Exploring Creation and Curation as Steps Towards a Gamification of the Arts Through Game Engines

Game engines enable the creation of novel applications that can enhance how art is created and presented and provide new tools to artists. This thesis presents study, research, and development within the frontiers between the arts and computer science, namely about a perceived dual phenomenon of the artification of games and the gamification of the arts. It proposes the hypothesis that through gamification, one can create environments that enable artists to give new possibilities to their art and communicate differently with their audiences, as the digital game engines’ artistic multimodality opens possibilities of new kinds of art forms, and artistic creation, experience and curation, and also raises questions about if it could extend the arts’ domain and if it could be a resource for the endeavours of the research in computational creativity. This hypothesis is tested with the development of an art studio for multimedia sculptures - TIMAEUS – and an infrastructure that enables people to render such sculptures in virtual spaces, made in collaboration with artists to create examples of their art transformed into digital forms. The work also approaches the gamified possibilities of art curation to create a virtual stoa - or colonnade - for teaching Stoicism and a virtual Odyssey, enabling the presentation of artistic work as a virtual art gallery. The artistic evaluation of the prototypes, in collaboration with creators on different branches of the arts – painting, drawing, poetry – aims to assess the qualities of this approach that has been presented in relevant conferences and evaluated by peers and artists. ‘The arts’ are here treated as an umbrella term comprehending the whole field of creative expression and are the subject of an experiment of a special kind of gamification, thought as a sort of gamification that is extended to the use and transformation of the digital game software infrastructure itself – the game engine