Mary Moran completes M.A. with qualifying papers “Clair Obscur Expedition 33 and The Avant-Garde” and “Player as Artist”
Congratulations Mary!
ABSTRACTS
Clair Obscur Expedition 33 and The Avant-Garde
On April 24th, 2025, SandFall Interactive, a team of 33 French developers, released their first game, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Since then, the game and its creators have won many awards, including 7 from the Golden Joystick Awards and 9 from the Game of the Year awards, including Game of the Year from both ceremonies, serving as a reminder of the dignity of artists within the medium of video games. This essay argues that Clair Obscur combines visual references to the Belle Époque and fifth-generation JRPGs to tell a story of grief and morality, the value of living one's life with truth and without delusion. This game invokes the original meaning of the term Avant-garde, the innovation of art in technique, technology and creativity, and social change, and uses them to compare the eras of 1800s France and 1990s video games to the current moment of society, surveillance, and the medium of video games. By employing a wide range of historical references from Art History, Literary Studies, and past video games, SandFall presents a complex and morally difficult choice to the player on how they should conduct their lives in the face of a changing, dangerous world. The question SandFall places forth: What is better, living in a dangerous reality or living in the safety of fantasy?
Player as Artist
On August 30th, 1952, then 65-year-old artist Marcel Duchamp, one of the greatest pioneers of the Modern Art Movement, gave a speech at the New York State Chess Association Banquet. He ends that speech on the game of chess as an artform with this effective quote: “From my close contact with both artists and chess players, I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” The act of playing a game to complete it is an artistic act, displaying agency and performance from each player. As a result, all players are artists. This essay explores the meaningful artistic choice of the player deviating from the established work, to purposely play in a way that differs from the developer's intention and the resulting consequences on the meaning of the artwork. Accomplished through a case study of Speed-Running, Modding, and Roleplaying in Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), Mojang’s Minecraft (2011-present), and Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2 (2024-present), this essay argues that players make meaningful artistic choices in their completion of the game they are playing in their expression of free will in its rawest forms. To do so, I utilize the theories of Ephemerality, the Palimpsest, and Fluxus as tools to study these forms of play to establish the agency of players, not as audiences to the artform of video games, but as responding artists.