Occupy White Walls Lets You Build And Visit Beautiful Art Galleries

thegamer.com:

Much has been said about Animal Crossing: New Horizons and how it has become a platform for hosting major events during the pandemic, where most of us are confined to the four walls of our homes—from birthday parties to online protests. Art galleries and exhibitions, too, have been seeing a resurgence via New Horizons, but the crux of the issue is that New Horizons isn’t designed as a platform to present art via online galleries, nor is it a place for audiences to discover emerging artists.

Enter Occupy White Walls, a massively multiplayer online game about building and curating your own art gallery, while allowing players to discover both classic artworks from historical figures, to contemporary paintings from modern artists. According to Yarden Yaroshevski, the founder of studio StikiPixels, the game is designed to address issues faced by the art market. “A game about art is essentially political. If you do a game about art, you will, first of all, [have to] solve problems with art in general,” he says. The problem, according to him, is the lack of access artists have to galleries, as well as the inability of art galleries to engage a younger crowd.

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Occupy White Walls seeks to address these issues with an AI called Daisy, which will recommend artworks to players based on their preferences, paintings that they may have already purchased in-game, as well as their personal wish list of paintings. But as a game, Occupy White Walls also feels like an extension of the Sims’ architectural ambitions—and it’s unexpectedly robust. There are at least 6,500 assets available to build your art gallery, ranging from a variety of walls to furniture such as carpet, chairs,