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Neoludica is an Italian exhibition on art and video games, held in conjunction with the 54th International Art Exhibition-Venice Biennale. They have a facebook page and blog but they are all written in Italian.

This is the companion book for the exhibition. 256-page paperback about A5 size. It collects 30 essays from 33 artists discussing the relationship between visual art and video games.

I only managed to finish reading two essays before I gave up. I can't even describe what the first essay The Italians Do It Better!! is about except that it's got something to do with the purpose of having a video game art exhibition. It's written in an academic style that I don't think any gamer will understand or appreciate.

Take this passage for describing digital architecture in a later chapter:

The heritage cyber-architecture derived from deconstructionism, other than the splitting up of the pair architecture/habitation, consists in the possibility of broadening the idea of "form" in the direction of parametric non-Euclidean fluid geometrics, a thing that as not happened yet in video games.

It's like that for all the essays. No gamer I know talks like that.

The pictures in the book are of photos with context that's difficult to associate with, video game screenshots and art inspired by video games (the abstraction of fan art). Photos of people playing with computer/console cables? Seriously? I would rather see pictures of how the cables have evolved. And they do not even show the many games that have undisputed good or iconic art.

I regret buying this book based on the book title which has the words art and videogames, and video games should be two words by the way.

I'm not sure who the audience is for this type of book, certainly not for gamers who actually play video games.

Neoludica Art and Videogames 1966-2011 is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)