In keeping with my less-than-frenetic pace of blogging during the summer months (I have a life, you know), I’m just getting around to drawing your attention to an interesting piece in last Sunday’s New York Times on “The Xbox Auteurs“.The article describes how a bunch of call-center employees, who also happen to be Halo fanatics, “hijacked” the game and used it to make movies–basically by not really playing the game and adding voice-overs. In so-called “machinima” the normally ruthless killing machines that roam the digitized worlds take a break from slaughtering everything in sight, preferring to bicker, complain, and bemoan the meaningless of their lives. (The article states that the exploits of these slacker grunts are particularly popular with U.S. troops in Iraq.).But can video games become the vehicle for genuine art? Well, if the nearly 90 years since Marcel Duchamp scribbled on a urinal has taught us anything, if you call it art then it is.Take the “work” of Brady Condon. The blurb for his “Suicide Solution” reads:”Suicide Solution is DVD documentation collected over the last year of committing suicide in over 50 first and third person shooter games. The title is a reference to the 1981 song of the same name by Ozzy Osbourne that was blamed for the suicide of an American teenager in 1984. Through the angst ridden logic of teen existentialism, the work offers a repetitive meditation on the act of taking one’s own life in a contemporary culture intertwined with interactive screen based entertainment.”See? Through the alchemy of artistic blurb-speak, the actions of bored or frustrated gamers are transformed into a “meditation.”The extract available online is a little creepy, however.