ART&.. More
There’s one bit in the very particularly punctuated ART&.. More that has and will stick with me for a long time. Developer Ledbetter Games points out that he could’ve filled this entire digital art gallery with his own works, but wouldn’t it be cooler if we could see things that were made by all sorts of people from the Playdate community? That’s a big part of what makes the Playdate special: the sense of community. All these developers, and Discords, and game jams, and Community Directs, and magazines, and YouTube channels, and podcasts, and THIS WEBSITE you’re on right now… there are less than 100,000 Playdates in the world so far, but the people that love it really love it. A lot of them are developers, too, and they’re constantly teaching each other, helping each other, and promoting each other’s work. I haven’t made a Playdate game (yet?), and I’m not great at Discord, but I do love sitting at the table right next to the cool kids with my little website.
The ART series (including this game, ART7, ART-O-Ween, and a few ARTtOO’s, along with the sidegame/comic A Ghost in the Gallery) is a digital museum made in Pulp. As it’s evolved, the museum has gotten more expansive, interactive, and fun! There’s an arcade, a gift shop, one artwork that’s too big for the Playdate screen that you get to help complete, an underground exhibit run by rats, and development art for games that were (at the time) still in development. It’s such a testament to the teamwork and community of the Playdate dev space, and I really admire it.
Ledbetter has some essays up on his site about art, and the medium, and the message. The whole idea for the ART series was inspired by a similar one done on the Game Boy Camera by Cat Graffam of Scratching Post Studio (which just had a second entry released!). A picture taken with an iPhone vs. a picture taken with a Game Boy vs. a picture taken with a Polaroid camera vs. a picture downscaled to fit on the Playdate screen will each convey a different idea, even if they’re all the same image. Seeing these artworks on the tiny Playdate screen instead of on a wall in a museum are two totally different experiences, but both are valid and worthwhile. Some of the art is even generative, so you never see the same piece twice. That’s something that can’t be done with a canvas on a wall, and utilizing the medium in a way that can’t be done in another is important and necessary.
I wrote about ART&.. More a little bit before, in my Games of the Year article. We have some cool museums in Colorado, but they’re often in weird parts of town or have inconvenient hours for someone that has a day job. Dreams on the PlayStation 4 has some digital art galleries (some even in VR!) that you can explore in a different way, and I think this museum is another avenue to bring art to a new audience, in a new way. It being a celebration of the small but mighty Playdate development community is icing on the cake.