Rudolf Thomas Inderst (PhD in Philosophy, PhD in Cultural Studies, PhD in Political Science) is a professor of Game Design and Game Studies at Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences. He heads the Digital Games section at the TITEL cultural magazine, publishes the weekly newsletter Game Studies Watchlist, and is the founder and host of the international Game Studies podcasts of the New Books Network.
From Trophy to Tomb: The Functional Opposition of Art in Payday 2 and Arc Raiders
FROG 2026 – Talk
The conference theme “PLAYING ART” invites speakers to examine how games translate artworks into playful systems and how games themselves operate as cultural expressions. This paper proposes a comparative analysis of two diametrically opposed ludic treatments of art: the active heist in Payday 2’s “Framing Frame” mission and the passive storage of paintings in Arc Raiders’ “Stella Montis” map.
In Payday 2’s “Framing Frame”, art is reduced to its purest capitalist function: a commodity to be stolen, traded, and weaponized for political framing. Paintings are marked with “Sold” stickers, signaling their prior exchange value; the player’s task is to intercept them before delivery. Art here is liquid capital – mobile, fungible, and entirely stripped of cultural meaning beyond its price tag. The gameplay loop reinforces this: stealth, bagging, and extraction transform the gallery into a logistics puzzle, not a cultural space. Arc Raiders’ “Stella Montis” presents the inverse. Described as a “now-defunct facility teeming with humanity’s important treasury” with “rows upon rows of stored paintings meant to preserve art”, this indoor map is a tomb of cultural heritage. The paintings are not loot; they are environmental storytelling, relics of a collapsed civilization’s attempt at preservation. Unlike in Payday 2, these artworks are immobile, worthless in gameplay terms, and functionally inert. Their presence signifies failed preservation rather than successful theft.
This paper argues that these two treatments represent a fundamental opposition in how games conceptualize art’s role: art as trophy (extractable, instrumentalizable, commodified) versus art as relic (immovable, melancholic, witness to extinction). I will analyze how each game’s mechanics, level design, and reward systems produce these opposing meanings and what this reveals about games as cultural mediators of art. The comparison offers a critical lens on how playful formats “are never neutral”: they actively construct what art is and does within their worlds, shaping players’ implicit understanding of cultural value.