The UCLA Game Lab, housed within the Design Media Arts department and supported by the School of Arts and Architecture and the School of Theater, Film, and Television, fosters game production and research within an experimental art and design context, emphasizing conceptual risk-taking and new modes of expression through gaming.

In addition to producing games and research, the lab also functions as a center that develops public programming around critical issues in gaming, including public lectures, workshops, exhibitions, a visiting artist program, and an annual public festival at the Hammer Museum.

Below is an interview conducted by indienova with Eddo Stern, the founder and director of the UCLA Game Lab and a Professor of Design Media Arts at UCLA.

Interview

Rashel: Can you briefly introduce why and how the game lab was founded and being interdisciplinary supported by various departments?

Eddo: Before I got hired at UCLA, I was teaching at CalArts where I initiated a new games program. Part of the experience involved determining the school where games should be situated. CalArts has eight different “schools”. I had already taught game-related classes in the schools of film, art, theater, and critical studies. What I tried to really insist on was that games, ideally,and in order to really be radical about experimentation shouldn't fall under any of these other disciplines. "The ninth school of Games" would be its own new school and would not inherit the structures and rhetoric of the other disciplines- it should pull from everything, ideally, but not be positioned under any of them. Fifteen years later, I still have not yet seen examples where games were completely on their own. Even at NYU and USC, they are still under what used to be and are still the film schools.

When I moved to UCLA, my role included the opportunity to start a lab. An agreement was already in place between the dean of the School of Arts and Architecture, which is our school, and the School of Theater, Film, and Television, both expressing an interest in games. It was nice that both schools were willing to collaborate on funding a game lab.. Because I was hired into the Design Media Arts department, that became the home department of the UCLA Game Lab.

The original ideas for the lab were very different from mine. The deans wanted a much more industry-connected model with commercial collaboration with companies like Disney. I resisted that, and there was a year-long tussle to allow the game lab to not fall under that model, which was strongly advocated by the Film school..

I feel fortunate that the lab had autonomy to not necessarily have to work in collaboration with industry. So that's how the lab started. We got a space and a budget, and hired a staff member as manager. From there, we figured out how the lab should run.

R: How do you think this standalone model is beneficial for the game lab compared to other game programs at, for example, USC, NYU, and ETC, etc.?

E: I would say the UCLA game lab is very unique because of the things we don't do. One theory I like to entertain is that the game lab remains experimental by not doing certain things. Once we do certain things consistently, we start to lose the value of that word “experimentation.” When I say we “don't do” something, we still can do them - such as engaging in commercial collaborations if we see them as interesting. But, it's not our mode of operation.

We want to be open to some industrial processes so that students should be able to get jobs, but we don't want to pre-feed them into certain industrial roles or specific companies, which is a contentious and potentially exploitative process of resource extraction from academia. This is one of my criticisms of many other games programs situated in academia - they receive direct funding from big game companies that then use the programs as an human resources extension of the corporation.

The game industries are, I think, very good at getting content out there to the world. But, due to their profit-driven nature, they're by design less experimental. They have to make things that they already anticipate through market research, are going to be popular and profitable. Experimental work does not need to be popular or financially lucrative. It's about trying things, not knowing that they're going to work. So that's a core tension between an industry model and an experimental approach.

To make things even more complicated, you can apply that same idea beyond the industry. There's a lot of grants available to allow the recipients to make games about certain subjects and social problems. I think a little bit of that is good, in the sense of being open to opportunities for collaboration and working within frameworks can be a very creative process, but when these frames become the driving forces for what is being created and engaged with then we lose something by narrowing the breadth of what games can offer as cultural production.

So, we get to that question of art versus design. I feel like the context of experimentation and making games as art is that the frame doesn't necessarily come from the outside. “This game has to run on this platform, sell this many copies, or be about this subject…” Constraints need not necessarily be defined. It's up to the individual to approach games in an open way. It could be that you walked home and saw a snake on the road, got a terrible email from a relative and you started a fight, watched something on the news that really upset you, or experienced a beautiful sunset, then you are inspired to make a project. Or, you are formally motivated and say and very into glitch or collage, so you want to make something abstract or glitchy looking; Or, you are into noise music, so you want to make a really loud game that people can't play. All these ideas emerge from unpredictable places. And this is where the values of art truly shine, allowing openness without a known prompt.

But to complicate things further, of course art has its own constraints. I believe for games to find their full potential, it's important to not put them under any other rubrics, including art. So, I reject terms like “art games,” I don't like that because that's already a constraint, or “serious games,” “games for change,” “polemical games,” or even “experimental games” though If I must choose I can live with the latter — I still want to make sure that it's really experimental and preserve the spirit of the word - which may be closer to “unknown and unpredictable”.

Being skeptical of any structure is what the game lab is good at. And a benefit is we're able to embrace technology in an exciting manner, including advanced software and hardware engineering, robotics, and sensors. We often build our own stuff and have a high level of engagement with experimental technology. We also value analog practice of handmades, screen-free things, communal and social activities, performances, board games, conversations as games, and social games, etc.. We explore every connection possibly around games and see it as an opportunity to create something new.

I sometimes describe my vision around games as a bicycle wheel with the games at the center as a hub, and the spokes are made up of all the possible connections that come out of games, and also go in both directions pointing to back games. Almost any conceivable connection is interesting: Games and music, games and poetry, games and furniture, games and cats, games on the moon.

The idea of the game jam is very much in this spirit - “here's someone's random idea, let's all make a game around this.” It’s an exciting practice that exists within the realm of games culture, and our lab is not unique in relishing the idea of always looking for new things, but we do well as far as being able to preserve that ethos of the game jam within an institutional structure.

R: I really like the Cthulhu way of thinking, touching various disciplines, and that you keep away from any categories, terms, or frameworks. However, I wonder if you still have main research and exploration directions, such as AI (Artificial Intelligence), XR (Extended Reality), AR (Augmented Reality), MR (Mixed Reality), or HCI (Human Computer Interaction), which are commonly discussed. Do you engage in any criticism of these domains?

E: Yeah. In some ways, I think the lab is many years ahead of the current discourse in certain areas. We've been exploring what people now call XR, mixed reality or the intersection of virtual and physical experiences, and experiments in that fluidity. I've been interested in that fluidity for twenty years in my own work. Fifteen years ago at UCLA, we started having classes dedicated to those areas, but avoiding trendy terminology. Sometimes we use off the shelf systems that are interesting to play with, sometimes build and engineer them ourselves; sometimes it's very low tech stuff; sometimes it's people on stage performing alongside projections; Sometimes it’s people using phones to collaborate on game inputs; Sometimes we build devices to wear on your head or body. All of these experiments can fall under some of the definitions you mention but we try to avoid naming and framing them.

I think games, performance, the physical body, and the relations between virtuality and non-virtuality are part of the core interests of the lab. It's not so much in response to trends in discourse. It's just been there from the very beginning. I think any serious media artist has to think about these questions around mediation: What is media? What is special and specific around electronic mediation, and what are the differences between forms of mediation? How does it change the world to talk on Zoom, versus meet in person, versus share a virtual space?

I think AI, obviously, is an interesting and big topic. It's definitely being used and discussed in our classes. I taught an AI and games class ten years ago, and I taught one twenty years ago. I feel the discourse around AI has also been around in media arts all the time. Now it's rising as a tool for creation that is accessible, and its cultural impact is already very different now. People now find it much easier to create content with AI and this raises many questions. People in the lab are all interested in different things, but some of us, myself included, share a passion for making games, exploring analog practices, and contemplating humanistic practice around games.

But the focus on new creative technology is mitigated - There is widespread anxiety about the digital taking over everyone's lives and people becoming more alienated. In the game lab we take care to build community and culture through role-playing games, board games, reading groups, cooking, eating and live performance. We recognize the opportunity games have to rehumanize. Games have been around for over 5,000 years and probably much earlier than that, they were not brought about by computer technology... analog games don't go away, they're still very compelling and interesting. Perhaps even more so today.

Another recent interest in the game lab is around social and economic modes of production. There's a lot of recent interest in collaboration and “co-ops”,thinking about how to negotiate capitalism with creative practice as a sustainable life choice. How can you make games, publish them, and have an income and a life without feeling terrible about your engagement with capitalism and its processes? How can you negotiate social media as a lively promotional and discursive space when you know Instagram for instance is run by a corporation that you do not believe in, and is exploiting you as a creator and a consumer. I think it's very trying for people to always feel compromised in that way, when we are trying to be critical while also seeking solutions. I think co-ops are very interesting right now. I proposed a new class to teach next year about working as a co-op, role playing as if the class is a co-up and learning how that works in practice.

There is a lot of discourse around capitalism and how to negotiate economic precarity and survival in the US, especially where it's very hard to find a lot of government funding for the arts.

R: The Game Lab has organized the UCLA Game Art Festival since 2011. How does this festival differ from other major game festivals, many of which are also located in California, such as IndieCade and IGF?

E: We're changing our festival’s format after COVID. In fact, next year, we're going to have a new version of it. However, I can explain a bit the distinctions between our festivals and others. I’ve been involved in a few different festivals over the years, like IndieCade, GDC, Fantastic Arcade, E3, etc. I really appreciate these game festivals for the opportunity they provide to see and experience a lot of games, I'm not terribly critical of them. I just had the desire to create something a little different with our festival. One of the differences is that our festival does not have any marketing components.

Many other festivals, which I appreciate, often showcase works-in-progress, demos, and sneak previews. For our festival, that was not the idea. Everything we presented ideally provided a site specific experience, rather than something to be played later. The other difference is, we focused on experiences in games that benefit from the public settings, as opposed to software designed for solitary computer play at home. We invested considerable care in physical curation and spent a lot of time and energy in making these shows viscerally compelling. We had really good quality projections, and none of the games were on laptops or played with tiny keyboards. We put effort into creating experiences that are different from what those might have playing at home. We look for projects that are spatial, physical, structural, social, live, or temporary.

Another aspect we are very interested in is the history of games, which a lot of other festivals are less interested in. In the last festival we had games from ten or twenty years ago. I think it’s very important for games to be cared about as an art medium with a history. Can we find value in older games without simply dismissing them as obsolete or relying solely on nostalgia to appreciate them? Can we make sure that we also introduce new audiences to older games and not just pretend that only the new things matter? This idea is very important to me.

R: Do you see your game festival as an opportunity to engage with the indie game communities in Los Angeles?

E: Yeah, I see it as a way of overlapping different communities and bringing them to the same space and to share discourse. We try to merge and bridge the art community and those discourses with the game community, to work against the antagonism, and create more crossover between folks who have an interest in both communities and cultures.

A lot of the game festivals are not comfortable in art spaces. There's a certain kind of game that I think ends up in an art context. When a “regular” art show does exhibit games, they show a very particular type of game - conceptual, critical or formal, and usually not very complex as in terms of gameplay. There's a lot of games that don't get put in the art context because they're too long or too complicated and they rely on a different kind of literacy - a game-playing literacy. I think that's an interesting challenge that games have because they do require a really different form of literacy compared to art appreciation. Yet there is a lot of potential for crossover, but there are examples that just don't fit in both contexts. We're really looking to push them together as much as possible.

R: Could you give some advice to the readers of Indienova from the perspective of indie game development or game art creation?

E: Sure. I have two thoughts on that. One is, it's probably important to think about what “indie games” mean to you. Does it mean a small business? Does Indie mean it's still commercial, but it's small and it does not run through a big publisher?. That's one definition, perhaps, of indie. Another would be that it's non-commercial in its aspirations. It's about producing work without necessarily thinking about the next step or how to grow it into a business. I think that's an important thing for everyone who is interested in the term “indie games” or the culture, to really think about that distinction. Do you see it as an organic, immediate cultural experience in production, or is it a small business model?

The other thought is more about, originating ideas and approaches to games. I'm a big believer in spontaneity with games and not being intimidated, and reject thoughts like “I need to first know how to draw before I can draw, or I need to become a great programmer before I can make a game.” Much of the charm and magic of indie games comes from people who might be good at one thing and less good at other things, but they still are making games. Let's say they're great writers and have a really good story to tell, but they still want to make a game, and then they feel like, “in order to make this game, I have to hire or collaborate with a skilled illustrator because we need really good illustration”. No, I would say, it's okay for a game to be great at writing and it doesn't have any drawing, or it can be coded very simply.

There's often an assumption that because games have so many elements, one must be good at everything or at least collaborate with people who are. But, I think it's important to allow games to have different values and points of focus. Let's say, you really have no interest or knowledge about complicated game mechanics, but you have a wonderful aesthetic sensibility. You can make a visually captivating yet very simple game. Or the opposite, you're so in tune with complicated game mechanics, but you have no interest in narrative, then make a game that's all about mechanics. A game doesn't have to have a story. It just has to offer something distinctive. I like Anna Anthropy's approach to game creation, as outlined in her book “Rise of the Videogame Zinesters,” which says, “Hey, just make games. Don't worry too much. Just make them, and say something.”

A lot of good art comes from an artist spending way too much time and attention on one thing that others might overlook. Someone may be inspired by an illogical impulse: “Here’s a rock, and I spent a year just polishing it over and over, and now it's this very strange polished rock”. Or, an artist has been taking a photo of themselves every five minutes for five years and then makes a video of it. That's another methodology that I like to see, being highly focused on certain irrational pursuits, spending unusual amounts of time on them while neglecting other areas. Whatever it is, in this way something interesting probably will happen, whatever we may call it :).

About Eddo Stern

Eddo Stern is an artist and game designer. He was born in Tel Aviv, Israel and lives in Los Angeles. At the Design | Media Arts Department, where he is currently Chair, he teaches courses on game design and culture; computer game development; and physical computing in an art context. His work explores the uneasy and otherwise unconscious connections between physical existence and electronic simulation, surrounding the subject matters of violence, memory and identification. He works with various media including computer software & hardware, game design, live performance, digital video, and kinetic sculpture. He is a strong advocate for independent game development, and the inherent potential of game design as a medium for artistic expression and cultural impact.