‘30 Lives’: MCAD focuses on games and videos that speak to gaming

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PEOPLE VIEWING Harun Farocki’s four-part video series Parallel — BRONTË H. LACSAMANA

DROP DEAD OR DIE, a board game by Ikoy Ricio — BRONTË H. LACSAMANA

BENILDE STUDENTS’ games can be played at the exhibit. — BRONTË H. LACSAMANA

VIDEO games, board games, and video works engaging with the rules of games take the spotlight in “30 Lives,” a showcase of the gaming world at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) Manila.

The exhibit, running until March 31, features works by Harun Farocki, Lu Yang, Heecheon Kim, Ikoy Ricio, and Miguel Inumerable, and games developed by students of the Interactive Entertainment and Multimedia Computing program of the De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde (DLS-CSB).

While it invites visitors to enjoy the games and videos on display, MCAD aims to “weave across temporalities, from card games to artists’ deployment of video games into their work, and engage in activities long derided for their apparent triviality.” Harun Farocki’s four-part video series Parallel, for example, follows and discusses the construction, visual landscape, and inherent rules of computer-animated game worlds.

“When you play a game, it’s a moment of separation from reality, allowing you to create a totally different world. There’s a capacity for critique. They’re seen as trivial but are actually a very powerful, huge part of contemporary life now,” said Maria Joselina Cruz, MCAD Director and Curator, in an interview with BusinessWorld at the exhibit’s opening reception on Feb. 2.

“Every piece challenges how we think about gaming, life, fiction, reality, and how they all skew into each other,” she said.

One fascinating representation of this is Lu Yang’s video work Wrathful King Kong Core, which centers on a fearsome Tibetan Buddhist deity.

For Ms. Cruz, this work was essential to include as it is an intersectional work — a “film that feels like a video game quantifying the different aspects of wrathful gods and breaking down the mythology using game-ified language.”

Heechon Kim’s Cutter III is also a stand-out, an installation that is neither completely game nor video. While it is viewed like a film, each playback is not guaranteed to be the same, randomized by the Unity game engine that it runs on so that scenes are arranged differently in each viewing.

“It uses the medium of gaming to tell a story. The narrative follows a character who plays a game and finds that reality and fiction start to blur,” said Ian Carlo Jaucian, MCAD’s exhibitions consultant and co-curator for “30 Lives.”

He told BusinessWorld that a major part of the work is Benilde students making their own mystery-adventure spin-off game from it, also showcased in the exhibit.

“All the assets from Cutter III were shared by Mr. Kim with the students of Benilde, and they were given the freedom to do whatever they wanted,” said Mr. Jaucian.

THE KONAMI CODE
In 2023, the global gaming market was valued at $281.77 billion and is expected to grow to $665.77 billion by 2030, according to Fortune Business Insights.

The ubiquity of this form of entertainment in people’s lives motivated MCAD to pursue putting up an exhibit dedicated to it, Ms. Cruz explained.

“It engages the human mind with algorithms and strategies,” she said. “Another impetus is the fact that there’s a gaming design course in Benilde, the first gaming design course in the Philippines, which started 15 years ago.”

This is why games made by Benilde students are displayed in the museum, providing an opportunity for more people to stop by and try them out outside of the usual final project showcase.

Mr. Jaucian added that the show’s title, “30 Lives,” harkens back to the Nintendo days in the 1980s. “It’s arguably the most famous cheat code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start) that you enter in a console’s controller to get 30 lives. We chose that as the entry point because it speaks to a lot of the topics that we want to talk about.”

“You want to cheat in the game because you want to beat it, but is it really a cheat if it was built by the developers who made that game?” he said.

The variety of works in the exhibit explores this in different ways, from Miguel Inumerable’s code-based video games to Ikoy Ricio’s ironic board games and card games.

For Mr. Inumerable, the algorithmic rules he programs into his work employ randomness with no goal, while Mr. Ricio plays with the irony of luck in collecting trump cards of nasty car wrecks or diseases on a board to effectively win by dying.

“They’re all interconnected. Video games involve rules within a certain world that you adjudicate to a computer, whereas with board games you are the judge and player at the same time,” Mr. Jaucian explained.

He added that while it’s good to see current trends and practices within the gaming industry and community, it is MCAD’s hope that more people — beyond those with relations to games — will also find the showcase interesting.

The Gamers Union for Innovation and Leadership Development (GUILD) is even hosting a Virtual Reality (VR) games day at MCAD on Feb. 13, adding more original works by Interactive Entertainment and Multimedia Computing students of Benilde. These involve head gear which simulate three-dimensional reality through stereoscopic displays.

The game day on Feb. 13 is free and open to the public, with slots for 10 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 1 p.m., 2:30 p.m., and 4 p.m. The “30 Lives” exhibit runs until March 31 at MCAD, located in the Benilde Design + Arts Campus along Dominga St. in Malate, Manila. — Brontë H. Lacsamana