up against each other in industrialized nations. If players occasionally leave the game without warning, then the image that was seen from the perspective of a fighter is suddenly left behind, and it becomes very, very quiet.

Lonnie Flickinger: «Pencil-Whipped» (2001)

If «QQQ» by Tom Betts appears to be the ultimate in visual sophistication, then »Pencil-Whipped« by Lonnie Flickinger appears to be the exact opposite. The game shows a peculiar black and white universe. The walls, floors and roofs look like they were scrawled by a three-year-old. There are also little scribbled figures that dance around the player and annoy him. If one of these figures is struck, a muffled thud is heard, and the figure falls over like a piece of cardboard. While normal ‹first person Shooter› games put all their efforts into looking as realistic as possible on the computer monitor, Flickinger does the exact opposite. His game landscape looks like a three-dimensional version of a picture scribbled by a child. In contrast to other computer games, Flickinger does not try to imitate reality as faithfully as possible. Instead, he creates a very idiosyncratic universe which calls into question the status quo of game design.

Cory Arcangel: «Super Mario Cloud» (2002)

Like Arcangel Constantini, Cory Arcangel hacked and modified, not a piece of software but of hardware—the cartridge on which the game «Super Mario» is stored, or rather, was stored—to produce «Super-Mario Cloud».[20] This is because, by disconnecting some contacts on the circuit board and putting in a chip for which Arcangel wrote his own program, superhero Super Mario disappears, together with all the obstacles over which he has to jump. Only a few comical, white clouds remain in a blue sky. Arcangel took away all the narrative elements of the game and everything that made it dynamic.

III. Abstraction

Many works that deal with computer games from an artistic perspective have concentrated on the genuinely graphical nature of computer games and have sought the types of images that actually can only be produced with this medium. In addition, the representational conventions and, above all, the visual limitations of games have become important subjects for artists. In such works, computer games often appear as a kind of further development or a curious variant of abstract painting. This theme is inherent in the development of computer games, which in the