Video game developers from IBORG Fedya Balashov, Yuliya Kozhemyako, and Margarita Skomorokh will talk about new ideas and principles in the making of games, various forms of self-organization and cooperation in game development (jams, festivals, collections of short games), and the relationship between art games and the contexts and media environments where they emerge.
Video games are the latest big medium that has accumulated expressive means from a variety of art forms, and their cultural resonance is hardly surprising.
However, the expressive potential of video games has not been fully explored. Although the medium continues to grow and develop, it is encrusted with conventions. For example, most commercial games have a system of rules that the player needs to follow in order to win, lose or move forward. Even art games often reproduce similar systems and standard algorithms, limiting the scope of experiment to audio and visual design or the narrative that is attached to the conventional agonal structure and genre clichés. When contemporary artists turn to video games, they also tend to reproduce some of their typical features, even if they do so to deconstruct them.
IBORG have chosen a path alternative to both game development and game art. The concept of shifting at the heart of their ideology points to the unclear future of video games and the inescapability of total doubt and creative search. IBORG avoid reproducing or critiquing game conventions in their games and instead aim to clear their work of these clichés completely. Exploring and developing the medium as an aesthetic phenomenon in its own right, they search for new ways of structuring the player’s experience beyond storytelling or competition.