 Art is always fake in some way, in its construction, in its fiction, it's an inescapable truth. The truth of its falsehood allowed Elmer the Horry to justify his professional forgery, an escapade documented in Orson Welles' film, F for Fake. Elmer has spent his life crafting meticulous renditions of others' work, he is a forger through and through, but what separates his charade from the rest of art? This is what Orson Welles explores in the film, playing with the artificiality of his medium, the video, to show how art always has artifice. However, it is a lie that tells the truth. So Elmer perhaps riles us up because he reveals something about ourselves more than anything else. But art is not just about the skill of painting, it is about conceptualization, impression, transformation. If art is a way to signal things about ourselves, as Dennis Dutton argues in his book The Art Instinct, then both knowing the expression of a work of art belongs to someone specific and knowing who the real author of a work is, are important. The problem with our species, of course, is we can lie, we can deceive, we can manipulate. Not just works of art, but others as well. And because of the reality of deception, signaling sophistication becomes as useful as sophistication itself. And this is the paradox of authenticity, because to be authentic is to be unauthentic. Once an activity gains credence as an artistic discipline, there is utility in pretending to partake in it. There is social status to be gained from going to museums for the sake of being in a museum, not because you genuinely appreciate art. In our book Paradoxes of Authenticity, Julia Straub makes this point more explicit, that once authenticity in art becomes a commodity, a deceptive species will make an industry out of its emulation, of forging it. But this is also true of life in general. Politicians try hard to come across as authentic, but this is usually a well-manicured facade focused tested with people. In business, people use terms like greenwashing and pinkwashing. But our focus here is on art, and more specifically, on play. But play is a lie, as many of you will know, as Gregory Bateson argues. When we murder someone in-game, it is in-game. Play is inherently a fake act, it is forgery made manifest in behavior. But like any form of art, play can also tell the truth through these lies. In his book Avangard Video Games, Brian Schrank illustrates how the performance theatre of many a political organization can present an alternative vision for what people could be. This is an extension of many other avant-garde traditions, from the fluxes to the situationists. But the analogy in play that parallels Elmer's craft most is the design of games, the craft of making them. But games present a problem. Most of them are made by hundreds of people. Sure they started from humble beginnings, but most games today have armies to craft them. Auteur theory has been thrown in games, that the creative vision of people like Hideo Kojima or Hidetaka Miyazaki shows through in their games, but they are also built by the labor and vision of many others. Who then is really the author? On top of this, when you add the fact that games are participatory, interactive, something else gets challenged. The author isn't just dead as Roland Barthes proclaimed, it is now communal. Something strange has happened recently in games though, where we have reverted back to games' humble origins. Indie game and avant-garde game designers have taken back control over authorship and now are using games to create art. Great is art, right? It explores the nature of time, love, regret and hope. Journey is art, right? It is a digital version of the hero's journey. True. But this means they must, like any work of art, lie. In his book Handmade Pixels, Jesper Yule argues that our understanding of what constitutes indie has evolved over time, owing to how we as a medium construe authenticity. This only becomes more salient because video games are an even deeper lie. They are not actually physical products. They are made of ones and zeros. Indie game design is a forgery. It is a forgery not just in that it is art, but also in that they try to evoke artistry by copying other mediums. Let's take Braid again. It wants to signal itself as something more in line with objects of high culture. So how does it do that? Why its aesthetics are that of a watercolor painting, beautiful and expressive in all its digital glory. It has music that evokes the sound of classical pieces. It should stand amidst titans like Beethoven and Bach. It is literature or poetry. Words literally sprawled on the screen using symbolism, metaphor, meaning. Its very structure is influenced by Italo Calvinos and how it speaks about things without speaking of them at all. Braid is often seen as one of the games that kickstarted the so-called indie renaissance. But apparently, this too is a forgery. Forgery perpetuated by films like Indie Game the Movie. Indie games predate Braid as people like Benefati have documented. In any case, Yule goes on to explain how there are different narratives about the origin of indie games, as well as different conceptions of what indie means. It went from financial independence, you know, being an indie dev meant you were broke, to aesthetic independence, you know, your art, to cultural independence, or you ought to be political or say something. This is what he calls indie style, using contemporary technology to emulate artistry in expression and process. And it turns out this pluralism is itself a forgery of other mediums. Indie cinema is about aesthetics, but indie music is about financing independently. The notion of authenticity goes deeper, though. We pay a premium for artworks or anything, really, that was made by hand, artisanal pottery, handmade carpets. These are all seen as authentic because they exemplify more grounded work. As Karl Marx has argued with the worker being alienated from his labor, or Walter Benjamin did in his essay about art in the age of reproduction. Real art under this view is made by real people. And so to be indie is to pretend to be indie. But what indie itself is is also a forgery. Some games, like crayon physics deluxe, unravel or even little big planet, not even an indie game, signal themselves as craft by showing digitally rendered real material, wood and crayons and such. But then other games take this idea and foreground the substrate of games. Pixel art. Pixel art is now seen as a way to signal authenticity as well. Celeste is indie because it was made by an indie studio, but also because it looks indie. It has sprites that seem more authentic, that seem like handmade pixels. To be an indie game is to be the right kind of indie game, it is politically mediated. Steven Saucerjoule is one of the best puzzle games ever made, but it came out at the wrong time. It came out when political messaging and emotions were more important than abstraction, depth or financial independence. And perhaps it didn't do as well because of this. Celeste's style, as Joule argues, is a representation of a representation. We are forging authenticity by replicating what culture perceives as sophisticated. He has documented this extensively, how what games are given awards alters based on the different indie organizations that exist. The game VVVVVV was an even real pixel art. It actually replicated pixel art. It is an artifice of an artifice. German expressionism and film noir were forced into using black and white. But limbo is simply replicating this. Another paradox of indie games is that even though they are seen as a craft, they are now digitally distributed across the world. Artisanal products are often seen as locally produced, but the strange hybrid that is indie games breaks this division. We have authentic art pieces that replicate styles, that try to seem authentic, and are forgeries in the literal sense. Not just because they are made of ones and zeros, but because every person's copy of a digital game is literally just that. A copy. However, as is the case with most mediums, this isn't a problem in itself, except when manufacturing authenticity becomes a commodity that overrides true authenticity. Indie games and art games can become strangely derivative because they want to seem artistic, instead of recognizing that art speaks for itself. When the question of how to seem indie becomes more important than just being indie, something has gone awry. Elmir has overtaken Picasso. Shovel Knight is an interesting game because it is built on nostalgia. It signals itself not as art, but as part of a simpler time in games, one where gameplay took precedence over story and graphics. What's funny though is that it is an 8-bit game. It is deliberately hampering its aesthetic to seem more authentic, but it imagines a version of reality where 8-bit could be realized in widescreen and not have flickering. It is trying very hard to seem authentically nostalgic by using trickery. Forgery. Does this detract from the game in any way? No. It is a well-designed game no matter which way you slice it. And perhaps therein lies the rub. Nostalgia has also become a commodity in the recent onslaught of games that have been getting remasters or remakes. This is where older games with dated graphics are given a facelift, some more extreme than others. It is for all intents and purposes some version of a digital art restoration. Shadow of the Colossus in its initial release was critically acclaimed, viewed to this day as one of the most artistic of games. And so when a remake was announced, people were excited but hesitant. But they do justice to the aesthetic, the frailty, the disempowerment, the subtlety of alienation and isolation and tragic inversion. Many agree it does. Many agree it in fact enhances the game. And they did this by giving the game a facelift. But not by really changing the mechanics and control. It is still a little hard to play. It is authentic in how it doesn't tamper with what came before. It presents things now as we saw it then, as we perhaps still see it in our memory. In some sense, the remake of Shadow of the Colossus is no different to one of Elmer's forgeries. It is a copy, a fake of a revered and beloved original. The difference of course, is it is presented as such. It is also made by an entirely different studio, not for me to away down his team. The original transformed the way we think of expression in video games. The remake is a cover. But that's just it. There is skill and devotion and painstaking love that goes into the creation of a forgery. It is a work of art in its own way. And what if the original team was remaking their game, like in the case of Jonathan Blow and the anniversary edition of Braid? By his own account, he wants to better realize the vision he had back then, and engage in the work of art restoration himself. He wants to preserve his own work for the future. Is he now copying himself? So how does one go about being authentic then? And what does that even mean in a digital medium that changes in what it values as artistic that involves the participation of an audience who alter the work of art to their whims? Love for fake paints is somewhat sympathetic picture of Elmer, using his life story to draw attention to the deception inherent in all art. But there is a sense that we ought to pity him as well. Should we spend a lifetime simply reiterating what others say instead of getting in touch with what we have to say? Well, what if you express yourself by replicating others? What if you love a work of art so much that spending hours polishing its rough edges is a passion that you truly wish to pursue? Companies may remake games for commoditizing nostalgia, but what if the many fan-made projects to refurbish, remake or revitalize past games? Realness or fakeness is not in what you do, it is in what you do it for. And so journey may be contrived in how it evokes the hero's journey, but Jenova Chen and that game company did it to elicit emotion, to engender compassion and community and hope. Braid may try to signal itself as art, but it has something to say as well, about regret, obsession, reminiscence and games themselves. The Big Planet may technically be a triple-A game and try to signal its artisanal nature, but it was made by a studio, media molecule, with a passion to engender creativity in others, to enliven and enchant and inspire our very soul. Play may be inherently fake, a lie, a forgery, but it perhaps defines us as a species, drives the evolution of culture, and can be a force of social upheaval. Culture and media and perception is a mess, we can never really know what other people's motives are, whether they are trying to deceive us. The only real person who knows if you are a forger, if you are authentic, is yourself.