Games as Art.

The chances are you won’t have listened to the third podcast. In it I suggested that Space Invaders in the right context could be art.

Artist Douglas Stanley seemed to agree. At Leipzig he unveiled the ‘Invaders’ piece. A 9/11 based game with two towers inserted into Space Invaders. The message is a damning comment on the Iraq war. You can’t win, the war continues forever.

Look at my last post.

I’ll wait.

See the last sentence. People don’t. Cries of insensitivity abound. For those touched by 9/11 it is still fresh. Censorship of serious social comment is extreme though. Movies have used the tragedy as a back drop for years, and for profit.

It’s hard to shake the feeling Stanley’s mistake was venue. Art is context. Debuting at a game show lacks the gravitas of a gallery which could have shielded the piece from claims of insensitivity and immaturity.