Several University of California, Santa Cruz Arts and Engineering students and alumni worked together on two separate projects which are part of the same exhibition at the SFMOMA. Annalivia Martin-Straw (Porter ‘23, Art) worked with her collaborator to create an immersive racing game, which up to five visitors can play at a time.
The exhibition, Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, which is housed on the 7th floor of the museum, went up in October 2024 and will run through Feb. 18, 2025. It’s an immersion into the crossroads between arts and sports, with both interactive and non-interactive works. Artcade (open until Mar. 23, 2025), the exhibit that incorporates Martin-Straw’s work, is an extension of Get in the Game, but is housed on the 2nd floor and is free and open to the public during all times the museum is open.
For this exhibit, Martin-Straw in collaboration with UC Santa Cruz Computer Game Design undergraduate student Tyler Knowlton crafted an arcade style table top racing game, Super Ultra Racing Xtreme, in which players can place obstacles to disturb the path of the cars. “We had done a lot of thinking about fan culture and what it means to negatively influence the outcome of a game as a fan,” says Martin-Straw. “It’s an ambient racing game: even if there are no players on the track, the game will always continue. If there’s nobody looking at it, the game still happens, and the race still exists, and somebody still wins.”
Another of the three pieces in the Artcade, calledPongalong, was made by fellow alumni Jared Pettitt (Stevenson ‘18, Computer Game Design) and Celeste Clark Jewett. They are all interactive pieces that put players in a sports setting.
When the exhibition ends, Martin-Straw hopes to bring Super Ultra Racing Xtreme around to new exhibits, or find new ways for people to play it.
Martin-Straw met Knowlton at UC Santa Cruz by joining Game Design and Art Collaboration (GDA), an on-campus club that helps students build independent games and connect with professionals in the video game industry. As an officer of the club Martin-Straw focused on outreach and made one of her main goals to make sure her fellow students saw game design as a viable future.
Before coming to UC Santa Cruz, Martin-Straw studied animation, but when she transferred in, she switched to art. “Animation gave me a good framework for my own art and my own personal practice as an artist, but I just kept thinking, it needs to get weirder,” she says. Of the four alumni participating in Artcade, Martin-Straw is the only one who studied art specifically.
Alongside her game work at SFMOMA, Martin-Straw also worked for a game-based museum in Los Angeles where she is from. “There’s this whole intersection of games that are experimental, niche and fun, and they exist in the museum,” she says.
With Super Ultra Racing Xtreme still up for more than a month, this is only the beginning of Martin-Straw’s career in game making. “Games are art,” she says. “Ultimately, games are not something that you can really ever make alone, that’s where the magic happens.”