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Crawford Lambasts Overly Technical Approach To Games
Thanks to the IGDA for its Chris Crawford-authored 'Ivory Tower' column discussing the gap between science and the arts in videogame creation. Crawford, ever belligerent, argues: "Let's face it, the world of game design is dominated by science/engineering people; people from the arts and humanities play a secondary role... the result: a vast wasteland of cold, heartless games, technological works of genius deficient in redeeming social value." He goes on to suggest: "We need educational programs that expose students to equal amounts of technology and art. They should learn to program even as they study Michelangelo, rhetoric and recursion, algorithms and architecture." Do you think this would lead to better, more innovative, socially aware videogames?
There's many games out there that seem to be more tech demos than real games, and even some of the bigger hits, like Ninja Gaiden, I sat there playing it, and it just felt like it was missing something... a soul, if you will. Hopefully we get more games that are more than just the sum of their parts, and I see them from companies such as Nippon Ichi, and Nintendo.
...a whole world of geniuses?
Not everyone can come close to being able to focus on that many areas - the literary/artistic education people are given in this country (at least) is laughable, and there are people who want to add onto all of this?
Why not just get more people who have the artistic skills and prowess more involved in the game making process? Why do companies let engineers write game plots? As I see it, the reason there isn't more redeeming social value in gaming is because no one involved in the creative side of game development seems to be good enough to tie it in.
It's a bit silly to try making everyone into an artist/writer/director as well as a mathematician/engineer/programmer; most people's minds just don't deal that well with one area or the other (right brain/left brain dominance I suppose).
I'll be graduating in a couple of years with a degree in English, and hope to make a name for myself through writing, but the last thing on my mind is getting a job writing video game stories or working on development. I'd love the chance to do that kind of work, but it's nothing I've heard of happening lately.
"Infants flesh will be in season throughout the year." -Swift
As a programmer, I'm a little insulted. This guy seems to ignore that many of today's game designers do not come from a highly technical background,...at least not as technical as the programmers. Furthermore, much of the design either comes from or is altered by the producers. That means that much of the content is swayed by people that don't necessarily have 'any' technical background; they're business people, not programmers or software engineers.
Many of the bigger names in the industry 'are' technical, but they're also artistic, and they mainly hail from the days where only 2 people may be working on a game, forcing programming and artistic expression into one condensed job. However, these people are the exception, and the majority of people who influence the content of video games at this point have little to no technical knowledge of the games they're creating.
The author makes a good point, and more artistic creativity wouldn't hurt the creation of games. I'm just not sure he targeted the problem correctly.
When I take a look at game developers a majority of the staff are generally artists and designers who come from every creative field you could imagine, and it keeps showing in the games. If you only play doom and quake you might not see that there are a lot of more artistic and creative games available. But a game designer (or at least a lead designer) needs a ton of experience to know how to create things that work in games, if you just bring in a famous script writer you're just going to get one long cutscene with no room for gameplay.
If anything, we need designers that have more technical skills so they are more able to put their creative skills to better use.
Crawford may not have anything nice to say about the game industry, but he knows a lot about games. Listen when he preaches, just don't take his words as gospel.
I totally agree with him that there is still an unpleasant divide between the academics and the engineers. It's great that people are starting to take games more seriously and I still believe that the current trend will result in a much more mature (in the intellectual sense, not the Playboy-Sims game sense) industry.
However, here is where I disagree with Crawford - I don't think the video game industry will emerge from its 'puberty' once interactive storytelling takes off and the humanities people are finally able to add their 'emotion' into games, but I think it'll happen once academics master the formal elements of games, build theories from the ground up and recognize things computers are inherently good at, like real-time distributed communication and number crunching for complex systems.
After that, all that's left to be done is to create a thriving indy scene and bring game development to the masses, raise public opinion and awareness of games as a medium by creating them for their artistic merit as opposed to their marketability and popularity, and finally, acknowledge the enormous educational potential of games and wholeheartedly integrate the study and play of games into our educational institutions all the way from elementary schools to university departments.
Let's face it, the world of game design is dominated by science/engineering people
Good. Game designers who can't at least begin to understand the technical aspects have no place in game development. The best game designers understand why a programming team can't implement a solution in a particular way due to the underlying complexity. The simpler the design, the better it folds and fits onto the hardware. Designers who simply sit around spouting unimplementable nonsense are eventually going to get punched in the face by the developers who have to actually build the game.
Put it another way: Do you want your car's engine and steering to be designed by an automotive concept artist (the guy who does the first outer rough sketch?) - or a competent engineering team who understand technical problems?
Another point: The consumers of games aren't exactly fine art afficionados. They've got to have a technical bent in the first place if they are going to own a machine capable of playing games. Science / engineering folk tend to know what other science / engineering folk like best.
people from the arts and humanities play a secondary role... the result: a vast wasteland of cold, heartless games, technological works of genius deficient in redeeming social value." He goes on to suggest
The stereotypical "chick flick" hasn't had much of a draw among young 15-26 year old male gamers. I'm not sure warm, lighthearted, socially redeeming fluff games would sell to anybody. "Feel good" movies are forgotten 2 minutes after exiting the theatre - and somebody forgets they've played such a game, what, really, was the point?
We need educational programs that expose students to equal amounts of technology and art. They should learn to program even as they study Michelangelo, rhetoric and recursion, algorithms and archite...
WOAH! Hold on a second there - I'm not sure if you've ever worked on a modern game development team (sorry, things have come a long way since 1979) - but there's a certain specialization of the roles. Unless you're an indie developer and with a team of more than about 4 people, artists produce assets - and generally don't code. Programmers produce code - and generally don't make art. Larger teams even have specialised designers - the "lead designer" will be in charge of the entire game's direction. The best designers are a cross between empowered gameplay testers and someone who knows the level design tools.
Unless somebody is set on making their own little games in their spare time, heeding your advice and learning art alongside programming is a good way to dilute talent and torpedo someone's game development career before it's even started.
Not necessarily. Games have already begun to go beyond their initial function as merely 'games' by interacting our citizens. Video games have already served therapeutic purposes... http://www.wetland.sk.ca/children-games/therapeuti c-games-for-children.html ... military recruitment purposes...
http://www.americasarmy.com/ ... and potential CIA agent training purposes.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030929-123116- 1145r.htm
"Games" have already begun to expand beyond a mere entertainment source.
if Peter Jackson set out to do LOTR without first knowing the books inside and out, would it have done as well? if the Wachowski Brothers didn't have an interest in such a wide variety of different forms of Storytelling and Visual effect, do you really think the Matrix would have been as big?
now to Translate that over to the Current Generation of Games. if the Makers of Gran Turismo didn't know cars inside and out, would GT have been the Racing game of choice for both Hardcore and Mainstream Racing Gamers? or, if Square-enix didn't take the time to make sure their storylines not only touched the mind of the Gamer, but the Heart as well, would any FF games do well?
nowadays, Being a renaissance man/woman should not only be Recommended, it should damn near be Required of anyone that even considers having a part in Developing a Game, otherwise everything becomes Generic, Corvettes start handling like GT40s, all main Characters become the same, Game scripts become re-writes of Hollywood Movies, and the industry creates Heartless and uninspired games that re-hash the same thing over and over to the point where its even more common than it is now
as a Programmer thats trying to get into the Game Dev Industry, i make for Damn sure that i do as many different things as i can, Programming is my Specialty, but that doesn't mean i should render something in 3D Max from time to Time, it doesn't stop me from Playing the Guitar, and it damn well shouldn't stop me from going to the Bar and enjoying the night-life of my Hometown.
as far as Socially aware, more MMORPG Developers would do some good by actually being a part of their City's nightlife and finding out how people interact without a Keyboard in front of them. discover the importance of Hand Gestures and Body Contact, inspiration can strike in the most unusual of places, but 9/10- times, its the most Logical place to find that inspiration
/. is overrun by bed-wetting elitist nerds
let it be known, for anything other than servers, a *nix OS sucks
Whilst I agree that there are alot of bad game design and desingers out there. I don't think that it's because designers are too technical. If anything my experience is that they are neither technical nor artistic enough. Generally the people who end up being designers are people that entered the industry from the bottom rung: testing.
Lots of the designers that I've worked with over the years are people who are in the games industry because they want to be (nothing wrong with that) and have no skills that are of obvious practical use to the industry (i.e. they can't draw, they can't code, and they can't project manage). So, we make them testers, and then when they've been there long enough to deserve a decent salary we make them into designers.
There's no qualifications that you need to be a designer, people just get into it and they're either good or bad at the job. This is unlike both code and art, most studios don't employ coders or artists without qualifications (unless they take them on as co-ops or something).
Maybe all these game design courses that universities are starting up will help, but in the end I think that this is just the nature of the beast.....
There are plenty of people out there designing and writing games who are both creative artists and decent engineers and programmers.
... Just because you may not understand some of the real concepts behind what this author is proposing ... and yeah, frankly, the Two Cultures problem just still has not been addressed properly in the game industry.
Sure. But there are plenty of un-creative, overly technically obsessed, keeping-up-with-the-chipset-joneses-driven game 'designers' out there as well, pumping out boring dreck with their warezed 3DSMax installs, re-used Half Life engines, and 'games == war' mindset.
It wouldn't hurt to have a little more Shakespeare or Chancer in this Modern Literary Front
Think otherwise? Give an example?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I'm saying that this divide between "artists" and "programmers" is crap.
... they either use it to justify not going the extra mile to find a technical solution, or they end up doing nothing but attempting to defeat entropy.
I wouldn't say there isn't a divide, but I do concur with you that there is an "Art" to programming, and many/most programmers do instinctively have a creative impulse (except for those COBOL guys, that is...)
But in the gaming industry, in general (and this may just be one of those arguments nobody wins because everyone is using generalities) there is a definite technological-obsession factor that appears to be detracting from true artistic sensibilities.
Was the "creatively sapping environment" at Game Systems Robots caused by the coders refusing to program anything new, or the management refusing to bankroll anything that wasn't a sequel?
Too often, the Programmer Technocratic Elite are given a mandate from "Artists" to do things, only to react with "Can't Technically Be Done", or "Artists Steal CPU Clock Cycle" arguments. The times when true genius has been obvious have been, in my observation, when a programmer thinks "yeah, artistically, that is a cool model/object to implement, even if its freakin' hard", and then goes ahead and works out a good, solid, technical solution to the problem.
But this difficult blend of Art vs. Technology is tricky to manage, and so we end up with many game companies adopting policies of 'Programmers Set the Tools for the Artists" -> "Artists may Only Do what the Programmer allows", and in my not-so-humble opinion, this often results in utter dreck.
Entropy happens in the Art world, it is the muse and the enemy.
Programmers, generally, have a difficult time with entropy, artistically, I have found
Programmers are a kind of Artist. No question about it. But they're also capable of being just as anti-art, as well. Its a fine line, and I really would not say its black and white.
(Jeff Minter for President!!!)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
In other words, they are enormous fun...which some of us happen to think has a social value in itself.
The old I get, the more distain I have for self-styled intellectuals.
Ian Bogost pointed out that science/engineering tends to be "predictably useful" where arts/humanities tend to be "unpredictably useful".
Then perhaps the real problem is not that science/engineering dominates, it's that business people are the ones choosing where the emphasis of today's games lies. An executive can choose to hire more programmers or more English Department types. The programmers are reliably useful, the academics either incredibly useful for detrimental. If you're spending a billion dollars to make this game, the choice becomes clear--hire more programmers and avoid as much risk as possible.
The only way we'll see more creative, less technical, and riskier games, is if it becomes possible to make games at a drastically reduced cost.
As if anyone who is an engineer can't possibly understand arts and humanities.
What a load of crap.
If anything, talent in both fields seems to be quite common among intelligent and creative people. You can't tell me that any engineer couldn't jump right into a philisophical/humanities discussion with relatively few problems understanding what's going on.
The only "problem," if there is one, is that the typical engineering type is outclassed by the guy-with-the-humanities-doctorate when it comes to spouting bullshit, and consequently yields authority or creative control to him because he doesn't want the hassle.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
The pitch meeting: a play in one act.
The scene: Several businessmen wearing khakis and polo shirts sit around a large conference table. A large screen, ready to show game demos, dominates one side of the room.
Chairman: Ok guys, we're here to decide which games our company, Publisher X, will fund, and which we won't. We don't have a lot of time, Fred over there needs to fly to Japan to give an interview to Famitsu and Joe has a conference call with the Wal-mart guys. Because of this, we're restrained to only seeing each game for about 5 minutes.
Chairman: Our first demo is from the guys at GameDev Studios. Matt, here, will be showing us his game, uh...
Matt: "Hills of Aeden", sir.
Chairman: Tell us about your game, Matt.
Matt pops up a powerpoint slideshow on the big screen, and begins his pitch.
Matt: Hills of Aeden is a third person action-adventure game with rpg influences. Like the Square game, Final Fantasy X...
Fred: Excuse me, Matt, but have you considered changing the name of your game?
Matt: (knocked off balance by the interruption) Um...uh... well, not really. The name is pretty important, as it ties into the answer to the big mystery...
Fred: Because this, "Hills of Eden" thing sounds like a soap opera. Joe, what were the stats on soap opera games?
Joe: (pulling statistics out of his ass) our marketing research says that 7 out of 12 males aged 12 to 27 won't buy soap opera games unless there's nudity involved. However, Wal-Mart and EB refuse to sell games with nudity in them, so they're a no-go.
Fred: Right. That's what I thought. No go on the soap opera name, Matt. How about something with some spark to it. Something that we can use to create a strong IP around. How about something like "Dark Fury", or "Mayhem".
Chairman: Good point, Fred. Matt, we'll need a new name for your game. Now, you've had 3 months of pre-production. What have you got to show us?
Matt: (even further off balance) Well, as I was saying, this is a very story-oriented game, so we hired a professional writer to come in, and together, we've put together a 200 page outline of the game. We've also got together some really good concept art that I think really shows off the style... (furiously clicks through powerpoint slides until he gets to art).
Fred: I like this look, but it seems kinda pretty, to me. Kinda pastel-y.
Chairman: I agree. Pastels are a no go.
Matt: Well, we have some, uh, more bold images, over here. (more slides go by)
Fred: Hey! That looks like that World War 2 game that came out last week. What were the numbers on that game, Joe?
Joe: (more number pulling) NPD has it as the best selling game for last Tuesday in the 21-32 year old bracket, Fred.
Fred: I thought so! You know, we could use another WW2 game in our portfolio. Which battle does your game take place in, Matt? Normandy? Uh, Guam?
Matt: "Hills of Aeden"...
Fred: You mean "Mayhem".
Matt: Right, "Mayhem" doesn't take place during WW2. It's a futuristic game that takes place on another planet where racial tensions between 5 different factions...
Fred: Hmmm... well maybe you can change it to a WW2 game. Those sell pretty well, and we only have two others in development right now.
Chairman: So, Matt, you only have a design doc and some screenshots? No prototype?
Matt: We really wanted the art direction and the story to take precedence...
Chairman: Matt, have you ever heard of John Romero? Daikatana? Designers first?
Matt: Uh...
Chairman: We'll give you our decision later, when you can't actually physically attack us. Thanks for coming by and showing us "Mayhem"!
Fred: Yeah, thanks Matt! Hey, next time, try to focus more on the WW2 aspects of your game.
Matt: Uh...thanks.
Chairman: Ok, guys, next game is called "Police State". Don is here to show us this game.
Don: Hi guys. We've been working hard for the past