Replay @ Arts Itoya @ Takeo Onsen Japan

The way you can get away with something in the real world is to make believe and make not-believe. This is because in this imaginary world, what you do cannot be said to be untrue, so you can get away with a false story, a false premise, or implanting something untrue or uncalled for, or merely not what the audience had agreed with or wished. A video game can be a method that effect changes for social good precisely because audiences never thought that what we are doing in the game is an intervention, but rather simply playing with the imaginary in a magic circle. Thus, a game can help us align players with messages of sustainable living or pro-climate action even if the player is personally against it, because it appears to be happening in a world where they are playing with a different set of rules, and they are simply playing the game. This is how we as players can be tricked into thinking that there is no fundamental change compared to the real world, when in fact we are in a different world entirely and playing by a new set of rules. While the game can be a way to effect positive change, it can also deceive. Depending on how we employ these "magic circle" techniques, a game can be used to urge people to behave pro-socially or deceive people into believing something that is not true.

In both cases, we are playing with our beliefs about what is real. In particular, when our opinions and actions are altered upon playing a game in make-belief, we automatically think that in the real world, we stay consistent and behave the same way as we do in the game. In reality we do not actually have objective artifacts in the real world either, and our actions in the game reflect our opinions and behaviors just as much as they do in the real world. Thus, the art of creating a fake world of make-belief makes all the magic possible. Let us play tricks and hence get away with things in this magical world that we ordinarily are not supposed to. But let us do this for positive pro-planet, pro-social causes.

REPLAY plays around with the themes of make-belief and influence on the player by exploring the concept of dreams in video games, for dreams are an additional layer of make-belief within the already make-belief world in a game. Our favorite role-playing fantasy games are used as examplesd, exploring how these games form a type of cultural heritage that can tell universal stories. In this work, we use footage from the RPG genre of games like Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Romancing Saga, Earthbound, Chrono Cross, and Legend of Zelda that provide a mood rather than telling a story. We remix the specific game footage about dreams with sounds and music that show how the real world attempt to leak into the game's world. We are playing with reality substitution in the games as a world that mimicks our own and in which we can slowly learn to live inside of. We are already living in a game everyday in the form of nightly dreams. While we can change what we experience in a dream, we can seldom do that well in a dream. The mixture of dreams in a video game forms a hybrid world where the content appears surreal even when the norms and contexts feel surrendipidously real.

Game are really expressions of dreams in the real world. Thus in playing games interactively, we can rewrite dreams.

Exhibited at Arts Itoya, Takeo, Kyushu Japan.