Artists' game mods and the new public sphere

As of 2010, there are 183 million active gamers in the United States, each of whom plays at an average of 13 hours a week. Forty-nine percent of these players are between the ages of 18 and 49, and two out of every five of them are female. Following in a tradition of tactical interventions in mainstream media, contemporary North American artists are working with videogames as a means to engage the public in a discussion of the repercussions and possibilities of an increasingly digitized world. Artists' games like Anne-Marie Schleiner, Brody Condon and Joan Leandre's Velvet-Strike (2002) and Zach Gage's Lose/Lose (2009) confront these issues by creating "mods," or alterations of popular games. These artists use familiar reference points as catalysts for engaging new publics in conversations about contemporary art and the culture industry.