In 2010, Jordan Magnuson did something special: He set out on a crazy adventure to travel Asia and make short computer games (and notgames) about the things that impacted him along the way. After 236 days of travel through five Asian countries (Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia), Jordan's adventure of "gametrekking" was completed, as well as 10 games made during and about this journey and the people and places he visited.

I contacted Jordan and asked him a few questions about travel, games and notgames.

VGT: Coincidentally, you and me have some things in common: we both travelled in Asia at the same time, for a similar amount of time. Contrary to me, you had a "mission" - to make games as well as travel. How did that work out? Did you find it difficult to combine the movement of travel with the sedentary business of making games?

Jordan: Overall, the gametrekking journey was incredibly rewarding: as I’ve said in my retrospective, I wouldn’t trade my experiences hitchhiking down the east coast of Taiwan, couchsurfing in the Mekong delta, or visiting the Killing Fields of Cambodia for anything. I love traveling purely for its own sake, but at the same time I’ve done a lot of traveling, so I enjoyed having a particular “mission”, as you put it, on this occasion: I like uncertainty and challenge, and Gametrekking provided me with plenty of both. Even after it was successfully funded, the project was somewhat unprecedented, and a big unknown in a lot of ways, which made things exciting.

Tale of Tales, the Belgian couple behind experimental games like Endless Forest, The Graveyard, The Path and now Bientôt l'été, are known for their artistic, dreamlike games. In August 2011, they helped curate a small exhibition accompanying the Cologne Games Lab. The show included games experiments like Dear Esther, Kairo, Trauma as well as Amnesia and Tale of Tales' own titles and offered a unique glimpse into a creative games underground. 

The motto and title of the exhibition, and of the games shown in it, was "notgames".  And that's a problem.

Anthemios: Fallout New Vegas

Why play? There are many reasons. This is mine.

Our ancestors are within us. For roughly 200,000 years Homo sapiens sapiens has roamed the planet, and it's easy to forget that we, as our even more remote relatives, are nomads by nature - hunter-gatherers, wanderers, vagrants. It has only been a puny 8,000 years since our style of life has become sedentary, since the concept of 'city' or even 'village' appeared, since both the blessing and curse of 'civilization' were realized. Man is - both physically and mentally - nomadic.

Christopher David Sellner Adler is one of DADIU's most successful graduates. In his project for the Danish  games incubator, 1916 - Der unbekannte Krieg and A Mother's Inferno, he has taken the role of Game Director and, with his team of fellow DADIU students, has succeeded in creating fresh, memorable and unsettling game experiences. Born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1985 to immigrant parents, his family is firmly rooted in cinematography: His German-born father was a cinematographer of both fiction and documentary, while his mother, who is of US origin, primarily teaches production design. Currently David is attending the Danish film school, but for now, his focus is firmly on games.

I had a lot of questions for David, and he took the time to answer at length. Here's the full interview.

Robert de Niro in Scorsese's "Taxi Driver", from Kent's project "Zappers" (2011).

Eron Rauch, "A Land to Die In (Every Player Corpse from 1-70)" from A Land to Die In (Detail)

A few weeks ago, LA-based artist, writer and VGT-reader Eron Rauch contacted me to discuss some of the finer points of In-Game Photography. This conversation led me to ask him to collect his thoughts in an essay about the relation of In-Game Photography and traditional photography and art. Here it is.  

If you are anything like me, you had friends who linked Rainer's "The Art of in-game Photography." If you are anything like me, you saw many of your friends duke it out on Facebook and Twitter over whether or not this was a legitimate art — whether it was  even photography.

The arguments, if I may dramatize them like a cheap real-crime TV program, went something like this: It's photography. No, it's not photography. Yes it is. No it isn't. Uh-huh. Nuh-uh. Your mother's not photography. Well your mother was photography last night.

Then: You own the image. No you don't own the image. Yes it is. No it isn't. Uh-huh. Nuh-uh. I own your mother. Well I owned your mother last night.

I have spent too much time drinking coffee and waiting in lobbies in League of Legends (to inevitably have the 5th PUG pick Feeder-Yi). I spent this time mulling over why this video-game-photography-thinger gets people so worked up. Here are two thoughts:

1) Both sides of these arguments seem to have good points.

2) What sides? The history of photography is way too weird for binaries.

The more I turned these two ideas around the more it occurred to me that they were related. Additionally, the more I pondered the original article on In-Game Photography (IGP) and the very polarized reactions it elicited, the more I grew adamant that these strong reactions mean that this subject is a very important notion to ponder and hence make art about.