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Thursday, February 9, 2012

Visual Art Currently Hanging: A Video Game in Which You Are the Cat of the Iranian Prime Minister

Posted by Jen Graves on Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 1:43 PM

There are those who will dismiss this video game because you don't kill anybody in it, or even really win. The point is making your way through the story—which means navigating a seriously pleasurable landscape that combines collage, Persian and Indian miniature painting styles, and comics. The game is called The Cat and the Coup. It's also a work of art by Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad. (Cue debates about art and video games.)

Somebody does die in the course of the game: its central character, Mohammad Mossadegh. He's the democratically elected Iranian prime minister who supported the nationalization of the oil industry and was ousted in 1953 in the CIA-backed coup that installed the Shah. (In real life, he died in house arrest.) In the game, you play the character of his cat. At the end, Mossadegh floats to his death on a cloud/wave of oil.

The Cat and the Coup is part of the exhibition Asian American Arcade at the Wing Luke Museum. It opens tomorrow, I got to see it yesterday, and I recommend it. It's a layered collection of playable games and works of art that link video games and identity—paintings of cheat codes by Seattle's Jonathan Wakuda Fischer, for instance, plus a documentary called Gold Farmers, about a mind-boggling shadow industry in which Americans pay Chinese workers for video-game characters that have already been played at the lower levels of games and now come stocked up with privileges and extra lives, wealth and weapons, etc. Boggle.

Comments (4) RSS

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The Cat and the Coup is free on Steam (which is itself free), too, if anybody wants to download it for themselves.

Posted by Zebes

on February 9, 2012 at 1:59 PM

The only person who would dismiss a game because "you don't kill anybody" is the hypothetical, mouth-breathing 13-year-old construct that cluless-about-games journalists use as a stand-in for the actual consumers of video games. (educated 30-year-olds, statistically)

Posted by Daily in LA on February 9, 2012 at 2:32 PM

What Daily in LA said.

Jen, some examples of games with incredible sales figures, without a focus on violence:

LittleBigPlanet, Echochrome, Peggle (everything PopCap makes really, with the possible exception of Plants vs Zombies), the Katamari franchise, Harvest Moon franchise, the entire "simulation" genre, etc, etc, et fucking cetera.

Posted by Knat on February 9, 2012 at 3:09 PM