Installation artists like Yayoi Kusama and Allan Kaprow built interactive worlds decades before Zelda. What can videogames still learn from contemporary technology-based art?

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island is a legend among 2-D platformers—but its art design was something to behold as well. It’s intense, vivid and contrasting use of color recalls Fauvism, the 20th century art movement. Just as Fauvism took Impressionism’s abstraction to a wilder, weirder level, so does Yoshi’s Island embrace artistic passion and messiness. Kyle Chayka explains why Yoshi’s Island is full of more “wild beasts” than we realize. 

In the latest of our monthly column, Kyle Chayka explores the search for photorealism in videogames. Once we can perfectly recreate grass in code, where does photorealism have left to go? Where does the search for photorealism fall apart, how does it relate to the struggle between photography and painting, and what would an abstract-expressionist game look like? 

In the third installment of this monthly column, Kyle Chayka explores the relationship between landscape painting and Minecraft. How does one blocky indie game have the ability to create transcendental experiences just as the greats of landscape painting were able to do? And how does Minecraft allow players to accomplish this in a different way?