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UK Industry Group Boss: Study Arts So Games Are Not Designed By 'Spotty Nerds'
nickweller writes: John Cridland is the leader of the Confederation of British Industry, a group that represents over 100,000 UK businesses. In a recent interview, he spoke about his enthusiasm for adding arts education to more traditional STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) programs. Here's how he chose to express that: "One of the biggest growth industries in Britain today is the computer games industry. We need extra coders — dozens and dozens of them but nobody is going to play a game designed by a spotty nerd. We need people with artistic flair." Cridland also expressed support for an increased emphasis on foreign language education: "If we’re not capable of speaking other people’s languages, we’re going to be in difficulties. However, there is far too much emphasis placed on teaching French and German. The language we most need going forward is Spanish (the second most frequently spoken language in the world). That and a certain percentage need to learn Mandarin to develop relations with China."
All we need to do is look at GNOME 3, Firefox 4+ and Windows 8 to see what happens when "artistic" types get involved with software development.
The end result is always a huge fucking disaster!
The old UIs, developed mainly by programmers, may have been deemed "ugly", but they were consistent and highly usable. You could use them to get real work done quickly and efficiently.
The new UIs, developed mainly by "UI designers" and "UX artisans" may be deemed pretty by such people, but they are really goddamn inconsistent and fucking unusable. You can't get work done with these, because you'll waste all of your time trying to figure out how the fuck to use the software.
Gedit is an obvious example of how these "artistic designers" completely fuck up perfectly good software UIs. Gedit used to look like this, where it had a traditional, consistent, and highly usable UI. Newer versions of Gedit look like this disaster. Yes, it's true, the GNOME 3 developers somehow managed to fuck up the user interface of a simple text editor!
We need to go back to "ugly" UIs developed by real programmers, not today's "pretty" UIs developed by terrible "designers" and "artists".
"One of the biggest growth industries in Britain today is the computer games industry... but nobody is going to play a game designed by a spotty nerd. "
Is it just me, or do these two ideas seem contradictory?
Hey feminists, see that? That's how people treat us.
I actually like his honesty, it's easy to see he's an imbecile. I think all you can read into this comment is he doesn't understand how games are developed, and the roles of both artists and programmers. Or, he really believes in indie game development, which would be unusual coming from a stuffed shirt type who sees labor as a means to make himself wealthy, and worthless if it's not working for him.
The part that is more amusing is STEM->STEAM. When trying to "focus" one tends to reduce the subject matter to the fewest things, STEM is really math & science, the T&E being applications. Art is orthogonal, with no overlap. Might as well throw literature and history in there. STHEALM. Oh and Foreign Languages. STHLEAFM. I think you say that before you drink liquor?
I suspect his comment about foreign language, particularly Spanish and Mandarin is correct even for STEM. R&D is being conducted on a much wider scale, with a lot of it being dropped on China (usually at the back end). Certainly I encourage my own kids the same way. Schools continue to push French and German in addition to Spanish, but those two languages are almost entirely worthless in the USA. Spanish is widely taught of course, but Mandarin is rare, and probably the most useful language looking in to the future. Sure if you're in the UK, it would seem French and German are a whole lot more immediately useful, but it seems appropriate for a minister of industry to want to focus on skills useful for the workforce. I'm confused about the rest of his message, unless we distill it into what should be obvious: the UK needs a better educated workforce (which is also true in the US).
The new Gedit UI fails even when considering your arbitrary criteria!
With the old UI, you could disable the toolbar, gaining you three more lines of text, if you really needed them that badly. You'd still have the menus available to you, with the functionality very easily accessible and well organized. You can't disable the hodgepodge top bar in the new UI without losing access to most functionality!
The tabs in the new UI are also nearly twice the height of the tabs in the old UI. For all your talk about "making the best use of vertical space", the new UI is extraordinarily wasteful! The hodgepodge top bar actually has more empty space than it does functionality and labels!
We know you're just here to argue, but please, at least make your arguments at least slightly sensible!
Engineers, and programmers are most certainly engineers, tend to have certain personality traits. In the USA, bosses try to nurture such people, and thus the USA has become the home of much of the computer revolution. In the UK, home of some of the GREATEST engineers and scientists in Human History, the bosses EXPLOIT what they see as the psychological weaknesses of the engineering classes.
The hatred has a class basis, originating from the time when the rich OWNED the talent of everyone below them in Britain, and kept their power and money by becoming PERFECT PARASITES. In comparison, the same bosses LIKE the arty types, and find them droll company. The tradition, of course, is the dinner party of NOBS including the odd writer and artist to 'amuse' them. The cliche of the engineer, on the other hand, is a 'BORE' who sends every listener to sleep by wittering on about the minutiae of their field of study. You can see the same cliche depicted in modern films and TV shows.
Computer Games represent quite unique art. Most frequently, according to the rule 'FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION' the 'artistic' expression in a computer game follows the technology that makes the game work. Take shoot-em-ups, like Space Invaders or Galaxians. Or platform games like Donkey Kong or Manic Miner.
Much later we had Quake, with its distinctive style driven by the engineering choices of Carmack and Abrash. Modern open-world games look as they do due to the engineering behind the 3D rendering and lighting- the 'art' follows the engineering.
Art-driven games tend to be flash-in-the-pan shallow shit that appeal to Apple loving journalists. Today the SJW crown has jumped on the bandwagon, since these types CANNOT think or program for shit, and thus must explot the fundamental work of vastly smarter Humans for their own perverted ends. A SJW that 'creates' a game by paying others to slap a layer of crap on a pre-existing engine will claim responsibility for everything, INCLUDING the engine.
Pop stars are FAMOUS. Blockbuster movie directors are quite famous. The programming talent behind the world's best video games is 99.99% utterly INVISIBLE. A person like Carmack is the exception that 'proves' (tests in Old English) the rule, and even Carmack is only known to fellow nerds.
We don't need games designed by nerds who have a sometimes rather weird sense of "fun". Granted. But at least those games would get played by nerds. Games designed by artists who have no connection with games would be played by NOBODY because, yes, they are artistically pleasing and maybe they will one day end up in some review of the "most beautiful games of the past", but an artist that has no idea what makes a game fun will not create a good game.
What we need is people who have an idea what makes games fun. What makes games interesting. Why people play them. And why people play THOSE games and not the ones over there. What made Kerbal Space Program a great game that was generally praised and Hatred a bad game that was generally panned? Don't bother answering, pretty much EVERYONE here knows the answer.
At least if they play games!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is the same mentality which leads to so much being added to the curriculum that neither the teacher nor the student can handle it. Rather than having every special interest trying to get their bits into the curriculum, decide what is important in a particular field and focus on that. Then give the learner the option to pursue a STEM, arts, or blended education. The arts aren't going to die off because everyone is interested in STEM, because you're never going to run into a situation where everyone is interested in STEM. Likewise, STEM isn't going to die off because of the arts. You're even going to have people who are interested in a mix of the two because no one completely fits into those silos.
What part of game "design" isn't art, exactly? This is an interesting perspective: programmers make games, and they subcontract all the "Art" out to vendors. I've done sound design for some video games so I definitely run into this perspective a lot, I think it's kinda sick and it sorta denies the essential creative act of making a game.
Basically you have a bunch of artists making stuff, and then you present your work to developers and the PMs, and uniformly, I've found the devs are totally inarticulate, and either don't really know what they want, and they are totally unoriginal and if you let them do whatever they wanted, they'd just have you remake all the Titanfall assets in different colors (or with more reverb and low-end). Dev don't communicate, they never want to talk to you, they got no vision for how they want this game to be different from every other one, and to them, the "artists" are just columns on a spreadsheet.
What prevents anyone from doing it the other way around. Why can't "artists" subcontract the programming?
What makes you think that situation will be any different? If you feel that programmers have a problem communicating with you then it is inevitable that you will have a problem communicating with them.
Communicating in the echo chamber is easy, communicating with people with a different world view is hard, that is because the meaning of words are subjective.
Well, anyway, we have seen what happens when artists try to design computer games. You end up with things like "Dear Esther" a.k.a "The walking simulator".
That is why modern game studios have dedicated game designers that are neither programmers nor artists.
Those that can't afford to have that are indie developers, they either have to be programmers and skip the art or they have to be artists and skip the program. In the latter case the end result is typically not a game.
The design that moves the titlebar and menubar into the toolbar, which you referred to as "this disaster", gains two lines of vertical space in the document compared to the old UI. With 16:10 and portrait displays hard to find especially in laptops, how else is the user supposed to make the best use of vertical space?
No, if that had been the driving point then the toolbar would have been switched to a vertical one along the left or right edge.
The reason for the change was only "oh, shiny!"
Right, You are the well rounded ones. Despite not taking a single non remedial math or science course.
We do understand the world better than those who don't bother studying math or physics. That is just a simple fact. You are blind and don't know it.
Every time I go anywhere near anything that makes the real world operate I see groups of techno nerds making it happen.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Well this explains a lot about the sorry state of the AAA title industry. Like their obsessions with 'professional' looks and dress codes, their games are often expensive affairs that are all flash and no substance: Nice graphics, piss poor gameplay, and plenty of showstopper bugs. I submit that people who think shit like dresscodes are important are the ones who are 'spotty', at least in terms of self-esteem, and that insecurity is probably justified.
You mention pop music as though it's an improvement to those long haired dudes who can play guitar... I just don't know what to say to that.
Dress codes do serve a purpose. In industries that aren't 99% male, they keep people from bitching about each other over what someone was wearing or how slutty or not some person is. It keeps complains down about poor hygiene and about people leaving body marks on chairs. A basic dress code reduces a huge amount of HR work. That said, way too many companies go too far the other way. Fabric that can be easily used to strangle you should never be required.
At least it helps when evaluating another company and it's people. The fancier they dress the less trust worthy they are. People dress more formal to artificially impress other people but it also artificially inflates their self-worth. Studies show time and time again that people with higher self delusions steal more and are more corrupt. They think they deserve more than the 'little people' so they take it regardless of the morals of doing so.