Bruny on 7/4/2001 at 22:31
<a href="http://www.mgon.com/interviews.phtml?id=62238&language=en">Here.</a>
<blockquote>Do you consider game design an art? If so, then do you consider yourself an artist? What inspires you to create?
WS: I guess if you really push me, I do think of game design as an art (though one with a lot of "craft" about it). But I've always felt it's not for the people working in a medium to decide that they're artists or to work in ways that are consciously artistic. It's for others -- critics, audiences, academics -- to decide what's art and what's not. But even more, it's for posterity to decide. History will tell us what has lasting artistic value, not newspapers, magazines or websites -- and certainly not developers themselves. Run in terror from any game developer who says, "I'm an Artist!"
The one thing I fear is that, if we ever consciously approach game design as an art, we'll become even more timid about thinking about it analytically. If thinking of oneself as an artist makes it harder to think about game design, if it stops us from getting beyond meaningless words like "fun" and "interactive" that seem to dominate discussions of games and gaming, count me out!</blockquote>
Warren is the last person I would expect to misunderstand art (unless I misunderstood him). I think game design is an art, I agree posterity will be a good judge of whether or not it's "good" art. But why shouldn't game designers consider themselves artists? What's so dangerous and pernicious about that? He seems to imply that artists cannot be analytical when it comes to their work. Ever try and compose a fugue without being analytical? Or perform one for that matter? I also think a consciously artistic perspective would bring a lot to game design.
Agent Monkeysee on 8/4/2001 at 02:03
Hmmm, I'm inclined to agree with Warren Spector here. Although I believe if others would care to judge it as art that's fine but usually when someone begins identifying oneself as "an artist" they're usually either taffing themselves or getting too wrapped up in <u>how</u> they accomplish their craft and not <u>what</u> they accomplish.
[This message has been edited by Agent Monkeysee (edited April 07, 2001).]
buglunch on 8/4/2001 at 10:37
I think he meant artists should just DO and not think about whether or not it's art or it can affect the result negatively.Fugue-writing is especially math and analysis-dependent but the ear has the final say.The less self-conscious you are at work the more artful and elegant the result.
frozenman on 8/4/2001 at 23:26
I agree with buggy over here.
I've always kinda had this idea that if you force creativity, it always comes out, well, forced and you don't like it. For instance, say you are trying to create a cool name for a cool fanfic for DX or SS2 or Thief -- if you sit down and go, "allright, i need to think of a name.", the names are always gonna be terrible and stereotypical.
It's the same with art -- whether it be a painting or music or games -- i'm sure Warren Spector (or whoever initially had the idea for DX) didn't sit down and say to himself, "Hey, i wanna create a revolutionary game -- what's revolutionary?" -- DX probably came to whoever it came to while they were sitting in the park one day and looking at all the people and thought how cool it would be to have in a game.
Anyway, games are art -- but if you *try* to make good games, it will be bad art.
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"Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it -- we make extrodinary efforts to delay it and often consider it's intrusion a tragic event. Yet we find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it. If death were indefinetly put off, the human physche would end up like, well, the Gambler in the Twilight Zone episode."
Bruny on 9/4/2001 at 18:00
Those are good points. I don't mean to analyze his off-hand comment to death, it just seemed wrong from somebody with a professional artistic background (film). I think he was commenting on pretentious vs unpretentious artists and I just don't think that has anything to do with it. Either an artist's stuff is good or it's bad, that's what it ultimately boils down to.
My only experience with art is music, with which I have a long background. I played around composing for awhile but gave it up when I realized I didn't have the knack. I have the most experience with performance which, in my experience, is 90% analysis, and just plain hard grunt work. The last 10% is "pure" art but without it you have nothing.
Some people work top-down, others work bottom-up, stepwise refinement is also a technique. I've always been a bottom-up kind of worker. I'll study all of the phrases, find the high points and low points, move a little further out to stamp out repetition, identify three-fold patterns, all the little stuff. Move out further, quantify the moods, identify explicit segments of the piece, do harmonic analysis. Move out to the top, quantify the overall structure of the piece, decide what "the point" of the thing is, find broad patterns in phrases, harmonies, and rhythms. Sing through the piece (even if it's not a vocal composition), dance the rhythms. Move out further still and look at the piece in the context of everything else the composer has done. Move out yet further and look at the piece in the context of all the other pieces being performed. During all of this is the pure grunt work of technique through practice and repetition. All of this is quantifiable and even found described clearly in textbooks.
The last 10% is a conscious drawing upon the artistic soul. It's impossible to quantify. It's a state of mind where you become in touch with your mood, listen to where you soul wants to take the music (even if it's at odds with what you decided during the analytic phase), even draw strength and inspiration from the audience. My teacher used to claim that during some parts of a erformance she would contact something higher from which beauty and inspiration would flow. The point is that that last 10% is what turns mere technique into beauty and art.
I imagine it's the same with other art forms. A writer goes through much the same hard work but ultimately relies on something more to turn a bunch of pages into an organic, living, thing which speaks to the reader's soul.
There are dangers involved in this (perhaps this is what he was alluding to). When you discard a part of your hard work and analysis to capture a moment of inspiration you run terrible risks. You can destroy the large structure of a piece of music, throw off tempi, draw too much attention to a segment too soon. All music performers know this though. I've been warned about it many times. It takes long years of experience (or inherent genius) to recognize good inspiration from "bad" or dangerous inspiration.
I'm just saying games might benefit from a little bit of art thrown into the mix. Listening to inspiration or ideas beyond the path which was carefully laid out (which is what I think art ultimately comes down to).
But Deus Ex turned out pretty good so what do I know?
Siftland on 10/4/2001 at 00:59
Quote:
Originally posted by frozenman:
Anyway, games are art -- but if you *try* to make good games, it will be bad art.
What?.....Did that come out wrong? Do you think that a work's artistic merit is valued by how LITTLE the artist cares?? That's crap: good art is work, hard work, and you have to try damn hard, and care about the work to get anything that anyone thinks is any good.
What Spector is trying to say is rooted in the idea of "art for art's sake." Artists are supposed to listen only to themselves, not cater to any standards set forth, or bow down to the criteria set forth by any person or group of people. This is "fine art"....and guess what? Fine artists are usually unemployed. They have no source of income unless their interests just so "happen" to parallel interests of buying customers. A fine artist is not attached to any marketplace, and thus can express his or her vision free of any sort of narrowing direction.
....But that doesn't sell games. Sorry, there is a market, and you can't expect to go off and do your own thing AND make money. So an "artist" pretty much means "failure:" A guy who says this WILL be this way because that suits him, and no one else matters. He would no doubt be out of a job soon. Also, have you ever met someone who says he has a great sense of humor? I have met several (including my own mom), and none of them do. Someone proclaiming themself an "artist" would be similar.
The ever-present problem of artisty is finding the line between fine art and mindless commercial crap. While you can sit back and practice your art all day, you have to also please your audience to get some coin. That's how it's always gonna be.
Are games art (hoping I never hear theis question again)? Hell yes! Else why the hell am I going to art school to get in the business?! I mean, there are guys who just produce drawing and paintings all day that work on games. If they aren't artists, then who is?
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"...Speaking of metal detectors..."
(http://www.gnourg.com) www.gnourg.com
(http://www.ttlg.com/fmp) T2X Artist...of sorts...
liquiddark on 10/4/2001 at 14:27
Quote:
Originally posted by Siftland:
good art is work, hard work, and you have to try damn hard, and care about the work to get anything that anyone thinks is any good.
This is very, very true
Quote:
What Spector is trying to say is rooted in the idea of "art for art's sake." Artists are supposed to listen only to themselves, not cater to any standards set forth, or bow down to the criteria set forth by any person or group of people. This is "fine art"....and guess what? Fine artists are usually unemployed. They have no source of income unless their interests just so "happen" to parallel interests of buying customers. A fine artist is not attached to any marketplace, and thus can express his or her vision free of any sort of narrowing direction.
....But that doesn't sell games. Sorry, there is a market, and you can't expect to go off and do your own thing AND make money. So an "artist" pretty much means "failure:"
"Financial success" <> "Success"
Sorry, but it just ain't. The crux of your argument falls apart if you take it outside of the realm of commercial games creation. And with modding (modders ARE artistically free) becoming increasingly significant to the success of a product, "fine art" is going to be a small but lasting component of what differentiates between the chaff and the wheat. Much as it is in every other area of life. Modern artists might be more pretentious as a class, but the really
important stuff still comes mainly from their ranks.
Quote:
A guy who says this WILL be this way because that suits him, and no one else matters. He would no doubt be out of a job soon. Also, have you ever met someone who says he has a great sense of humor? I have met several (including my own mom), and none of them do. Someone proclaiming themself an "artist" would be similar.
It's possible to be an artist and know it. Visit your local fine arts college if you don't believe it.
Quote:
The ever-present problem of artisty is finding the line between fine art and mindless commercial crap. While you can sit back and practice your art all day, you have to also please your audience to get some coin. That's how it's always gonna be.
Agreed. But that doesn't mean that being a self-proclaimed artist makes one unfit for creation. Take, for example, Warren Ellis: he's unapologetic and a cantankerous old creator. And he really, really rocks at what he does. Just because our equivalent of Transmetropolitan/Cerebus is Daikatana and our Ellis/Sim is John Romero doesn't mean anything. Every artistic medium has commercial interests these days. They also all have artistic interests, and these turn out to be the roots of real creation in our society - see independant filmmaking, see small-time comics, see half a dozen literary "revolutions" per genre in the past half a dozen decades. Unless you think the drek that Hollywood/Marvel/Harlequin/Girls Of Fantasy Calendars are the really important stuff. And if you do, I can only say that I pity you.
Quote:
Are games art (hoping I never hear theis question again)? Hell yes! Else why the hell am I going to art school to get in the business?! I mean, there are guys who just produce drawing and paintings all day that work on games. If they aren't artists, then who is?
I'm just wondering what that last sentence means. Obviously in the most technical sense they're "artists". But do they produce ART or art? Like you say, the line is between fine art which gets you no dough and mindless drek which makes you another cog in the machine.
I'm just going to say this: theatre for the stage suffers through much the same thing you're pointing out in games. Nobody makes any real money off of staged theatre in small markets, so the effort is entirely amateur. But let me quote a local director who
does get paid for his work:
Quote:
The only difference I can see between the amateur theatre done locally and the professional theatre I have seen here and abroad...is the absence of a paycheck
That sums it up pretty well; you're right that commercial interests dominate artistic in games. But that's the worst reason I've ever heard to argue against the conscious consideration of the artistic value of games in either the generic or the specific sense.
ld
Siftland on 10/4/2001 at 21:18
I think in taking each portion of what I said and responding to it seperately (in a very Nedan-esque manner, might I add) has completely failed to make you arrive at the overall point of my post. You act like I somewhere said I think hugely commercial is the way to go. I never said or implied that. Someone being too arty is bad; someone being too comercial is bad. It's about finding middle ground as it is with all other media. Sure a modder can do whatever the hell artistically he wants....but unless it sparks an interest in a group of people, NO ONE will care, obviously.
Somewhere, there's a painter who lives in his parents' attic and creates images of rusty nails. Wow, imagine that! An artist who works on his own free will!...Well it's not art if no one ever sees it. Gallery artists that have any repute just got really lucky, that is unless they appealed to some sort of social wanting, thus becoming a "commericial" artist, not a "true" artist.
I freekin' said game developers are artists! And they know it AND consider themselves thus. The problem comes in when you get a developer coming in a justifying his decisions because it's simply his vision; he's an "artist," and constantly declares himself such. You can't work with that sort of person.
And of course there are exceptions, a Leroy Neiman or Dave Sim (as you suggested, I'm not gonna add in Ellis however). These guys got lucky, plus they are involved in pretty much one-man operations. Games are a whole different affair than paintings or comics, not just one guy can do it. It's teamwork. You can't have some dictator "artist" bossing everyone around.
Games are large and expensive. You have to please publishers as well as fans AND manage to pull off a classy work of art. There are very few big name traditional artists; they are in the process of dying out. Works of art this day and age are huge projects, involving more and more people all the time. Pretty soon, the way it's going, unless an artist has the backing of a big corporation that they've "fooled" into funding their artistic outlet, then he will have no art at all....unless he wants to be the nail-painter in his parents' attic....There's always that.
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"...Speaking of metal detectors..."
(http://www.gnourg.com) www.gnourg.com
(http://www.ttlg.com/fmp) T2X Artist...of sorts...
[This message has been edited by Siftland (edited April 10, 2001).]
frozenman on 10/4/2001 at 22:25
Quote:
What?.....Did that come out wrong? Do you think that a work's artistic merit is valued by how LITTLE the artist cares?? That's crap: good art is work, hard work, and you have to try damn hard, and care about the work to get anything that anyone thinks is any good.
You interpreted it wrong. I doubt that there are very many artists that sit down and go -- "I wanna make a really revolutionary and beautiful piece of art.". Painting for example -- a painter may have this one emotion to express, if he sits there and goes, "What would be a good image to express this emotion?" the painting will come out flat and not inspiring. If the painter sits back and lets himself be inspired (by whatever it may be) it's gonna be a great painting.
You obviously completely ignored this:
Quote:
i'm sure Warren Spector (or whoever initially had the idea for DX) didn't sit down and say to himself, "Hey, i wanna create a revolutionary game -- what's revolutionary?"
cause that's exactly what i'm saying. Not that art isn't hard to make. There's the idea and the execution. The idea has to be great -- and it should come to you naturally -- and then there's the execution where the hard work comes in to realise your idea.
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"I got this great idea for a movie. It'll be about these two guys, and they have the party of their lifetime. But when they wake up, they can't find their car! I think i'll call it, 'Where's my car, dude?'"
Siftland on 10/4/2001 at 23:25
Okay....I'll agree to that. But the sentence I quoted was poorly stated. An artist needs to be inspired to do great work, not told or forcing himself to some pregenerated idea. But not all art is bent on being revolutionary or changing the world or people's perception of art. Some art is about just portraying a nice scene or telling a great, epic story. What is so bad about the present that we constantly have to strive to find art that takes us somewhere else?
I had a painting teacher who said art is only meant to depict the raw animal behavior of man. And that's all. Now that's complete bullshit. That's what I feel about you suggesting that good art should be revolutionary....that's not the case. That may be what it is to you, always looking for a change, but not necessarily the rest of us.
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"...Speaking of metal detectors..."
(http://www.gnourg.com) www.gnourg.com
(http://www.ttlg.com/fmp) T2X Artist...of sorts...
[This message has been edited by Siftland (edited April 10, 2001).]