Ever since I recycled my circa-2008 Macbook Pro, a device that was still working fine despite a dead battery¹ in 2022, I have been without a computer of my own for about four years. The last time this was the case was late 1998 when we had an old Tandy 386 sitting in a nook in our apartment back when homes still had spaces dedicated to computer. 

Yet somehow I have three laptops, all provided by work. One is my direct workplace Macbook Pro², two are evil company client laptops of which one is an actual gaming PC. However, it’s very managed and cursed by an evil not of this world so there’s no chance I’m installing Steam³ on there. Let alone mods.

So I enjoy the Quake Brutalist Jam (Youtube), including this Robert Yang level, from a distant, aesthetic perspective.

The Gran Turismo 2 Beige mod trailer, where they focus on the most generic every day cars, is one of my favourite YouTube videos of last year:

Perfection. No notes.

I love the work of 2girls1comp (it’s, uh, a safe link) though there’s no chance I will be playing their mods.

As someone that was entirely outside of video games for a decade, despite a previous lifetime being immersed in it, I’ve come around on my appreciation of games outside of direct play. In some ways I might have been a purist in that “ludo” sense, a game’s value was in the mechanics and systems tied to user input and choice. Now that I’m back in the games fold some of that opinion remains, though when it comes to video games as a whole I am now more of an aestheticist.

What took me there was a Tumblr. During those years away I had a blog that evolved into something that focused on a very narrow aesthetic related to video games: un-reality landscapes, glitches, uncanny valley architectural renders, virtual liminal spaces, and so on and on, a lot of it intersecting with art and net.art communities.

I posted pictures and videos capturing that aesthetic. The big lightbulb moment for me was that realization that a game’s mechanics and systems are aesthetic too, both in terms of user expression but also at the deep GPU level in the ways data is rendered and visualized, especially at the fringes of what a player can do. Game mods can open up those edge spaces. 

There will always be mods that add big naturals to a talking dog, or ones that replace your character with a different model (also with big naturals), or this, or 2D playing card asset swaps for ones with big naturals. There are also interesting things like fan translations, randomizers, difficulty modifiers, art and fps upgrades, and entirely new games (and even genres!) There’s a democratic aspect to mods. They are bottom up changes to products that, often, have a top down design.

Yet one of the simplest mods you can make for the most aesthetic output is a simple UI removal, camera free roam, no clip, or combination of those. It opens up exploration of game environments and gives tools to virtual photographers and film makers.

One particular film I rewatched recently was Total Refusal's "How to Disappear" (2020), a treatise on desertion and rules from the perspective of Battlefield. There’s also Kinderfilm (2023), a more surrealist film set in GTA.

Total Refusal as a whole is interesting. They describe themselves as

a pseudo-marxist media guerilla focused on the artistic intervention and appropriation of mainstream video games. We upcycle video games in order to reveal the political apparatus beyond the glossy and hyperreal textures of this media.

I like the idea of “appropriation” of the mainstream, though what fascinates me is that they don’t modify the games; they “upcycle” them. Upcycling involves taking trash and old materials, and through recontextualization and reuse, converting them to something new and/or useful, with higher purpose. In the case of games this means upcycled into greater cultural value. This is a strong value judgement about the medium. It’s not one I fully agree with, though in the aftermath of December’s Game Awards, a celebration of the most consumerist aspects of the form, it’s hard not to keep video games in low regard.

I think the first time I encountered this type of upcycling was in the early 2000s, via Rosemarie Fiore’s arcade game long exposure photography (2001-2002) – which I mimicked directly years later with then-new XBox Live Arcade game Pac-Man Championship Edition – and Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002). Those feel quaint now, by comparison.

Game photography has come a long way when you compare Fiore’s work with something like Pascal Greco’s Photographie, Jeu video, Paysage, the technology used to render the subject drastically evolved, and similarly there’s a massive shift from a hacked NES ROM that removes gameplay to a mod that replaces all non player characters in GTAV with “photo daddies” looking for the perfect picture in perpetual golden hour. Though the biggest shift in those years was in the image itself. 

We are now in an era of post-photography. There is no distinction between a ‘photo’ of a video game landscape and one of a real landscape because the photo of the landscape can be generated through a model trained on landscapes, real or otherwise. Photography is evidence of having witnessed a thing. This is true in video game photography and even screenshots. Yet if a prompt were to generate an image in the style of a pastiche of a photograph, what was witnessed? The photograph has no meaning.

And so it’s the experience itself, the exploration of the edge cases, the performances in silico, the exploitation of software errors, and the mere act of playing through the games, artsy or otherwise, that is the aesthetic form of the medium. I just need to get myself a computer to do that.

1. Which I couldn’t charge because it was using an old MagSafe charger during a time Apple had them discontinued, only to bring it back around the same time.

2. Which is technically managed but I have some tools installed to, uh, monitor that.

3. That’s why the Steam Deck kinda appeals. I’m the demographic, though potentially I’m already priced out.

Related Links

Luca Miranda, Riccardo Retez  A Poet in the (Parallel) World - Milan Machinima Festival (2023)

Culturally, we believe that video games lead to a new definition of photographer: Millions of players engage daily in the practice of image-making, often unknowingly, sharing screenshots with an intentionality not unlike that of a documentary photographer But the most radical transformation is perhaps in the ontological context: game photography aims to capture something that does not exist in the real world. It is a photograph without referent, yet not without truth or meaning. This forces us to rethink the very essence of photography: no longer just a trace of the real, but an act of creation, of witnessing a presence experienced in a virtual space, distant but also close to the real one.

but the games were good - simulacrum (December 2025)

Games are better and more interesting than this, because people are better and more interesting than this. Consumerism, is however, too central to the rotten heart of the games industry to excise it without killing the thing. This wretched state of affairs is what Keighley aspires to be the voice of, and what his Game Awards is a shrine to. It’s why the ads for upcoming games are the real point of the show

You Never Render The Same River Twice by Lucia Kan-Sperling

Geomancer and AIDOL, however, are not video games, but films. They are not playable, only watchable. Lek’s subjective angle, then, provides the viewer with an aesthetic simulation of agency in his world—like one would have in a video game—without actually granting it. As a result, his films emphasize the comparative lack of interactivity allowed by their medium. The camera’s constantly switching perspectives—from first-person to third-person subjective shot, to the inside of a fictional game—exacerbate what Galloway points out about the subjective camera in video games: it is not the gaze of any specific character, but the computer’s “gaze of [its] own.”

Pascal Greco : « La photographie in-game est une forme de méditation active » (November 2025)

il y a cette double idée : proposer un voyage immersif et des moments plus descriptifs, qui interrogent le dispositif : l’analyse des détails d’une image, le doute sur l’authenticité de ce que l’on voit, etc. Ce qu’il en reste, c’est un court-métrage de quinze minutes où on me voit évoluer dans quatre ou cinq jeux différents, au sein desquels j’ai filmé selon le même procédé que celui utilisé dans le monde réel, en tournant entre 100 et 200 images par seconde, dans une approche qui recherche moins les dialogues que la contemplation. Après tout, c’est que je recherche dans la photographie in-game : une forme de méditation active.

Adam Mosseri on how Instagram exists in the age of AI-generated images | The Verge (December 31, 2025)

A cynical and superficial view of the degradation of the image by those very much responsible for it.

Listen to this

Jam & Spoon - How Stella Got Her Groove Back 1999-1992 Eternal Basement Mix

An early 90s club tune meant to be enjoyed the original way: via a 15 year old YouTube upload with no description on a dormant channel with only a handful of similar music uploads.

Hope you’re staying safe in these trying times,

sometimes, out.