Video Game Photography and Spectator Gaming: A Flusserian Perspective

Abstract Still-images of video games, discussed in this paper as ‘video game photography’, have increasingly found a home in gallery exhibits. This contrasts with other forms of media derived from video games, such as ‘livestreams’ and ‘let’s plays’, which have been characterized by communal spectatorship facilitated through online platforms. Through the work of Vilém Flusser, I argue that this is because what links video game photography to real-world photography is its use of photographic conventions, and that adherence to these conventions allows galleries to integrate these images into a pre-existing canon of art photography. For the same reason, however, video game photography has struggled to find a home in spectator gaming. By analyzing video game photography and its separation from spectator gaming in this manner, I demonstrate how video game photography becomes socially ingrained in the conventions and the canon of real-world photography, something missed by approaches focusing solely on the aetiology or ontology of video game photography.