UCLA's Game Art Festival Presses All the Right Buttons

With no less than 40 playable artworks, it's a celebration of cutting-edge gaming creativity.

November 16, 2015, 4:55pm

Images courtesy the artists

Hey, remember when Roger Ebert said "Video games can never be art?" Yeah, neither do we. But just to make sure, this week, for a only-one-night event, the UCLA Game Lab teams up with the Hammer Museum to offer the UCLA Game Art Festival, the fourth edition of the event bringing LA the year's best in experimental gaming creations.

This year's festival includes around 40 cutting-edge works that will take over the museum's large courtyard. Ranging from board games, to food games, to video games, and even to machinima screenings, the event will explore a wide-range of interactive creations that beat with the pulse of the modern zeitgeist. “One of our ongoing goals for the festival is to examine independent games and game art within a multidisciplinary context,” says Eddo Stern, UCLA Design Media Arts professor, artist, and director of the festival. “Several themes we are highlighting in this year’s Festival include: a selection of game projects examining the politics around gender, immigration and violence, the relationship between food and games, experiments in theatre and gaming, and games in the context of contemporary art."

The tight international selection curated by Eddo Stern, Isabelle Arvers, and Lee Tusman—with the participation of Art-Tech meet-up organization Hypercube and indie game-making collective Glitch City—will provide attendees with both independent and experimental creations that blur the lines between art and gaming and question our relationships with contemporary entertainment.

Thanks to a bunch of unique arcade games, a handful of digital delights, a strong live performance lineup, and a brand new food games area exploring how we merge entertainment and cuisine in this modern age, viewers will be able to experience many unconventional modes of gameplay that not only generate new perspectives but also affect behavior, create new player archetypes, and push the creative boundaries ever forward.

Finally, if you need to take a break from the festival madness, you can follow the now-classic UCLA Game Lab Arcade Backpack to the lounge and enjoy a quiet space filled with unique board games, including a revisited chess series, a relationship-related game, and even more playable awesomenesses.

Check out a sneak peek of the festival below: