forth what a farmer goes through in times of drought,” says Akhshay Rathore, who has created a game based on Bengal famine of 1950s. But doesn’t a game trivialise a serious issue like this “Some may think so. I feel that as a player, one can empathise with the issue and feel the anxiety, crises and tension of the farmers,” reasons Akshay. But while games become a source for raising pertinent issues, there are many games available in the market that propagate violence, objectify women and even go against the beliefs of particular segment of population. “Just like art is subjective, indigenous games will be under scanner from various sections of society,” quips Prayas. But ask game developer Dhruv Jani, who represents Oleomingus studio that has few artists on board to create games, and created the game Somewhere, and he says the artistic angle is quite fuzzy for him. “As a developer, I look forward to creating an engaging game for the gamers and work on open source software. My codes are available online and anybody can use it. So it is not a masterpiece in that sense!” he dispenses. On being asked how much would one spend in creating such games, Prayas responds, “It completely depends on the person who is creating it. One can make it on a shoe-string budget on an open source software, that looks for crowd- funding and is not meant for commercial gains. Else one can look for collaborations with big studios that can spend millions on creating games.”