Replaying the remnants in Mark of the Ninja

As Felan Parker convincingly demonstrated in his study of the rise of Jason Rohrer’s game Passage (2007) to art-house status, cultural and artistic legitimation “are not benign, natural processes” (2013, p.56). As they are increasingly being observed from various analytical frameworks, videogames of the 21st century are more sensible than ever to the presence of an observer. Some of them seem to (re)act accordingly by ostensibly seeking inspiration from aesthetic lineages rich in “cultural capital” (Parker 2013, p.43). In contemporary culture, awareness of such phenomena led to some artists challenging the recuperation of surface-level discourses on artistic value by the art market and mass media, as in Orson Welles’ F for
Fake (1973) and (famous street artist) Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010), mischievous winks towards the “material capital” that is pursued by some practitioners and promoters of a certain artfulness. They seem to ask: who’s printing the legend?