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April 14, 2003
Maybe video games are too creative
Over at Corante's game blog, Andrew Phelps -- a professor of gaming at the Rochester Institute of Technology -- has written an interesting essay about how game-design is taught. He points out that academic studying games still have no real language with which to discuss how games work, which is a really good point.
But then he criticizes students for continually wanting to remake the popular games of their youth:
When students come to me their questions are not 'will I study technique XYZ?' or 'will I get a job?' but 'how can I learn to make [game X]?' ( where [game X] is a game that they played in childhood ). Bard's Tale, Asteroids, Pitfall, Zelda, these are all popular choices. Yes, they all want to do it with new fully immersive ultra high-def 3D and whatnot, but generally people getting their feet wet are not interested in studying new forms of play -- they are interested in lavishly recreating the old ones with better technology. And there is nothing wrong with studying the old forms first, indeed it is difficult to explore new alternatives without first understanding the major genres and niches -- but at some point originality is key... Regardless of what we try to study anyone in this culture invariable relates any idea back to a basis in another game, and anyone who isn't in this culture has long since left the room out of disinterest.
As I sit here (and I've had two prospective student emails thus far even while I write this in spite of the fact we only have a concentration at the moment and not a degree) I am floored by the number of people that wish only to recreate, albeit with better tech, that which has been seen and described before. And it is in part because they are a part of the gaming culture, and that is what drew them here. The culture is so iconic, worships its past with such fervor, that it is nearly impossible to break the mold ... I've seen game proposals that literally say 'We want to build a Quake-like thing but that takes place in a kind of giant bee-hive with insectoid enemies'.
I think he's way off base. I, too, have harshly criticized the game industry for coughing up the same-old, same-old stuff. But Phelp isn't giving enough credit to the artistic value of remaking the old.
In virtually every other art-form throughout history, pupils learned the craft by mimicking the style of masters. And the masters themselves invariably plundered from successful works that had come before. Chaucer stole tons of narrative devices for his Canterbury Tales from Boccaccio's Decameron; Shakespeare stole material joyfully from Ovid's Metamorphosis, Chaucer himself, and Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. James Joyce and T.S. Eliot pretty much did nothing but brilliantly stitch together riffs from the last few millenia of art.
And in each case, the plundering was utterly crucial to their art. These guys knew that by starting with narratives and drama and metaphors that were already proven to work, they were freed up to focus on their own particular creative genius. Julius Caesar kicks ass partly because Shakespeare didn't have to worry about coming up with an original storyline; he knew the existing one worked well. The same holds true for the audience; nobody who sat down to watch the play was there for the surprise ending or anything. The story had been known for centuries. The point was, Shakespeare's creativity came out because he didn't have to worry about crafting the basic narrative. He was free to worry about other things, like making Brutus' character so wonderfully complex, or producing an insanely deft speech by Marc Anthony that turns the mob against the conspirators.
Let's be really contrary here. Let's say the problem with games is not that we've had too little creativity -- but that we've had too much. As Warren Spector once told me, one of the main reasons game design is so hard is that the technological stakes change every few years. A new Playstation or new Pentium chip comes out with entirely new graphical capabilities, forcing designers to throw out all the work they've done on tweaking and perfecting the last game engine, and start fresh. That's like demanding oil painters switch to watercolors after only two years -- and then to macrame bead art two years later. Who's ever going to master an artform under those conditions?
Consider this: The most successful first-person shooter in recent years was Counterstrike -- not a new game, but a modification of an existing one. The designer didn't start from scratch; he didn't need to. He took a game that worked perfectly well, and made it immeasurably better with a few elegant tweaks. Similarly, there's been a creative explosion in online Flash games -- like Bejeweled or Collapse or Snood -- that are really nothing more than updates and modifications of classic color-matching games. Again, the designers didn't go back to square one ... because that's often artistically counterproductive. If Phelps is worried about the crapola games his students are suggesting (and I admit that Quake-with-bees thing sounds kinda ludicrous) the problem is not that they're starting with a tried-and-true game. It's merely that they suggestions for updating it aren't terribly smart.
Sometimes, too much creativity can be the worst thing for art -- and gaming is going to figure this out soon.
Posted by Clive Thompson at April 14, 2003 11:29 PM
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An interesting counterpoint!
I would argree that while there are several games that are build upon the shoulders of their past (and I would also agree that there are several genres in which this has been successful) there is still substantial room in games for that which has *not* been seen before. One of the most important classes I took in art school was 'experimental art' (don't remember the actual name, that's what the students called it) in which the *only* rule was 'You cannot do that which has been done before'. Yes, it was one of the hardest classes I'd ever taken - but it advanced my thinking about painting farther than any other single course. Was it important to take Art History? you bet. But there's the flip side: I developed a personal artistic style only when I began to separate myself from history and influence in experimental art. I produced a lot of crap. But it was *new* crap. And then I could draw from that when I wanted to make *good* things, that hade some historical basis but that also had a uniqueness to them.
Certainly there is a place for derivative work, and I don't mean to assign derivative in a bad way. As you point out some great work is based on its predecessors. But they also added something very new and different - where does 'new' come from?
Posted by: Andy at April 15, 2003 10:53 AM
For a long time I was convinced that video gaming was a dead form. I thought the abstractoid insanity of the 1980s arcade, which I loved loved loved with all my heart, had gone away forever. Hello frickin' fighters and shooters, goodbye Pac-man and Tempest and Qix. You will be missed, etc. Boo hoo.
I don't think that any more. Every week I spend several hours with two or three new games. Many of them suck. Heck, most of them suck. But at least once a month and sometimes more often, I find something that puts a big grin on my face. And several times a year a game completely and utterly blows my mind. If you have not tried Rez and Ico, you must. They are so beautiful to look at and wonderful to play that you will not be able to stop talking about them, even when the people you are talking to are visibly not interested. (Yes, Rez is the one with the vibrator thingy, but it will blow your mind even if you don't let it into your pants.)
Many of the mind-blowers, strangely, stay very close to traditional game archetypes. Rez is a rail shooter. Ico is a platformer. Silent Hill is classic survival-horror.
So I think you're right, Clive, that having history to work with gives designers the right kind of creative space. But I don't think the ongoing rush of technology is such a problem either. Remember, what we're really talking about, at least in the post-1995 game world, is refinements and improvements to an essentially unchanging 3D model. Your texture designers get more resolutiuon, and your modelers get more polygons, and your level designers get wider, more open spaces and more on-screen activity. But the creative roles themselves really don't need to be re-invented every time the hardware gets improved. Mostly it's the coders who have to learn new tricks. And that's what coding is all about anyway.
Blather blather blather. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are gems floating in that great sea of crap, and I really, really believe the gem-to-crap ratio is better now than it's been in years. To pine for the golden age, or to say that gaming has hit a creative wall, is to be spending too much time thinking about ludology v. narrative and not enough time actually playing.
Gaming is producing far more per-capita wonders than, say, pop music. I figure that deserves celebration, not hand-wringing.
Posted by: Bret Dawson at April 15, 2003 11:23 AM
Certainly there is a place for derivative work, and I don't mean to assign derivative in a bad way. As you point out some great work is based on its predecessors. But they also added something very new and different - where does 'new' come from?
Yes, that's precisely the question! I think part of this is about degree rather than direction. I certainly think it's a good idea to try and innovate and do something new. (I actually currently am involved in my second so-stupidly-forward-looking-that-it-might-not-even-work project in the wireless area, so I'm not only a believer in trying new stuff, I'm my own worst enemy.) It's more about precisely when we ask students learning a craft to try something stylistically new. I think it behooves students in all genres -- fiction, poetry, cinema, oil-painting, drama, non-fiction -- to immerse themselves for at least a couple of years in doing emulations of classics. That's partly because there's an element to art that is always about doing -- until you get your hands dirty, you'll never fully understand what the principles of your medium are. And the cool thing about practising by emulating 'what works' is that you build up a sort of muscle memory; you learn the ins and outs of the medium by inhabiting the work that exemplifies it. I mean, that's how I learned french horn (which I played for 8 years), guitar (which I've played for about 17 years now), and journalism (which I've done for about 14 years). If I'd tried to do something entirely creative off the bat, I definitely would have done something that had never been seen before, but that's for the best; it would almost certainly have sucked.
I've tried this trick plenty of times as an editor. A new writer comes in, with a ton of fantastic reported material; but it's their first major, full-length magazine article, and they have no clue how to organize the material. So I get them to find me a couple of superb, top-of-the-line magazine features in styles they admire and respect. I throw in a couple of my picks too. We analyse what the writers did and how they did it, and how it's applicable to their subject matter. I tell them to basically go and do their draft in emulation of the format and style of the favorite of their pieces.
Inevitably, they hand something in that is so much drastically better than their first draft that it's hard to believe the same person did both.
Though to be fair, I think I err too hard on the side of cramming-the-basics down the throats of creative people. I think I'm reacting against the Romantic-era pedagogical claptrap that assumes that anything that flows out of us is inherently creative, merely because it came from us. I know that isn't at all what you're arguing, Andy -- I'm merely clarifying that this is a straw man I often feel compelled to attack, heh!
Bret: Excellent, excellent point. I agree -- think the hit-to-miss ratio in games is astonishingly high, given the immaturity of the medium! Pop music only wishes it could come close to producing stuff as good as games.
I was thinking today that maybe that's why games have continued to thrive (well, thrive reasonably well) in a world of peer-to-peer file-sharing. People download tons of games for free (hell, the PC folks give 'em away for free openly, and even the console guys give stuff away in sample disks polybagged with gaming mags), and yet still enough people go out to drop $50 on a title. It's kind of amazing.
Posted by: Clive at April 15, 2003 7:58 PM
I agree, Clive. As a harmonica player, one of the most instructive things I've ever done is to learn to play the classics note for note. In his great master class series, Jerry Portnoy (plays with Clapton, played with Muddy Waters), describes mimicry as a critical part of mastering the vocabulary the instrument, and I agree that the same might be true of games. Learning how and why games were paced in a certain way, and then playing around with different variables to see the effects of changing them and so on. Second, one of the best games I played this year, Sly Cooper, steals from other games left and right, and that's what makes it work.
Posted by: kurt squire at April 16, 2003 11:29 AM
Posted by: Online Casino at January 16, 2004 2:50 AM
Posted by: julia at January 24, 2004 8:49 PM
Many games are based on the same fundamental code i.e. graphic engine (for in games it's mostly graphics that improve with new hardaware). Just look at the plethora of games that were created with the engine of quake 2. These engines are relatively state-of-the-art, and new engine becomes the industry standard when the old one becomes obsolete. The graphics resemble that of the earlier games, but the game developers are pretty much free to create their own game with original story and setting. So, on the other hand, developers don't have to create everything from scrath, but on the other, they don't have to just ape a succesful predecessor.
Posted by: finnish moron at January 25, 2005 1:13 PM
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An interesting counterpoint!
I would argree that while there are several games that are build upon the shoulders of their past (and I would also agree that there are several genres in which this has been successful) there is still substantial room in games for that which has *not* been seen before. One of the most important classes I took in art school was 'experimental art' (don't remember the actual name, that's what the students called it) in which the *only* rule was 'You cannot do that which has been done before'. Yes, it was one of the hardest classes I'd ever taken - but it advanced my thinking about painting farther than any other single course. Was it important to take Art History? you bet. But there's the flip side: I developed a personal artistic style only when I began to separate myself from history and influence in experimental art. I produced a lot of crap. But it was *new* crap. And then I could draw from that when I wanted to make *good* things, that hade some historical basis but that also had a uniqueness to them.
Certainly there is a place for derivative work, and I don't mean to assign derivative in a bad way. As you point out some great work is based on its predecessors. But they also added something very new and different - where does 'new' come from?
Posted by: Andy at April 15, 2003 10:53 AM
For a long time I was convinced that video gaming was a dead form. I thought the abstractoid insanity of the 1980s arcade, which I loved loved loved with all my heart, had gone away forever. Hello frickin' fighters and shooters, goodbye Pac-man and Tempest and Qix. You will be missed, etc. Boo hoo.
I don't think that any more. Every week I spend several hours with two or three new games. Many of them suck. Heck, most of them suck. But at least once a month and sometimes more often, I find something that puts a big grin on my face. And several times a year a game completely and utterly blows my mind. If you have not tried Rez and Ico, you must. They are so beautiful to look at and wonderful to play that you will not be able to stop talking about them, even when the people you are talking to are visibly not interested. (Yes, Rez is the one with the vibrator thingy, but it will blow your mind even if you don't let it into your pants.)
Many of the mind-blowers, strangely, stay very close to traditional game archetypes. Rez is a rail shooter. Ico is a platformer. Silent Hill is classic survival-horror.
So I think you're right, Clive, that having history to work with gives designers the right kind of creative space. But I don't think the ongoing rush of technology is such a problem either. Remember, what we're really talking about, at least in the post-1995 game world, is refinements and improvements to an essentially unchanging 3D model. Your texture designers get more resolutiuon, and your modelers get more polygons, and your level designers get wider, more open spaces and more on-screen activity. But the creative roles themselves really don't need to be re-invented every time the hardware gets improved. Mostly it's the coders who have to learn new tricks. And that's what coding is all about anyway.
Blather blather blather. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are gems floating in that great sea of crap, and I really, really believe the gem-to-crap ratio is better now than it's been in years. To pine for the golden age, or to say that gaming has hit a creative wall, is to be spending too much time thinking about ludology v. narrative and not enough time actually playing.
Gaming is producing far more per-capita wonders than, say, pop music. I figure that deserves celebration, not hand-wringing.
Posted by: Bret Dawson at April 15, 2003 11:23 AM
Certainly there is a place for derivative work, and I don't mean to assign derivative in a bad way. As you point out some great work is based on its predecessors. But they also added something very new and different - where does 'new' come from?
Yes, that's precisely the question! I think part of this is about degree rather than direction. I certainly think it's a good idea to try and innovate and do something new. (I actually currently am involved in my second so-stupidly-forward-looking-that-it-might-not-even-work project in the wireless area, so I'm not only a believer in trying new stuff, I'm my own worst enemy.) It's more about precisely when we ask students learning a craft to try something stylistically new. I think it behooves students in all genres -- fiction, poetry, cinema, oil-painting, drama, non-fiction -- to immerse themselves for at least a couple of years in doing emulations of classics. That's partly because there's an element to art that is always about doing -- until you get your hands dirty, you'll never fully understand what the principles of your medium are. And the cool thing about practising by emulating 'what works' is that you build up a sort of muscle memory; you learn the ins and outs of the medium by inhabiting the work that exemplifies it. I mean, that's how I learned french horn (which I played for 8 years), guitar (which I've played for about 17 years now), and journalism (which I've done for about 14 years). If I'd tried to do something entirely creative off the bat, I definitely would have done something that had never been seen before, but that's for the best; it would almost certainly have sucked.
I've tried this trick plenty of times as an editor. A new writer comes in, with a ton of fantastic reported material; but it's their first major, full-length magazine article, and they have no clue how to organize the material. So I get them to find me a couple of superb, top-of-the-line magazine features in styles they admire and respect. I throw in a couple of my picks too. We analyse what the writers did and how they did it, and how it's applicable to their subject matter. I tell them to basically go and do their draft in emulation of the format and style of the favorite of their pieces.
Inevitably, they hand something in that is so much drastically better than their first draft that it's hard to believe the same person did both.
Though to be fair, I think I err too hard on the side of cramming-the-basics down the throats of creative people. I think I'm reacting against the Romantic-era pedagogical claptrap that assumes that anything that flows out of us is inherently creative, merely because it came from us. I know that isn't at all what you're arguing, Andy -- I'm merely clarifying that this is a straw man I often feel compelled to attack, heh!
Bret: Excellent, excellent point. I agree -- think the hit-to-miss ratio in games is astonishingly high, given the immaturity of the medium! Pop music only wishes it could come close to producing stuff as good as games.
I was thinking today that maybe that's why games have continued to thrive (well, thrive reasonably well) in a world of peer-to-peer file-sharing. People download tons of games for free (hell, the PC folks give 'em away for free openly, and even the console guys give stuff away in sample disks polybagged with gaming mags), and yet still enough people go out to drop $50 on a title. It's kind of amazing.
Posted by: Clive at April 15, 2003 7:58 PM
I agree, Clive. As a harmonica player, one of the most instructive things I've ever done is to learn to play the classics note for note. In his great master class series, Jerry Portnoy (plays with Clapton, played with Muddy Waters), describes mimicry as a critical part of mastering the vocabulary the instrument, and I agree that the same might be true of games. Learning how and why games were paced in a certain way, and then playing around with different variables to see the effects of changing them and so on. Second, one of the best games I played this year, Sly Cooper, steals from other games left and right, and that's what makes it work.
Posted by: kurt squire at April 16, 2003 11:29 AM
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Posted by: Online Casino at January 16, 2004 2:50 AM
Posted by: julia at January 24, 2004 8:49 PM
Many games are based on the same fundamental code i.e. graphic engine (for in games it's mostly graphics that improve with new hardaware). Just look at the plethora of games that were created with the engine of quake 2. These engines are relatively state-of-the-art, and new engine becomes the industry standard when the old one becomes obsolete. The graphics resemble that of the earlier games, but the game developers are pretty much free to create their own game with original story and setting. So, on the other hand, developers don't have to create everything from scrath, but on the other, they don't have to just ape a succesful predecessor.
Posted by: finnish moron at January 25, 2005 1:13 PM