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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?
...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
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.