Pixel-Art Game : Cafe Terrace at Night

This three-staged memory game invites you to observe masterpieces closely. Historically, a masterpiece was a work of a very high standard, produced in order to obtain membership of a guild or academy. Since the author never went to art school, her untrained eye wondered: “How should I look at art in order to fully appreciate it?”

Trying to answer this question, she decided to design a system of observation based on different steps: games and activities following a set scheme that triggers the player to look at a masterpiece on a different scale.

Pixel-Art Game allows you to zoom into these Dutch Masterpieces. Match the original image with its pixelized copies by zooming into Van Goghs famous Café Terrace at Night. The painter’s colour and light use is emphasised through the pixels of the digitalized image, taking art into our contemporary digital language.

With a light packaging, perfect to take along with you, Pixel-Art Game offers several games in one set. Each of these 3 games is a step to understand the artwork better, playing together with multiple players. Game 1 is the Puzzle, Game 2 offers a Pixelized Puzzle, and Game 3 is the memory game.

About the Author

Vanessa Catalano studied architecture at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. In 2013 she graduated MA in a program called Design Cultures, at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. For these studies, her Master Thesis was about museum as contemporary learning environments, where gamification was a main element in learning.