Interview with Pippin Barr

It's a troubled history. My parents are significant art collectors back in New Zealand, so I grew up in the contemporary art world of New Zealand, with art being the most important thing in the world. I've always had a weird relationship to the art world in general. I think the reason that I would say artist now is partly just through the weight of it, and because none of the things I've made are commercial successes of course. They get exhibited and that's the currency that I have in my job, because I work at the faculty of fine arts in a department that is not a game department, it’s a design and computation arts department.

This is the first time I've had one of these full time jobs where you have to justify that you're doing well in your field, and the easiest way to speak the language of my colleagues is to be an artist and to say “I'm exhibiting my work, and this art is internationally respected and therefore you can respect me.” It is the most comfortable label that I can wear around my colleagues as much as anything else.

It's a really weird question, in working in a purely digital medium, the act of exhibiting can be trivial in terms of the work that I have to do to prepare something for exhibition. I just email somebody a zip file. So it's easy to feel detached from the exhibitions themselves, and I very rarely get to attend them, so I don't really have any sense of the physical manifestation. There are lots of smaller galleries and museums who either have a curator who's into independent experimental games in general, or they're trying to catch up with where popular culture has gone in terms of video games being an important thing to younger people, and naturally they want to capture an audience.

I feel things are being taken more seriously with time. I'm showing something as part of the show at the V&A in London, which is definitely the biggest institution I have shown something at. Clambering up a scale of independent galleries and then more established galleries in various countries, and then more recognized institutions as I go along. But it's not part of an overall plan. Basically, this just happened to me. I'm not out there pitching for exhibitions or anything like that.

It's horrifying that it could be either of those or both. I think The Trolley Problem's an interesting one, because that's probably the most serious I've ever been about trying to represent a serious issue. A series of gunshots is the other one that I took very seriously. But with Trolley Problem, the presentation is super minimalist and I can see how you could read it as lightly mocking. But all of the neutrality of the presentation was a calculated idea of shifting the ethical burden onto the player. That totally failed, but it was meant to be an experiment. A series of gunshots is similar - how do you suck away all of the game things that allow people to escape ethical responsibility for game actions. The visual minimalism and the non-evaluation were all part of that. But it's really interesting that it can be flipped around and be seen as lighthearted and not really taking it seriously as well.

I think that the conceptual grappling of most of my work has to do with coming from a family where we talked about contemporary art, and artists were staying with us constantly, talking about their work. You would think about what art is and how it gets made just as much as perceiving it, and about your own reactions to it. And it also comes from my undergraduate degree in philosophy. That plus computer science is a good microcosm of how I operate.
I definitely don't think of myself as making fun of people who want to think about these things. I think there is an ironic or lighter tone, and I think of that again this is a Trojan horse of sneaking more serious ideas into people's consciousness, without it being a Serious Game.

One of the core reasons that all of my games look the way they look is me trying to find the easiest way to have a consistent non-terrible visual look that serves the conceptual purpose of the game, but doesn't require skills I don't have. Thinking specifically about the styles I was mimicking, to me the two major graphical styles in the pixely world (which I've been doing a bit less lately) was first of all late 80s, early 90s Sierra games. Particularly Police Quest One. Some of the games I’ve made literally copy the traditional Sierra walk cycle.

I wanted to use that style in reference to Police Quest, how harsh those games were and how unpredictably mean they were in terms of holding you accountable for the rules of their system. Police Quest is the best example because of the way you die for not following basic procedure. If you run a red light as a police officer, then your car explodes, and you die. That was the way it was, and especially early on I was really interested in that kind of harshness.

I first did it with The Artist is Present. I designed those kinds of character models, and I was interested in the hyper constrained idea of the art world juxtaposed with the hyper constrained idea of Sierra games from the 80s. They were both so rule focused, and I thought that there was a kind of relationship there that made sense to me. The second visual reference is Atari 2600, which I like because it's so insanely limited. It’s an interesting challenge trying to convey more complicated situations than the Atari is normally used for. And again, you don't have to be a graphical genius to put together Atari graphics, which means I can take on the challenge without immediately failing.

I would never dispute that there's a vaguely humorous tone going on in all of these things. The great thing about using Unity is, similar to using Sierra style or Atari style graphics, how much I can get for free. I wouldn't necessarily say my 3D games look good, but they look appropriately 3D. They don't look like somebody who's horrible at using 3D game engines, because 3D is so easy to achieve in Unity. To some extent it's just put a light in the scene and click generate, and stuff happens as if by magic, and you can play with it on a cinematic, directorial level - what angle should the sun be coming through the windows for maximum, “I am at a gallery sensation”.

Yes, probably all of the 3D Unity things I've made except the first one, the stolen art gallery, have been about Unity in one way or another. Using Unity to examine Unity/3D game engines and what are their points of focus and what's interesting about using them and what are we obsessed with, and what are 3D worlds like. Right now, I'm embroiled in this really horrible, upsetting project, a series of games based in Unity where each one examines one of the fundamental ontological units of Unity, camera, lighting, particle effects, 3D objects. I don't know how often you use Unity?

I like that these things can be read in multiple directions. For me the journey of making that translation is super interesting, for the decisions I need to make about how to represent things or what rules you have to abandon because you can't represent them in the new system.

Hopefully the person playing it doesn't just think I'm an idiot who thought this was a faithful rendition of the original thing, but asks themselves why I made these decisions? The Abramović work doubled back to some extent, because it's a terrible remediation of her work which is all about human closeness and the physicality of queuing and the fact that queuing is this human social activity, none of which is true in the game where you're totally isolated and it's a single player experience and everyone else is a robot and Marina Abramović is a robot with no emotions too. But for some of the people who reported back to me on the experience of playing, it did have resonance with the actual work in the intensity of the experience, partly because of the sunk cost fallacy or cognitive dissonance about how much time you spent waiting in an imaginary queue to meet an imaginary person.
But that's true of the original work too. It's scarcity again; sitting with her is not just about the fact that she's an intense person, but that you waited for eight hours to do it and very few people are going to have that experience. So it doubled back in a weird way.

Probably. That's definitely a feature of a lot of things that I do. Like of the museum drawings I have been doing, where I was obsessively drawing museums. It's a little cartoon building, sometimes very abstract, and then a caption saying which museum it is. You can look at hundreds of them on my website. But it's the same kind of effect, where each individual museum is kind of throwaway in the sense that I don't feel pressure to make them a great drawing or a great caption.

But cumulatively the project ends up having a weight around the question of what a drawing should represent and what you can say about a drawing. And about the connections between captions and drawings, and about the contemporary art world, coming through in the weight of all of the drawings, not through any one individual drawing. I guess that's also true of something like PONGS. It's not about whether any one of those versions is a good game or a smart idea, but the overall project is starting to say something about what the composition of Pong is, and about whether a game is the same game when you change one tiny little piece of it. Yes, part of it is that it frees me up to try anything and put it in front of people unapologetically. It's like a carnival ground or something.