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Over the next two years, in the Netherlands, the Game Fund will have 2 million at its disposal. The Game Fund was established on 1 November, 2008, by The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, with the objective of, as it is officially stated, ‘promoting the artistic quality of virtual games’. The fund has already awarded its first subsidies, to Monobanda, a design team based in Utrecht, and to designer Christina Garcia Marlin. This demonstrates the growing importance of the game industry for contemporary society, as well as for the arts. In art, the game is certainly older than computer games. Down the ages, games have been seen as a tried and tested alternative for the usual (passive) relationship between art and its public. It is in times when art wrestles with prevailing cultures and routines that games commonly appear – consider Dada, Fluxus, Provo and relational aesthetics as examples. Games are activating, binding, educational and socially critical phenomona, but they are also simply games, meaningful because, like art itself, they are not at the behest of specific interests. In our Games special, we take a concrete look at games from the standpoint of the practice of visual art: the games of artists. We have portraits of the American artist Michael Portnoy, and the German artist Harun Farocki, as well as a description by Joost Raessens, a specialist in game theory, of the implications of the game in the development of contemporary culture. Thanks to a grant from the Prince Bernhard Culture Foundation, we are also pleased to be able to include actual games with this issue, in a special game book created by artists and designers.