Click here to play White Veil, an art game created in Second Life by acclaimed metaverse artists Cica Ghost and Bryn Oh, an artist based in Canada whose virtual world-based works are actually funded by her local government. Unlike Bryn's previous works, which are more like site-based installations built in a 3D online world, White Veil is very much a game -- albeit a surreal and dreamlike platformer:
"The visitor has a goal to climb up a tower," Bryn explains to me. "Along the way I have created various obstacles ranging from giant balls that they need to avoid, floating Nya cubes that will attempt to bounce you high into the sky, turrets and evil magnets that bind you until you are squished. If you are caught many of these send you back to the start of the sim to try again. There are secret ways up the tower and useful shields that protect, for a short time, against these assaults."
While this also sounds fairly fun, it's also meant to be a mordant metaphor for social media and the gamified algorithms that regularly exploit us on the daily. As she explains on her blog:
Now if you combine an algorithm with a product we get for free, a product which is designed and packaged to be addictive and fun then it really doesn't seem dangerous or alarming. So my portion of this artwork was gamified because I wanted to show a dark idea but then paint it pleasant. Hide the message behind cute things and funny noises. Does this artistic method work? I am not sure but that is the experiment I had with this artwork and I hope you enjoy it.
Much (much) more here. Or as Bryn puts it to me pithily: "The gamification obscures the message in the artwork almost like a paint stroke. It is part of the message in that it obscures."
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