While I was playing Shadow of the Colossus I perceived a conceptual similarity of the emotions and situations created by the game and some aspects regarding Caspar David Friedrichs painting “Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer”. This inspired me to compare computergames and other imagebased artworks. In my further quest, i will collect pictures that share apects like composition, emotions or situations with computergames.

Shadow of the Colossus and Caspar David Friedrich
I recently started playing Shadow of the Colossus. You play the role of a male protagonist, who tries to revive an inanimate girl. An inconceivable godlike voice orders you to kill sixteen giants called “colossi”. Being triumphant will restore the life of the girl. The “colossi” are the sole inhabitants of an endless world that the lost protagonist explores with his horse “Agro”.

In this game man and nature collide. This struggle is controlled by a godlike being and you don´t really know why you need to take part in that fight. That is not only the main conflict in Shadow of the Collosus but also a topic in Caspar David Friedrichs paintings. Friedrich places man in a powerful natural setting, in which he is isolated, weak, inferior. He is never part of the natural surrounding. Just like our protagonist in the game. Even his horse Agro is not obeying blindly, and follows more than once its own will.

Prey and M. C. Escher
It seems, that computergame development undergoes the same paradigm shifts that can be found in the history of art, especially the history of painting. The historical starting point is marked by primitive cave paintings that progressed over a perspective of meaning (”Bedeutungsperspektive”) to physically correct threedimensional perspective images. “Pong” as the computergame archetype symbolises the skribbled mammoth in Lascaux. “Nintendo´s Super Mario Bros.” translates meaning and importance of game elements into their size (think of the mushrooms or level bosses). And current first person shooters enjoy the mathematical realism to the full. Regarding it this way, computergames have only made it to the renaissance so far. What is missing is a critical analysis of the medium itself, its tools and contexts. In painting this self-reflection led to versatile developments like surrealism, cubism or abstract expressionism (to name a few). Unfortunaltely, the computergame industrie is lacking this critical self-reflection. Innovations are mostly motivated by technological development and the mathematical realism seems to become a fixed point in game development.

But once in a while there is a game that extends this technological paradigm. Just like “Prey” by Human Head Studios. The story can be disregarded at this point, as it is just another game about saving the earth from some kind of alien invasion. But the gameplay offers some quite surprising elements. Especially the features related to the navigation in the virtual space are worth mentioning. Here some parts of the architectural space offer the possibility to walk on the walls or the ceiling. Further the designers introduces switches to change the gravitational pull of the world. Using one of those switches makes the floor the ceiling and vice versa.
The resulting situations in “Prey” remind of painting of M. C. Escher. And from a conceptional point of view both explore mechanics and strategies to create a spatial situation on a two-dimensional surface. What can be perceived is that the artists are exploring the spatial constructions in the domain the piece is perceived. While Escher is examining viewing habits, the designers of “Prey” focus on the way the player navigates in the gamespace.

M. C. Escher challenged the viewing habits that constitute spatial relations on a surface. He constructed the optical illusions by altering the practice of central perspective as he places several vanishing points. These points distort several objects, constructing a shifting perspective in the image.
The gamedesigners of “Prey” extended the way the player moves around in the game and how he deals with other game elements like other players. Making all surfaces walkable constructs a spatial experience that offers freedom and vertigo at the same time.
Though both works defy conventions, there´s a noticeable difference in the specific approaches. As in Escher´s paintings physical plausibility is not the main focus, he can easily show regular people walking upside down on normal staircases. The designers of “Prey” unfortunaltely didn´t take this kind of artistic freedom. They based their world on physical correctness, offering only special locations and situations where the described additional gameplay elements applie. They intensly tried to embed this new feature into a logical context. Thus, the illusionary realm of the game stayed quite figurative.
After all, from Pong to Jackson Pollock it is still a long way.