Slashdot Mirror
Fun is Fine - Toward a Philosophy of Game Design
David Kennerly writes "The Entertainment versus Art debate flares perennially. These participants may be having fun, but the dichotomy is uniquely inappropriate to games. By the end of this article, we may disentangle the faulty dichotomy. After reconsidering what we think we know about a game, fun, and art we may come to discover that Nomura and Costikyan are correct: 'If you were to write a Seven Lively Arts for the 21st century, the form you'd have to mention first is clearly games.' --Greg Costikyan"
What is the Sound of One Hand Designing?
"[Do not] mistake yourself for an 'artist.' Our goal is to create newer and more fun games. Art is not our goal." Tetsuya Nomura, Final Fantasy character designer[1]
The Entertainment versus Art debate flares perennially. These participants may be having fun, but the dichotomy is uniquely inappropriate to games. For example among MMORPGs, to Jessica Mulligan, fun subsumes art[2]; whereas, to Raph Koster, art subsumes entertainment.[3] I will challenge the dichotomy itself. Crafting fun is the art of the game.
To paraphrase Stephen King: Put your game design desk in the corner to remind yourself every day that Art supports Life, not the other way around.[4] By the end of this article, we may disentangle the faulty dichotomy. After reconsidering what we think we know about a game, fun, and art we may come to discover that Nomura and Costikyan are correct:
"If you were to write a Seven Lively Arts for the 21st century, the form you'd have to mention first is clearly games." Greg Costikyan[5]
To begin disentangling, we need to come to terms with the game as a unique medium.
A Unique Medium
"Unfortunately, as similar as the two media are, the differences are real and compelling and the superficial similarities can actually make people LESS effective in new, game-oriented roles." Warren Spector[6]
Games are not like other forms of art. To define a game: if it uses points, has players and rules, it's a game. Of course a game may be part of a service or a world or a community, too. To keep a game, as I use the term here, from being confused with all the disciplines that game theory has been applied to (economics, psychology, politics, empirical analysis), call it "a parlor game," if the reader must. But Joe and Jane at the checkout counter call it a game.
As the sound designer for the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers video game wrote:
"It is unproductive to think of games as âinteractive movies,â(TM) although many people tend to think of games in those terms. Let's be clear: games and films are different media. The techniques, processes, and skills involved in the creation of each are unique and not interchangeable. The metrics by which each is judged are also different, meaning that many of the properties that make for a good film would lead to a lousy game, and vice versa."[7]
Narratives, which includes most films, and games differ dramatically, because games donâ(TM)t tell stories, players tell stories. A narrative is a passive experience. One watches and feels but does not do. The audience is not the actor. In a game, the audience is at once the actor, also. Herein is a conflict of purpose. The author of a narrative must control the lives of the actors. Whereas, the designer of a game must abdicate control. To paraphrase Will Wright's first advice for a budding game designer: Games are about players having fun; not about writers solving the narrative problems they want to solve.[8]
Part of the problem is that an intellectual property rarely links a fine narrative to a fine game. Dungeons & Dragons is not J.R.R. Tolkien-in-the-medium-of-a-game. American McGee's Alice is not an adaptation of Lewis Carroll-in-the-medium-of-a-game. Go or Eleusis, which are puzzling, logical, and playfully deep, offers better comparison to Lewis Carroll. Reiner Knizia came closer with his cooperative board game of "Lord of the Rings," which retains the spirit of the novel. But still "Lord of the Rings" is more of a novelty than a fine game.
Many game-movie crossovers, such as Tomb Raider or Mario Brothers, failed and so did movie-games, such as Atariâ(TM)s E.T.[9] or Braveheart. Their lesson: satisfy an audience for a movie, a player for a game. A bleak road lies before one who seeks a movie experience in a game or vice versa~$?ugh the fine game invokes something powerful inside the willing player, don't look for J.R.R. Tolkien or Lewis Carroll in a game. He's not there. Equally, there
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is just complete bullshit.
Just because people are dumbing down CS doesn't mean CS isn't a science.
It's as if everyone and their crack whore sister became a neurosurgeon. Would medicine then become a "crafty" house-wise art fancy-pants hobby?
I'd really hate to be treated by a doctor who likes getting "creative" with standard practices for no better reason than "artistic license".
The true nature of CS is more than most colleges teach. Learning some stupid run-of-mill language is all fine and dandy but shouldn't constitute course material.
Real CS subject include math, numerical analysis, data structures, algorithms, etc...
Those are not "artsy-fartsy" subjects when treated properly.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Um, I don't think that was the conclusion. They proved that deciding the *best* position and orientation of the tetris pieces is NP-hard [or one of those] which basically means there is no sub-exponentiation method of figuring it out.
They didn't prove that you can't randomly guess correctly, just that you're not likely todo so.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Browsing this topic I see quite a few inflated +5 posts... yet the parent to my ramble is stuck at, oh, 1. Shawn, albeit grumpy and bitter, has made the most insightful point of all thus far. I'll add my own $.02 in and state that even beyond what Shawn is saying that *everything* is art, just as art is nothing, even if you don't see it as such through your eyes. If you ask me, the moment you try to define art is the same moment your objects of definition lose the very thing that made them art in the first place.
;)
For the purposes of this topic you may as well just substitute all instances of the word 'art' with the word 'novelty'.
Moderators: wake up and give this guy some credit, willya?
No I am not trolling! I really think the parent deserves some sort of recognition for well made points.
--
mcp.kaaos
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Sigeru Miyamoto is arguably the most influential game desginer alive today. He's responsible for the Mario and Zelda franchises and is renowned for his quality. Try miyamotoshrine.com for more info.
Bollocks.
'Classical' music (and its precursers in the church and court musics of the renaissance and medieval periods) was never popular music. It was music written for an elite and one of its primary purposes was precisely to distance the elite from hoi polloi who were listening to (and enjoying) ballads, jigs, reels and other 'folk music'.
Elite music is all about snobbery, oneupmanship and ostentation. Among other values elite music has to meet at least several of these criteria. It must:
While elite music of lasting aesthetic quality has been produced, the main reason people listened to elite music in the past (and, indeed, the main reason people listen to 'classical' music now) is a wish to identify themselves as elite - 'I listen to posh music so I am posher than you'.
This has nothing whatever to do either with aesthetic quality or with popularity. Elite music has never been popular and most of it never deserved to be.
By contrast, until the twentieth century (and, to a remarkable extent, through the twentieth century and into the present one) popular music is played by small groups of performers on relatively simple portable instruments using traditional musical forms which change little over generations.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.