This week, Broad Art Center’s Untitled Café will add joysticks and digital games to its menu to create the Untitled Arcade.
With the addition of the arcade machines that UCLA Game Lab has installed, students have the opportunity to play video games that fellow undergraduates and graduates have designed in the past year.
The UCLA Game Lab, a collaboration between the School of Theater, Film and Television and the School of Arts and Architecture, presented its first Untitled Arcade exhibit at the end of spring quarter in 2014. While the reaction to the event was positive, Design│Media Arts alumnus and now Game Lab Manager Tyler Stefanich wanted to test the exhibit out at a different time to see if the outcome changes significantly.
“Last year the exhibit was during finals week, and ultimately what happened was people were really stressed, and they would come in and play for a few minutes but then return to studying,” Stefanich said. “Part of the experiment for me is to see if people play the games more during a more relaxing time of the quarter.”
Stefanich said he hopes to make the Untitled Arcade an annual event, allowing participants in the Game Lab to showcase new work. The goal of the exhibit is to display as many games as possible, so the digital games presented on the multicolored cocktail tables and the standing modular arcade cabinet will be on rotation.
“A lot of people every morning that work in this building go to the cafe right away and get a cup of coffee, and they might see the same table they saw the day before, but we’ll have a new game,” Stefanich said.
David O’Grady, a cinema and media studies graduate student and Game Lab researcher, said he believes the placement of the exhibit in the Untitled Café parallels the Game Lab’s philosophy.
“Part of our mission is to not only develop game artists but to also expose other communities and the culture at large to the fact that we can make art playful,” O’Grady said. “We are always trying to find exhibition spaces where game art can find the public.”
The games on the modular arcade cabinet, which people play while standing, are single-player. On the cocktail tables, some of the games are multiplayer, and students can sit and play against one another.
On Monday, the game available on the modular arcade cabinet was “Space Invader,” created by Design | Media Arts alumna Kristen Sadakane. In the game, a player shoots at invading aliens by hitting one of the many buttons on the cabinet, protecting himself or herself from their retaliating shots. The player’s spaceship flies back and forth, its movement controlled by the joystick on the cabinet. With only three lives, the player must protect his or her spaceship extremely well, for the attacks become more complicated with each level.
“The game is a re-imagination of the original ‘Space Invader.’ It’s about colonialism and coming across aliens and conquering them,” Stefanich said.
Stefanich said the layout of Broad, with its long hallways and closed doors, causes students to be segmented from one another. However, the Untitled Café is the exception to this, bringing everyone together. Stefanich said this constant stream of customers ensures that the exhibit receives good exposure and, possibly, lots of interaction.
“The Game Lab is just one of the many rooms in Broad,” Stefanich said. “This is an opportunity to break down a little bit of what I view as a problem with the architecture of the building.”