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?

Comments

So what he wants is....

[MajikMan]

...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.

Not quite

[DarkGamer20X6]

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.

Re:Not quite

[radimvice]

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.

Chris Crawford is one of the bigger names in the industry. He wrote The Art of Computer Game Design, a seminal book on game design, in 1982, and founded the GDC in 1987.

As far as I know, his main beef is not with proven game designers like Warren Spector and Will Wright, but with the gamedev company-sponsored university classes that teach 'game design' as a mix of computer graphics and software engineering and nothing else, and the fact that that world is so completely separated from the guys talking about 'embodied virtual experiences' and 'hypertext narrative' in the English and Film Studies departments across campus.

I disagree!

[AltaMannen]

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.

Listen to the Grand Old Man (tm)

[radimvice]

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.

Too techincal?????

[idries]

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.....

Re:Too techincal?????

[Daetrin]

I agree almost 100%. I think you might be maligning the designers a bit, i've known some very good ones, some of whom have done a lot of creative work in other fields before working on video games. Sure there are designers who aren't very good, but there are programmers and artists who aren't very good either.

However your basic point is right on. In every game company i've worked at more than two thirds of the people have very little in depth tehnical experience. The designers can write simple scripts and use spreadsheets to balance stats, and the artists can use the appropriate art tools, but (on average) they know very little about programing, technical constraints, or the data pipeline.

There's always some artist who insists on exporting art files in the wrong way, even after you've told them three or more times that it will break stuff. The designers often make similar mistakes with the scripts, and frequently their first request for a new feature is totally unfeasible, requiring a programmer to come talk to them about what's possible and how to integrate that with what they want.

Unless the three companies i've worked at have been freak occurances, most game companies have non-technical people doing the art and design. If the design isn't good, either the designers just aren't very good, the programmers weren't able to implement it right (in which case the problem is not enough focus on tech, not too much focus) or as someone else suggested, management decided to get involved for whatever strange reason management always seems to have for screwing things up.

He almost sees the real problem...

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

From his Crawford's rant...

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.

I'm tired of this BS.

[Bluesman]

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.