Side Quest's Elliott Burns Puts the Art Game to a Vote
A performance lecture at Peckham Digital, the South London creative computing festival at Copeland Gallery, has the audience rate definitions by phone.
- When
- Oct. 25, 2026, 5 to 6 p.m.
- Where
- Copeland Gallery, Peckham, London
Elliott Burns, who writes Side Quest, a research publication on artist-produced computer games, gives a performance lecture called "What Even Is An Art Game?" at Peckham Digital in London on Oct. 25, from 5 to 6 p.m. at Copeland Gallery. The audience votes by phone, from strongly agree to strongly disagree, on statements, propositions and examples as Burns sets competing definitions in a historical schema, according to the festival's listing. A roundtable follows. Burns's post announcing the talk says it is free to attend.
The listing promises that views "will be statistically calculated" and that "discourse, debate and diagramming is expected to follow." In January, Side Quest published "Gather Quest: 100 Art Games 100 Artists," a list of games by artists with a survey of definitions.
Peckham Digital, a South London festival of creative computing, runs Oct. 22 to 25 in its fifth year. Its exhibitions are Mediating Behaviours, with 10 artists at Copeland Gallery, and Minimal Viable Home, four artists working with games at Rabbet London, including Jade Lin and Ama Dogbe. The same Sunday has a Pure Data workshop with Nadia Li, a talk on artificial life with Tom Appleyard and the Digital Reel film screening.
Burns co-founded the online digital art platform Off Site Project and is an associate lecturer on BA Culture, Criticism and Curation at Central Saint Martins. Earlier Side Quest entries cover Tomo Kihara's Game of Possible Lives and Juan Covelli's Los Caídos.
For more reading, see Exactly two playable games made it into the Venice Biennale, When a film festival ran Sleeping Dogs, the walls came off and Side Quest.
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