Whether via the lamentable trend of gamification or through the very public release of Jane McGonigal’s new book, the topic of videogames’ impact on the real world has been front-and-center of late.
Enter iCapitalism, an iOS game that critiques both capitalism and iOS games through a simple design.
As in Godville, there’s no gameplay. But unlike that game (which actually sells gameplay energy in earnest), iCapitalism is driven entirely by microtransactions. When you make purchases in the game, you rise on the leaderboard. Players are allowed to post a message on the leaderboard, so the most free of wallet also get their message heard, at least within the context of iCapitalism.
Given my accidental commitment to gameplay-free games, I’m fascinated by concepts like this one. As casual mobile and online games move more and more toward purposes of challenge-free time-wasting (a valid use, by the way!), it’s worth reminding ourselves of the logical (if absurd) endpoint of such efforts.
Here’s the kicker though: Apple rejected iCapitalism during App Store review. The developers seem confused by this (noting that they didn’t use any undocumented APIs), but it’s clear that Apple is exercising their new policy to limit programs that don’t offer much value (in their estimation). From the September 2010 Ap Store Review Guidelines:
- We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps.
- If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.
- If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you’re trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.
Apple has also indicated that the more an app charges (whether through initial purchase or in-app purchases), the more strenuous their review will become.
The problem is this: iCapitalism does do something useful and provides some form of lasting entertainment—precisely by not doing anything useful in a smart way. Apple’s ironic blindness for irony on the App Store is legendary, but in this case I doubt the faceless review bureaucrats even realize that the joke’s on them.
But on the flipside, the iCapitalism developers’ blog post about the rejection degrades from sharp (if simplistic) commentary into all-too-familiar whining about Apple review policies. Something more complicated is going on here.
When I made Cow Clicker, I argued that “satire these days risks becoming mere conceptual art.” I still think that’s true. In the heyday of conceptual art, it was sufficient artistic work simply to question that the work itself was the important part of the art. It was a natural extension and intensification of the critique of art developed by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. What better way to draw attention to the process and context of art than simply to post instructions for making art as the art itself—such was conceptualist Sol LeWitt’s strategy, one further developed by Robert Rauschenberg, Yoko Ono, Piero Manzoni, and others.
When Manzoni claimed to have encased his own feces in a box that he then exhibited, the effect was clear; it provoked certain questions in the viewer. Can shit be art? Does it matter if there’s really shit in the box? Is art meant to represent anyway, or just to provoke?
The problem is this: conceptual art is precious and gimmicky. It has proliferated, overtaking almost all other forms of contemporary creativity. It’s become the norm. So much art is conceptual nowadays, even work that doesn’t deserve the name “art.” What’s iFart, after all, but conceptual art? It poses questions like, what if your fancy new $500 iPhone was just a whoopee cushion? What is the minimum functionality possible in an app? Why is farting any less absurd and embarrassing than tweeting or receiving phone calls in public?
In their own backwards, totally unaware way, Apple is trying to bring an partial end to the era of conceptual art. It’s no longer sufficient to pose a question like, “what if an app did nothing but ask you to spend money?” Instead, it ought to get people to do nothing more than to spend money, offering tiny, subtle peepholes through which to understand the difference between enjoyment and absurdity. This is much harder work than faced the conceptual artists of the twentieth century.
Comments
Cobb
Au contraire. Apple is contributing to the literacy of people who read instead of pursuing the pretense that i-anything could possibly be art.
Dakota Reese Brown
I’m probably going to come off sounding as a Jobsian fanboy here, but that is an unfortunate side effect of the point I’m about to make. The iOS platform/store is the first viable mobile…just about everything. It is Apple’s Louvre of what mobile can & could be.
So…
Developers: Sorry guys, but piss off. If you don’t like Apple’s controls, don’t develop for iOS. It is as simple as that. Saddle up on your high horse and ride in the polar opposite direction of your potential cash cow.
Artists: Art, valid or not, has never been guaranteed a spot in anyone’s museum and has no “right” to a critical mass. Those are things that are earned, lucked into, exhorted, or stolen.
With iCapitalism, I can’t help but wonder if it is an actual critique or a fart joke that a critique could be based upon. If it was intended as a true critique, I find myself disappointed in the critics because they failed. Specifically, did they select iOS as a medium or as a platform?
If they choose iOS as their medium, they made the mistake of not knowing their medium. The precedence for this rejection was set in August 2008 with the removal of the “I am Rich” app. Sure there’s nothing to really lose by doing a 2 day experiment to re-test those waters, but if that is the case, they shouldn’t be surprised when the experiment failed.
My guess is that they chose iOS as a platform because it allowed them to turn something like this out in 2 days. That being the case, see my above note to developers.
Justin Parsler
Possibly, the ‘faceless review bureaucrats’ actually DID get what was going on and rejected the app on that basis: their product was, after all, being mocked. Were iApps to end up all being commentaries on how bad iApps were I am sure our faceless friends would be unhappy and the iphone would move from a perception of being trendy and cool to a perception of being an exploitative waste of time.
David Rylance
Hi Ian. Thanks for this post. I’m currently working on a piece to do with the problems for artistry in online media so this is really helpful. I was wondering if you might be able to help me out by clarifying something. Is your argument here that it would be less illusory, ideologically speaking, to get people to spend money and nothing more, in a transaction that justified itself by nothing else other than understanding the difference between enjoyment and absurdity that should derive from the experience of one’s purchase? A sort or riff on Morton’s “meta-” critique, in which conceptual art here is understood to operate as a obfuscation of the act of spending via a sophisticated reflexive pellet of interrogation that diverts one to “the next level up”, to the satisfying, self-critical but also totally anti-critical bathos of how one spends?
Ian Bogost
David, I’m not sure that I have a specific artistic fiat in mind, but I am more interested in actually carrying out the experience than just provoking the idea of the experience. The trick is to make the critique obvious within that experience, rather than relegated just to the white box or the critic’s notebook.
David Rylance
Ian. That’s really interesting: “carrying out the experience [rather] than just provoking the idea of the experience”. I can see how “making the critique obvious within that experience” could be hugely important in terms of the architecture and purpose of something like newsgames: since news itself, of course, works so hard to expel the critical coordinates in which any given fact is registered and does this, moreover, by informing. In this, it is ideologically oriented, of course, but it also thrives on being “contentless” in a quite specific way: on a kind of critical white-out (for instance, a rise in food prices will be reported but not the starving bellies this entails) that is all about not only misinformation (though that too) but also minimum functionality of information: a ‘competence’.
The thing I can’t help but wonder, though, is whether the app market is itself what is precious and gimmicky because it thrives on the idea that it is manufacturing conceptual art. As you say, if it is the case that the Apple review bureaucrats are notoriously unironic, what they would surely not understand is that a thing like iCapitalism is not at all counterpoised to their definition of value and usefulness. But I wonder whether the fact that there is an too obvious compatibility between the two is not in itself what they’re rejecting. By this, I don’t mean so much that they spurned the app as a critique of themselves – if only – but that they have come to feel that things like this, even if cleverly unuseful, are overwhelming the artistic basis of their market (“We don’t need any more Fart apps.”). I’d argue that the faceless Apple bureaucrats would all see themselves as either artists or art-enablers – as opposed, say, to faceless Apple bureaucrats. And who in the tech industry today, when interviewed, doesn’t invariably at some point compare their technological entrepreneuralism or corporate service to art? You only need open to any page of Wired to find some claim that media creation is really an art. Mind you, I don’t mean here to say that artistry and app production aren’t compatible: what I’m saying is that they are entirely compatible, which means that the the thing to disavow is the notion that the art makes it all worth while, that it’s what makes this not just about mechanical accumulation.
In that sense, I wonder whether it isn’t so much that Apple is trying to bring a partial end to conceptual art – in its totally unaware way – but is, with quite conscious awareness, trying to enforce an ideological definition of a concept of “art” that saves the very idea of their app market as a conceptual art market. After all, isn’t the deceptive crux of all this located in the very notion of a standard of “lasting entertainment” for apps, in which value derives from a proficiency and professionalism (“We have lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour”) that proves itself both proficient and professional through the erasure of absurdity from enjoyment. Even playing as proudly inane a game as iFlatulence, what one is not permitted to know is that one is really and truly wasting one’s time, in the sense of trashing it. The point of fart jokes is literally to squander time with fun (a fine point, may I say): yet the sense of edginess can only be extracted via the introduction of a aesthetic-cerebral element that holds off how tired we all eventually get with puerility. Ditto iCapitalism and banality. So it seems to me that Apple’s new rules are fueled by a fetishistic need to preserve the dignity of the platform itself: they’re saying – one can enjoy but not at the expense of the idea that there is inherent quality to the app platform. The point here being that surely ‘challenge-free time-wasting’ begins with a platform that allows one to create an app in two days, that thrives on that kind of quick turnover – a platform, in other words, that lends itself to being ‘surrounded by amateur hour’. For Apple,the necessity, of course, would be to then conceal this: the fact the whole thing is built on a sort of crudity of profit it feels moved to reject.
I do agree with you that the reflexivity once associated with conceptual art has now become our social and cultural norm. However, I’m not sure this is an argument against conceptual art itself, or that our task today surpasses their’s, insofar, for instance, as the kind of questions Manzoni provoked with his shit box were to do with the difference between the shallows and depths of aesthetic appreciation and sociological distinction, in Bourdieu’s sense. The question being not so much whether boxed shit can be art (it is, by being there) but whether it’s any longer shit (hence the box and the epistemological uncertainty over whether it’s really in there). Could the fact Apple is bringing what it deems to be valueless apps to an end not be a sign not of its unwitting realization of the tedium of conceptual art as today’s norm but rather its inability to tolerate what I might suggest is the inevitable elision of app with spam, of challenge-free time-wasting with the challenge to value of just plain time-wasting? Can Apple or its app-makers ever permit a confirmation that what they produce is simply shit? Isn’t this marketable artistry making sure there’s an alluring box to place it in?
Robert Jackson
Ian,
These are some interesting points. You are right of course on the conceptual gimmicky â??one-linersâ? that have become embedded in art culture. Historically this goes back to a sensibility of making the viewer, participant, player explicit in the work via his/her circumstance. It is this certain provoking of the viewer which is made more important than the work itself.
Concerning gameplay-free games, I think itâ??s worth clarifying â?? from your end â?? whether projects like iCapitalism provide something useful, because they make a salient point to the player about their circumstance in a different way. Or do they achieve depth by making the topic of interest explicit? Or maybe both?
There is the additional issue concerning the proprietary closure of the â??appâ?? and the Apple mobile platform in general (amongst others following the model). Encapsulating the hell out of iOS does them no favours. Alluding to Manzoni again, it looks like Apple are on a mission to cleanse the â??shitâ?? from its platforms.
Mr. Seacrudge
I posted this on the wrong article before:
Hi Ian,
You’re right there’s a lot of shallow “conceptual art”, but think one should still define the term more broadly than you seem to have done here. You’re talking gimmickry, which isn’t unique to conceptual art. They have it in decorative art as well: ever seen Hirst’s “spin” paintings?
Too bad it’ll take more than the greedy controlling buggers at Devil’s Fruit to kill gimmickry. It’ll take a cultural tectonic shift!
However, it seems to me there’s still a tradition of “conceptual” art that merges–or is conscious of the inherent unity of–form and content. And I’d say a lot of games belong to such a tradition (even if most art historians don’t seem to know it yet). This goes both for computer games and traditional games like chess. We need to think of board games as mobile interactive thought sculpture, which is what I’m currently working on on the low-tech level.
To put the idea of “conceptual art” in perspective, you’re probably aware that Duchamp also produced the Large Glass and Given, long after the readymades. These works are both conceptual but also have a strong element of craftsmanship and visuality. Perhaps the whole “retinal/conceptual” thing is a false dichotomy to begin with.
Among other things, I think the readymade tries to bring the artist back into “life” as a field of action, without any specific political agenda. Remember Duchamp’s epitaph:
“Anyway, its always somebody else who dies.”
Isn’t it reminiscent of Heidegger’s conception of death as one’s “ownmost non-relational potentiality-of-being” and his analysis in Being & Time of the “public” conception of death? In the documentary, “A Game Of Chess”, Duchamp is described by his associates as “one who experienced his own death while still alive.”
Duchamp may never have read Heidegger, but he obviously had the same insight, and was able to experience his own death as an artful act. Just as Heidegger moved away from a purely biological definition of life/death.
The problem is, so many of those who’ve tried to follow in Duchamp’s footsteps have seized on the everyday objects but have lacked the esthetic perception, thinking it’s the institutions of art which determine the status of art “objects”. This misses the point and becomes just another gimmick.
I haven’t read the books yet, but I think I may agree with both you and Jane (though I’m highly suspicious of anything funded by the World Bank): Reality is broken, and that’s alright.
Maybe the thing that’s broken about reality is: the fact that we think we know what “reality” is?
This brings me to your thoughts on a “metaphysical video game”, which is what primarily interests me in this discourse. It seems to me any game with hopes of being thoughtfully educational or political has to be “metaphysical” first. Looking forward to the third installment.
As a relative newcomer to the subject, I think that at some point open-ended AI story/plot generation has to meet up with more visually driven computer games, which will then meet up with vastly expanded computerization and democratization of pervasive gaming , when projects like Invisible Cities http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/invisiblecities/, Pastiche http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/projects/pastiche/ , Project Noah http://www.projectnoah.org/, & Historic Earth http://emergencestudios.com/historicearth/ etc. become networked as “pervasive/computer fusion” gaming platforms.
Maybe Frank Lantz is right about this: increasingly the computer is “inside” the game as well as providing an alternet/augmented reality & overarching framework; it provides the global social network, so that the game’s users are constantly generating new content for the game; it provides diverse & dynamic customizable ways in which users can interface virtual worlds with the “real” world; it is itself a kind of gaming platform unique to every user, providing an infinite living pool of data that players organize themselves according to a wide variety of gaming templates that are combined by the user in Its own way.
If Jane is right that what we’ve seen is a mass migration from lived reality into the virtuality of game worlds, what will mass migration of the game world from “virtuality” back into “reality” mean? It’s a fascinating (and also quite disturbing) question. What happens when the user can no longer distinguish game from reality?
I’d be interested in your take on this incipient/ongoing pervasive/video game fusion as a possible realm for explorations of the “metaphysical” video game concept. It is metaphysical in my view because it involves the literal merger of conceptual/symbolic worlds with the “actual/material” world.
Got any interesting info you can share on developments of this sort inside the industry? Or is there something you’ve already written that I’ve missed?