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Quake Friends
November 23rd 2002, 08:13 MSK by m0nty
There mustn't be much to do in Reno, Nevada. A bunch of college kids from the local university have staged a reenactment of an episode of the Friends TV show on an online Quake 3 server. The ringleader was Joseph DeLappe, an self-proclaimed "artist" who played Ross. Before we begin, it must be said that Joseph has already, in all likelihood, been condemned to spend eternity in the fiery pits of Sheol, so we shouldn't be too harsh on him.
DeLappe is a performance artist, which basically means he repurposes existing objects in attempt to create art, as in this piece involving a model train set drawing a circle. This is not the first time he has "performed" on online gaming servers - in fact, the Quake Friends piece is part of a series started last year when he logged on to a Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force server and proceeded to quote the entirety of Allen Ginsberg's poem, Howl. DeLappe has also claimed artistic status for playing Unreal, shopping on eBay, and doing his taxes. He also has a thing for the mouse, not to mention sex dolls.
Of course, this is not the first time FPSs have been used for artistic purposes, with entire movies being created within FPS engines at sites like Machinima, but the Quake Friends performance was in real time, which makes it somewhat different. There was no work done in skinning the Q3A models to make them resemble the actual characters. One notable fact in the performance was that all of the actors were male, which hardly subverts the hegemonic paradigm when it comes to online gaming. In a display of good taste which brings a tear to the eye of every Friends-hatah, the other players on the Q3A server at the time took great delight in killing the "cast" multiple times.
Our performers functioned as passive, neutral visitors to the game - we were constantly killed and reincarnated to continue the performance. The work is intended as a parodic mixing of popular entertainment to create a temporal occurrence of clashing inanities.
Is Quake Friends a brilliant critique of the Buddhist nature of online gaming, where all the world's a stage, and the players get reincarnated continuously to serve their place on the great wheel of life? Or is DeLappe the laziest performance artist in history? Can valid art exist in an online gaming server? What next: UT2k3 Touched By An Angel?
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