In Kyoto, an art hotel treated games as social diagrams
art bit #6: Game Playing Society put HUMANITY, SCHiM and Coffee Talk beside Courtinat and Kihara
Kyoto has a standing answer to the question of whether games belong in galleries, and it just wrapped its sixth year. Game Playing Society, the latest edition of art bit—the exhibition series born when Hotel Anteroom's gallery met BitSummit, the city's independent games festival—ran May 16 through July 12 at Gallery 9.5, free to enter, everything playable. The premise this time: treat play not as an escape from society but as a way of modelling it. The gallery's own announcement asked people to come and actually play, which sounds obvious until you remember how many game-art shows still bolt the controller to the plinth.
From the introduction trailer for SCHiM (Ewoud van der Werf and Nils Slijkerman, 2024), one of the playable works in art bit #6. Watch the full trailer with sound on Steam.
The Steam wing reads like a syllabus on agency: HUMANITY turns crowd direction into a choreography of obedience, SCHiM builds a platformer out of shadows and attachment, Coffee Talk reframes service work as listening, Craftopia compresses farming, hunting and automation into one production sandbox, and Relooted turns museum restitution into an Afrofuturist heist.
Beside them hung the game-art cohort—Mélanie Courtinat's INDULTO, Vincent Moulinet's Daddy loves you too, Sakiko Fujishima's Digital Persona—Two Voices, and Tomo Kihara's What Plays You?—Game of Possible Lives, which generates plausible biographies out of Japan's census data. (We interviewed Kihara about that work in August.)
What art bit models better than most institutions is its refusal to file indie games and game art as separate categories, the same argument we found in Larry Achiampong's gaming rooms last month. A hotel gallery between Kujo and Jujo has been running that experiment quietly for six years. The seventh is worth planning a trip around—ideally the week BitSummit is in town.
The exhibition’s playable wing, in screenshots via Steam: HUMANITY, SCHiM, Coffee Talk, Craftopia, and Relooted.
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