In a dark room encircled by a 360-degree screen, Patrick Moran methodically leaps through a series of blue spotlights on the floor. The Barbican curator is showing me an internal cheat code to speed through a section of Book of Sand, a specially-commissioned work named for the Jorge Luis Borges short story about a book with infinite pages. The meditative scenes projected around us are from Tequila Works’ 2017 puzzler RiME, reincarnated in a new form here at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore.
Book of Sand is one of six new installations at Virtual Realms, an exhibition co-curated by the Barbican and Sega alumnus Tetsuya Mizuguchi, who adapted elements of his own game Rez into a new piece for the show. Six game developers were paired with shortlisted media artists to create what Mizuguchi terms an “experiential new artform” for collaborative group play; onedotzero’s Shane Walter jokingly describes the Barbican as a sort of marriage broker armed with lists of potential matches. The idea was to get visitors to think about games as art, and push some boundaries in the process.
Each realm is defined by a theme*:
Synesthesia: “Rezonance” by Enhance and RhizomatiksUnity: “Together: the distance between (us)” by thatgamecompany and FIELD.IOConnection: “Wall” by Kojima Productions and The MillPlay: “Dream Shaping” by Media Molecule and Marshmallow Laser FeastNarrative: “Book of Sand” by Tequila Works and The WorkersEverything: “Eye” by David OReilly and onedotzero
While Virtual Realms is a high-profile instance of well-known game developers working in the physical world — a first for all of them — it also revisits the exhausting question, “can games be art?” Playful interactivity and gamelike experiences have been part of the “established” art world for decades, from Scott Snibbe’s Boundary Functions to Jamie Zigelbaum’s Pixel. Lawrence Lek’s 2065 — echoing the look of an arcade racing game — appeared at the Barbican in 2019. Ian Cheng’s Emissaries, which was acquired by MoMa PS1, used Unity to create a “video game that plays itself.” There’s also the whole Meow Wolf scene — massive, spectacle-like art installations that take cues from immersive theatre.