(Fig. 1: Pac-Mondrian – a game that relates modernism to ‘classic' game design)
Modernist Utopia in Video Game Design and Theory
Applying Greenhalgh's 12 Principles of Modernism to Videogames
This comparison will start with principles of Decompartimentalisation (1) and The Total Work of Art (2). In a similar way to the ‘project of modernity formulated in the 18 th century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment' (Habermas, 1980:9), the concern of the Modern Movement was to ‘break down barriers between aesthetics, technics and society' (Greenhalgh, 1990:8). Videogame theorists, specially the ones who consider themselves as ludologists, attempt this same sense of decompartimentalisation today. Researcher ITU Copenhagen Espen Aarseth's lecture on the subject of video game theory was entitled Games and the Study of Games – Between Art, Society and Technology (Aarseth, 2004). The notion that videogames combine all this elements contributes to the idea that games are The Total Work of Art. In fact, the Zero Games Manifesto by Emma Westecott states that ‘
The game is the Great Work', a status close enough to the bauhausian idea of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk' – in fact, the number of techniques required to complete a videogame resembles the Bauhaus pedagogic structure (Fig.4). Westecott's statement also attempts to finish the debate over the question if videogames are art or not by simply stating that they are bigger that that.
