What does avant garde mean?

Avant garde is a term that is used to describe artists and work that is experimental, radical or unorthodox with respect to art, culture and society. essentially work that is out of the box and out of the ordinary, avant garde is considered to be the hallmark of modernism by some artists. In french the term avant gaurd means vanguard or the advanced guard , essentially the peoples ideas are ahead of their time this is sometimes seen in movements in the art such as dadaism or in politics anarchism. The term can also be used to describe something that is cutting edge or something people are new too. usually the art work done by such artists is made to challenge the norm in today’s media, meaning to try and break the boundaries set by society too of what you are able and unable to create. The movement was created in the early 20th century by the artist Dada. The movement was originally created by Dada because of his disgust towards the social, political and cultural values of the time especially the horrors of the first world war, Dada’s work cause massive outrage leading to one of his exhibitions to be closed by police due to his work challenging the norms of society. The avant garde movement was created in France and lead from one artist challenging society to an entire movement of artists and this is now a term used by artists in many countries across the world, this shows how much impact a single artist can have.

(Art by dada on right)

Is it still possible to be truly ‘avant garde’?

I don’t believe that it is still possible to be avant garde in current games because of social boundaries that people are too scared to cross, for instance games like GTA have been banned in countries such as Australia because of extreme violence and so on which is why I believe that games like that may not sell as well as games that don’t have that kind of themes, as a game producer I would like to try and make my game socially acceptable and a game that all people can play in every country without fear of it being banned or having a bad name. I also believe that it would be hard to be avant garde in this day since most games seem extremely similar, this is probably because most games are just different versions of the same thing, like the fact that every MMO RPG just seems like the same quest after quest boredom, nothing really seems new anymore to me.