It’s been some time since my first post on this topic and I’m old now (or unc as the kids would say) 🧓. And with time comes wisdom, and I just realized there is one particularly gaping hole in my argument last time. I had argued that for something to be art, it needs human intention.

But what about non-human intentions? This means non-human animals, a digitized human brain, or aliens. Surely they can have intentions and therefore be able to create “art” too. Previously, I had been writing with the idea that a human using an image generator cannot call the generated image their art. I forgot about the generator itself… Oops. So is the image created by a generator the generator’s art?

After playing through Fieldrunners 2 I was in the mood for a TD game that was more explicitly innovative. I guess my brain doesn’t appreciate the monotony of slowly building out vast mazes of very loud machineguns over and over. My mind jumped to Anomaly Defenders and Space Run Galaxy, both are fairly innovative yet I never gave them too much of a chance the first time around. After spending tens of hours in both, I have some thoughts on them that other people may or may not have had before. And you are going to be reading them because you clicked on this post and are therefore contractually obligated to listen to my ramblings.

On a recent trip, my brother and I were up late at night lying in bed and reminiscing on our childhood. We do it at an abnormal frequency when we somehow find ourselves in bed in the same room at night, probably due to a combination of undiagnosed ADHD/autism and ADHD/autism induced insomnia. This time, we were talking about our early gaming experiences and how it shaped our childhood. It was quite comprehensive, we went from 00s PC games to DS/Wii to Adobe Flash. Then my brother mentioned Fieldrunners and my brain got one of those flashback unlock moments. For some reason, my brain had hidden those memories away and I had not ever remembered it when thinking about my childhood games.