Video game art involves the use of patched or modified video games or the repurposing of existing games or game structures. Often this modification is through the use of level editors, though other techniques exist. Some artists make use of machinima applications to produce non-interactive animated artworks; however artistic modification is not synonymous with machinima as these form only a small proportion of artistic modifications.
Videogame art relies on a broader range of artistic techniques and outcomes than artistic modification. These can include painting, sculpture, appropriation, in-game intervention and performance, sampling, etc. Video game art also includes creating art games from scratch, rather than by modifying existing games. It is useful to regard these as distinct from art mods as they rely on different tools, though naturally there are many similarities with some art mods.
Like games, artistic game modifications may be single-player or multiplayer. Multiplayer works make use of networked environments to develop new models of interactivity and collaborative production.
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Machinima is the use of real-time three-dimensional (3-D) graphics rendering engines to generate computer animation. The term also refers to works that incorporate this animation technique.
Artistic interventions in online games, often designed to disrupt in-game norms in order to expose the underlying conventions and functions of game play. Examples of this include Velvet-Strike and Dead in Iraq.
Site-specific installations and site-relative gaming modifications ("mods"), replicate real-world places (often the gallery they are in) to explore similarities and differences between real and virtual worlds. An example is What It Is Without the Hand That Wields It, where blood from kills in Counterstrike manifests and spills into a real life gallery.
Video games can be incorporated into live audio and visual performance using a variety of instruments and computers such as keyboards embedded with music chips. See also chiptune and the Fijuu project.
Generative art mods exploit the real-time capabilities of game technologies to produce ever-renewing autonomous artworks. Examples include Julian Oliver's ioq3apaint, a generative painting system that uses the actions of software agents in combat to drive the painting process, Alison Mealy's UnrealArt which takes the movements of game entities and uses them to control a drawing process in an external program and RetroYou's R/C Racer a modification of the graphic elements of a racing game which results in rich fields of colour and shape.