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I'm writing this little blog as a sort of response to another developer's blog: since I thought he had an interesting point to make, I hope anyone who missed his post will take a minute to read it.
Eddie Cameron says "I Want Ugly" in his recent editorial, but I think most of the people who read his post would agree that what he really wants is not Ugly, but Beauty--more specifically, he wants that elusive species of Beauty that we call "Art".
As always, Beauty and Art are definitely in the eye of the beholder, but there is one feature that everything truly beautiful must possess: it must be unique. Nothing can be called Beautiful which is common and generic; the best you can aspire to without uniqueness is something "Pleasant". By extension, nothing can really be called "Art" with the capital A if it lacks originality (another word for uniqueness). The best you can aspire to without originality is "profit".
It's actually quite interesting that Cameron chose two screenshots of women to illustrate his point about the lack of style and originality in modern game art. "Beauty" in modern gaming art has come to be defined very much by the lowest common denominator. No one aspires to Art, because they are much too busy seeking profit. The greatest possible mass appeal = no dangerous risk. No one wants uniqueness or originality. Orders from on high are to stick with "pleasant", and reap your profit.
My point here--and I'm going to assume that Cameron agrees with me in general--is that creating art with no other goal than to hit the broadest possible demographic inevitably creates generic crap. Too much "pleasantness" bores the eye. Modern game art aspires to nothing more than repeating what is done-to-death and therefore "safe". Generally speaking, when people crow and beat their chests over the graphics in a game, it's not because they've created a unique art style or a boldly original vision. It's because they've managed to polish the same old turd with a few more pixels and a new lighting effect.
My opinion? Developers who reach for this particular brass ring are always going to fall short of greatness. Just as women who get surgery to look more like Barbie always fall short of "Beauty".
On the other hand, I can also tell you exactly why so many developers will always "play it safe". It's not necessarily a matter of personal inclination or a lack of real artistic talent--some of the artists working today simply cannot get paid to achieve their real potential. They produce this generic "pretty" art over and over for the same reason that so many women working in Hollywood have surgery on their bodies and faces: their agents insist that they tow this line, or be dropped out of the system.
The fact is, most Hollywood agents have absolutely no appreciation for authentic Beauty. They want to make a buck and they want all their bets to be safe. They keep a paranoid eye out for every snotty remark and critical stab at their clients, no matter how insignificant, mean-spirited and untrue, and they actually believe that this crap has some kind of validity. They'll tell a woman who's 5'9" and weighs 120 pounds that she's getting fat. They'll tell a beauty pageant queen that she needs a nose job. Their greed and venality have evolved into a form of insanity.
The equivalent bottom feeders in the gaming industry are the producers and publishers who are absolutely terrified of the public. Every snotty illiterate dig written by some anonymous thirteen-year-old mouthbreather on a Youtube comment string is The End of the World. The Powers That Be are so focused on getting their profit that they lose all perspective. All Mongo has to type is "ur game luks like crap" for these guys to whizz their business slacks.
One of the nice things about working for an independent developement studio is that you can win free of this particular hamster wheel from time to time. Over the years I've heard plenty of complaints from people who don't like the graphics in our games, particularly the bold use of color or the fact that different races have different aesthetics for their ships. We've also weathered plenty of waspish whining about the use of humor in our 2D art or the comic books style of our old splashscreens.
It's a beautiful thing to be able to ignore all that garbage, and to keep doing what we actually want and intend to do rather than being generically "pleasant". Our games have no trouble finding an audience, and whether people think they're Ugly or Beautiful, at least they don't look like yesterday's leftovers warmed over with a new shader.
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And don't worry about being random. Your thoughts are appreciated. :)
I thoroughly enjoyed Transformers 2, actually, but by the end I felt I'd seen everything.
After some time had passed I decided to see Battle of LA and was not rewarded. They could've learned from your rule; "is that if it does not help the movie then take it out". They cut and pasted all these really boring, irrelevant and trite backstories onto the "characters" and had to jam in a mention that the aliens were there for the water. Whut??? It would've been better if they didn't think they "had to" put "more story" in.
You can't write a story in 2011 about aliens coming for your water. Water is now known to be brutally common. Mercury and the Moon have water. Ceres has water. Current estimates predict up to 2 billion planets LIKE EARTH in the galaxy.
How does mission planning go??
"Sir, we're out of water. We're thinking about hooking nuclear reactors to desalinisation-"
"No no no no, that's lame. Let's go to space to get some water. Where are some planets with water?"
"Uhh, well, our moon has ice caps, and there's a lot of asteroids with-"
"No I said PLANET. Preferably around another star system. And none of this 'oh you have to melt it' bullshit. Liquid water. How many planets have that?"
"About two billion."
"Which one has the US Marines on it?"
"Uhh... That one."
"Then that is where we shall go!"
"Hahahah, I get it! You want to test our tevatron bomb, right?"
"I was thinking more along the lines of charging into a large city with machine guns."
A lot of games including indie and tripple-A strike me as less creative than a Polish mutual fund advertisement. Everything off the shelf. There is no good reason for this other than certain people being pussies. There is a false idea that doing something different is "risky". It's deep seated in human nature but it doesn't help you in the entertainment industry because if you blend in too well, you're invisible. People don't steal invisible cars, they steal red ones.
The worst is when "indie" devs wax poetic about how much freedom they have, then make a space rail shooter where you have a spaceship that looks like a chinese knockoff batwing (they all look the same, it really grates on me). They avoid anything "risky", and by this I mean unusual, then dump it onto the app store at 99 cents and boggle at the low sales.
In any case, a lot of the ideas about how to do things are just oversimplified.
Anyone ever see League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?
They decided that their audience was under-25-American-males so they added a demographically matching character to "appeal to them". Every other detail of the movie was just as naive and dumb and the result wasn't good. Lo and behold it failed on the market.
When I was growing up, me and my brothers' favorite action heroes were usually OLDER. Rambo, Solid Snake, Bruce Wayne, anyone played by Bruce Willis or Arnold or Stallone.
Hell, even Superman. Superman isn't an under-25-year-old-American-male. He's at least 30ish, is a journalist and is Kryptonian-American.
A naive person will say "you need to do it like X because that's what sells", and often it doesn't actually matter enough to HURT, but the rules aren't so simple and if one isn't such a huge pussy they can enjoy more creative freedom and still get solid results.
It makes me think of aspiring musicians. There's some hopeless people who won't learn their A chord or scales because they think it'll stifle their creativity, and then there's people who think a band has to have a certain spec of instruments and sing about X, Y and Z and follow the damn rules. You have to be neither.
As for the slam to "indie developers"...obviously some people really are limited by their lack of talent. The fact that you can do anything you want doesn't help much, if all you want is to make the same old crap, but badly.
In either case, the under-25 thing reminded me of the ugly and beauty bit. There's an idea that everything must be splendid, and I don't think it's any truer. There's a mountain of successful art with superficial grotesqueness.
Indie devs, like indie musicians, have no one but themselves to blame for the decisions they make and the art they produce.
Then there's all the silly ideas people have to increase "immersion" and... Know what it's too stupid to think about.
Of course with the popularity of the Lord of the Rings movies having cemented the visual look of fantasy into the collective consumer consciousness bland is also what the general public is most likely to be accepting of. Remember when Nintendo showed off Wind Waker for the first time and and everyone went into fits of passion over how they dare turn Zelda into a cartoon when clearly everyone desired the realistic link from the Space World 2000 trailer?
Remember how Nintendo later gave these same people what they wanted with Twilight Princess and they ultimately turned their noses up at it? Despite both running on the same hardware Wind Waker's visuals stand up to this day whereas Twilight Princess already looks very dated.
The thing about always giving people what they want is that sometimes people are just wrong.
"Electron" is a nonsense word: there is no direct sensory perception of an electron possible for the human - thus we cannot speak about it sensibly, but only in logical abstraction. However, I can certainly point to a perceptible object, say "This is Art".
What you were looking for is something like: "The essence of Art is ineffable." There, that's better :)
Art you say? Ups, looks like this is my stop.
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/9297-mirrors-edge-producer-depressed-by-sexed-up-v
ersion-of-faith/
I thought Mirror's Edge did OK though, at least in spite of the dizziness. I mean the game worked perfectly fine. It's clearly not mandatory. I'm not sure if this should be seen as much different than someone who decides to try Mario if he were female. "I'll draw it this way cause I like that more."
The idea that these sorts of changes are mandatory is going to resonate with people who think there are simple formulas for everything.
A thought occurred to me just now.
Is it possible that people get more funding if they think this way because they project more confidence and this helps them when talking to investors?
There's an aphorism from Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design that might be relevant:
"A bad idea with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good idea with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."
Could all this really stem from a more person to person kind of "sales" issue?
On a side note, Faith's smaller than usual brjóst never even occurred to me; I always thought she was pretty hot. Hardly a shining beacon of "ugly" but exactly what looks good is certainly flexible.