The Art of the Game

Gaming has had a significant stake in the conversation around contemporary art for a number of years, from exhibitions such as “Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt” at the V&A to Gabriel Massan’s collaborative show at the Serpentine to Mitchell’s F. Chan’s recent exhibition at Nguyen Wahed, “Insert Coin(s).” Given the importance of coding and software to digital art, not to mention the trend for technostalgia, it is perhaps unsurprising that artists are increasingly exploring games as vehicles for creative play. If one of the consequences of the platform economy has been a wholesale gamification of life — from micro-incentives that reward particular behaviors to leaderboards that commodify culture — then games can also serve as safe spaces for social critique.

Today sees the launch of a new game, LIFT (a self portrait), by the artist Snowfro, otherwise known as Erick Calderon, which imagines life as an endurance test requiring daily digital labor. Comprising a cast of Web3 characters who demand constant engagement, Calderon admits that LIFT is also a reflection on his own life as an artist and CEO of Art Blocks. Here he discusses the genesis of his project with another artist, Mitchell F. Chan, who in recent years has turned video games into conceptual artworks that show up the invisible realities behind digital culture. Their conversation is hosted by Alex Estorick.

Alex Estorick: Erick, tell us about your new project, LIFT, and how it emerged.‍

Erick Calderon: I’ve been playing video games for a really long time, but never really graduated from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991). I always kept coming back to that, no matter how good the games got. I started my kids playing old school video games. They play some of the new ones — the driving simulators are much better today — but to me the original versions are the best. 

We went through a period last year when we were playing a lot of handheld games. Then, my kids asked me, “Dad, can we make a game?” In the past, the answer would have been no, there’s no way. But with the advent of ChatGPT and AI, instead of saying no, I said, “well, maybe, I don’t know, let’s go ask the computer.” 

What came out of that was a very rudimentary game where my kid would run towards traffic and dodge cars while collecting coins. We created this very basic thing with Cursor, but then he wanted to add a leaderboard at the end and it broke everything. The AI was no longer able to keep up, and it turned into a complete disaster. I came back to it with a different approach. Instead of asking AI to build the game for me, I asked AI to teach me how to code in C in the context of the Game Boy Advance. I ended up creating a website where I took ChatGPT and asked it to make a 25-page research paper on how to build a video game in C. Then I took it to Cursor and made an interactive website. I spent five days with flashcards and JavaScript, and figured out how to do it. At that point, I was wondering if I could somehow make it compatible with Art Blocks. 

‍I want everything in my life to be unique, and everything I do is about trying to make, mass produce, and automate individual items.

I have this little character named the “little man” that I’ve been making since 2013 or 2014 — a pixelated character with an afro who is meant to be the most basic version of a stick figure, the most basic version of me. My wife and I started thinking about how we could make it into an embroidered project, and we started iterating on the variability of a small number of pixels.

I thought it would be really interesting to make a project around that as a self-portrait. But I don’t see my thing as a game so much as a kind of Tamagotchi-like experience. When people clicked on the Chromie Squiggle and figured out that it moved, a little thing went off in their minds. But with the Squiggle you do it once, and you might never click it again. Thanks to the blockchain, we can create individuality by giving people both ownership and a live experience in the browser. I asked myself what it would take to create something where people wanted to come back every day. It all came together in a self-portrait project that is a commentary on the daily grind of being in this space. 

It takes up to 90 days to beat the game, and it’s really annoying. I can’t wait for people to tweet about how “this is stupid. I’m not coming back every single day for 90 days.” It’s really making my point of how hard it is to just show up every day.

‍AE: Building “homebrew” video games that are playable via legacy systems like the Game Boy also makes me think about a kind of generational technostalgia, which has always been part of the culture of crypto art to some extent. It seems to me that one of the reasons that games can be so powerful is that they offer respite from normative forms of cultural programming. Mitchell, you’ve said that if art has a duty “it is to render visible the conditions in the world which are ubiquitous but otherwise invisible.” Are games the ideal medium for that?‍

Mitchell F. Chan: Like Erick, I’ve been interested in blockchain as a medium through which to make art for a long time. I moved towards games largely because blockchain culture and basically every single application of blockchain — not only the art — reinforces the models of broader culture whereby everything is gamified. Even if you want to launch some kind of DAO [decentralized autonomous organization] to fund charitable causes in impoverished parts of the world, there’s going to be gamification: there’s going to be a points system or leaderboard; It’s ridiculous.

If I go to get coffee in the morning, I get points for it. If I then take an Uber home, the driver gets what is essentially a quest notification on their head-up display, and completes the fetch quest to get me. I’m just some random NPC [non-player character] in his life. It’s like, “thank you for taking me back to the castle. Plus $6.” 

As an artist, I don’t care whether it’s oil paint, marble, cardboard, whatever, it’s all the same — you’re just trying to tell a story about the world. In a world that is a series of interconnected, gamified processes, it’s natural to use games as a medium. You can use games to talk about the structure of sexism or inequality, or you can use them to talk about your own personal experience living in this world. It’s an incredibly flexible medium for artistic expression.‍

EC: I think that gaming can play a role potentially in supporting art institutions. Indeed, that might be what it takes for future generations to participate and feel a connection to institutions to support them financially. 

There’s something really permanent about gaming, and it’s not born of today’s gamer generation. It reflects the fact that we’re still preserving Atari and Nintendo game systems and even building systems on archaic code bases that are completely counterintuitive and awful to work with. I jumped on the NFT bandwagon because I saw an opportunity to preserve my work for a longer period of time. The archaic quality of these games actually offers double protection.

‍AE: The metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico once described the Greek poet Homer as “the tragedian who on a limited and enclosed platform manipulates the few characters of a tragedy, … close-packed by the lines of construction.”¹ Despite the fact that he was making paintings, de Chirico imagined the world as a nostalgic stage set. Mitchell, what can you tell us about your latest work, The Zantar Triptych (2025), as well as previous games like Winslow Homer’s Croquet Challenge (2022) that situate players within an enclosed, almost metaphysical, environment?‍

MFC: Most of my games to date use the same trick, and I think it’s a good trick so I’m gonna keep using it. 

The trick is that I get the user to start off thinking they’re playing one game, and then I show them that they’re playing another game. 

My first video game work, Winslow Homer’s Croquet Challenge is a fun little croquet game. But if the viewer zooms out, they realize that the game exists inside a very particular framework, which is maintained by a particular kind of world. This idyllic, perfectly manicured croquet field is in fact sustained by a frame where sexism and male chauvinism creep in — I couldn’t keep it out. There’s prison labor on the outside.

With my game The Boys of Summer (2023), the user begins thinking they’re playing a baseball management simulation game. Then the scope of the game gradually expands until they’re playing a nutritional supplement management game and a debt refinancing game, while experiencing all of these other number-go-up, number-go-down systems that we all engage with to continue the business of being alive today. It’s about the massive scope creep taking place in our own personal lives and in society.

When I was younger, the only place I’d see a whole bunch of numbers was in the baseball box scores in the newspapers. Now it’s like, “my blood pressure is this; my cholesterol is that; my sleep app only gave me a 93 sleep score,” and so on. 

With Zantar, you start off playing a game, and then I take it away from you. Why do that? Because I believe that the way life works now, and the way it works being a consumer financial entity in the year 2025, is that society convinces us that we’re playing one game but it has this whole other second-order game that we’re all trapped in. 

Maybe you go through enough of my artworks, internalize that idea, and then you too will look around at the second-order systems that are impacting your life.

‍AE: Erick, for LIFT you’ve used your company Generative Goods to develop an on-chain cartridge cover. What more can you say about that?‍

EC: To me, part of the nostalgia is not just playing the game, it’s going to Target and pulling the thing off the shelf and waiting in the car while your parents drive you home where you unwrap it. There’s also this creased poster that somehow still makes it onto your wall with all the creases on it. 

I really want to communicate how intentional this project is. The NFT itself is like the cover art for the game — it’s just the placeholder. But that digital object allows you to download the sticker, the poster, the cover art, and it allows you to download the game. I have this big bet that the blockchain is going to be a very durable medium that, in 20 years, will allow you to access your DIY project and download the box, etc. 

It’s really important to me to be able to give people the experience of a mass-produced video game with the same quality, box design, and insert, but yours is a unique, individualized object and there’s no other copy of it on the planet. 

‍AE: I wonder if part of the current interest in DIY and retro tech is driven by skepticism of contemporary technological systems, whose seamlessness obscures their often insidious operations.‍

MFC: For me, even in aspects of my project that are a little bit lower tech, the answer is that it’s just very difficult to make a video game. 

Most of the games that we play were created by hundreds of people over the course of years. If you’re just a lone artist, you have to pick and choose where your effort and where your complexity is going to be. You absolutely should not be trying to reinvent every single part of the wheel.

If you are doing the things that make me excited about games as an artist, then probably you’re not trying to reinvent graphics. Because if you just care so much about aesthetics, you could do painting, you could do sculpture, you could do glitch art, generative, or algorithmic art.

Instead, what do you focus on? In Erick’s piece, which I’ve been able to preview before most people, he is innovating the interaction mechanism. Of course, the graphics and aesthetics are a reflection of him and his aesthetic sensibilities. But when I played LIFT, the part that was most surprising was this notion of a game where you have to do a task every day for 90 days. That’s where the innovation is and that’s clearly where the thought was entered.

‍EC: The game has two modes: regular mode and endurance mode. Endurance mode has no end to it, but in regular mode the game lasts for a set duration of up to 90 days. When you start the game, you meet the protagonist in the form of an animated character, and you have to press the A button to build your support in order to prevent yourself from being crushed by a rock. When you have 20 supporters, the rock is at its highest level. 

But, just like everyday life, people have their own lives to deal with, and so, over the course of a day, all of your supporters will disappear. As a result, once every 24 hours, you have to rebuild your support otherwise the rock crushes the protagonist and the game is over. 

We’ve gone from one click with the Chromie Squiggle to maybe 9,000 clicks in order to successfully participate in this project. If you can go 90 days, or whatever your mint dictates, without being crushed, you win the game. But because I love the surprise I feel when opening a pack of baseball cards or whatever, along the way you are awarded items that either make your job a little easier or a little bit harder. Some items will actually reduce the length of the game. 

In the world of crypto, there is always a detractor: that person who subtweets you on a random day that takes all the energy out of your life and makes you feel like shit. The detractor is a little character who appears at random in the game, jumps up and down on the rock and makes it fall at a faster rate. There’s also the bear market, which forces you to press the A button 50 times in order to add a supporter (instead of the standard five presses), a Red Bull can that helps you out when you need it most, and fairy dust, which will automatically revive you if you have it in your inventory. 

By allowing players to choose the items they want to use from the menu, the experience of the game is a little like Zelda. I felt a need to add in a mini game, so every so often a Chromie Squiggle worm will squirm across the screen for you to capture. It’ll be interesting to see how many Squiggles are captured if anybody even beats this game.

All of the supporting characters are self-portraits by people I’ve invited who have been around for the last few years during the coldest crypto winter of all. Every single supporter in the game has shown up every day.

‍MFC: When you say that this is for everyone who’s been here all along, you really cut to the core of why games are such an important medium. Beyond the story of The Heroic Struggle of Snowfro In The Bear Market — which I’m imagining like Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) with a Pepe head and zombie hair — there is a certain amount of empathy that comes from being the protagonist.

Video games are empathy machines, and when I sit down to play LIFT, I am not watching this stick figure that is supposed to represent Snowfro, I am that character. 

When you put someone in front of a game, they identify with the subject in the middle of the frame much more readily than they do if they’re looking at a painting. That changes their perception of self and you can only do it in this medium. For now, pushing that button means lifting a rock, but it is also the daily grind of showing up for your friends or being a spouse or parent. That’s a very cool thing to be able to do.

I am so excited for all of the other artists who are taking things to another level. Just last week Jonathan Mann live-coded a game, Coldplay Canoodlers, following the viral kiss-cam at their recent concert. He said to me, “I wish I could mint this as an NFT,” and I texted him right away: “you have to do it.” And he did. I bid on it. Go bid it up, everyone. It’s an historic NFT!