Side Quest
Video game, 4-channel audio installation (2026)

Side Quest is a video game developed from interviews with professional players, bringing together narrative fragments drawn from e-sports with the core mechanisms of game design.

It explores how games organise our actions and decisions, and repurposes these logics to expose their underlying assumptions and structural limits. The title refers to side quests in video games - optional detours that diverge from the main storyline and its objective. Recently popularised on TikTok, the term points to the ways in which video game culture and its codes now permeate everyday life. Voices gathered from e-sports players - their doubts, aspirations, and strategies - resonate throughout the game, lending it a documentary dimension.

By linking these testimonies to video game progression mechanics, Side Quest draws parallels between simulated competition and the imperative to “succeed” in a performance-driven society. Rules, metrics, rankings, rewards: the structures that shape gameplay are also, as McKenzie Wark observes in Gamer Theory (2007), those that increasingly shape our relationship to the world.

Produced by Art Center Ygrec-ENSAPC.

Exhibition text by Ingrid Luquet-Gad (FR / ENG)