Art games that explore society

What happens when artists create games that define unexplored frontiers in new media art? Through art games, they can decode our political system, create a dialogue about refugees, and even raise questions about the Kashmir issue. All this and much more is being explored through an array of board games and digital games developed by eight international artists who have spent six weeks at Khoj Studios working on their projects.

Khoj International Artists’ Association will present Of Games-III, a show resulting from a six-week long art and gaming residency at Khoj Studios which begins on October 15.

“The residency is closely curated to facilitate and incubate innovative projects that push the boundaries of contemporary art practice by exploring the burgeoning culture of art games within game development. Art Games defy and critically engage established tenets of gaming experience by breaking down traditional game mechanics, incorporating notions of identity, identification, immersion etc into the structures of game making. With its gaming residencies, Khoj is partaking in this global conversation around gaming as experiences of art,” said Promona Sengupta, curator at Khoj. 

With over a decade of experience in practising design, Chinmayee has worked with user experience(UX), interface design, wire-framing and branding, using visual art as a catalyst. She says about her gaming project, “The Indian Government structure is ambiguous to majority of the Indians. My project looks towards decoding and understanding conversations between the Indian Government system and the common man. This game offers an in-depth journey into the know-how of the systems at large. Through a strategy based game play that leads to competitive and alliance based interactions between the players, a conversational space about the working of the Government system is initiated. The game’s objective is to increase the interest level of the player in complex political and social changes through a light and fun based game play.” 

Krishnarjun Bhattacharya is an author, film-maker, and storyteller who is fascinated by all things supernatural, and firmly believes that stories have vast, untapped power; that stories can document and change history itself.

He is working on two projects—Amor Fati is about an eternal battle between Hope and Despair, as they try and control a mortal’s life and steer it towards their own end. Players play as Hope, Despair, Mirth, Ego, or as the Mortal — this game being about pure storytelling, countering other stories with stories of your own, and believing in a world enough to make it real.

The other project, An Old Lady Dies is about storytelling balanced with gameplay on a game board. A rich old woman dies, and relatives turn up for the inheritance, except none of them knew the old woman at all. 

Through photographs and visual cues the players try to lie their way into convincing the lawyer that they did know her the most, until night falls and the old woman’s ghost appears on the game board.

Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra work collaboratively in a wide variety of media including painting, sculpture, installation, film and design. Their work responds to Bhau Daji Lad Museum’s collection and space, exploring the idea of “play” from cultural, strategic, and psychological perspectives, with the title “Walk of life.” The game is built upon the ancient Indian game called Ganjifa, Originally played with a set of 120 cards, the artists have turned it into a board game that depicts Dashavatar, the ten earthly incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu.

The avatars can also be considered as the evolution of mankind: from fish, to reptile, to mammal, to human, to deity.

The game aims to impart the meaning of life to those who play it, in effect by paying off one’s ‘debts’ and equalizing one’s ‘scores,’ which are recorded on the card of Karma.