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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."
I'm convinced that this phase of computer history is going to be remembered as the "UX Revolution." Seriously, even Linux distributions' GUIs have turned into iOS clones. Windows 10, while better than 8, is still a disaster because Microsoft is still convinced that people want to run a phone/tablet OS on their desktop PC.
It's the deadly combination of:
- Everything is a touch screen, so UI elements have to be massive and convey no meaning unless you know what the symbol means.
- Millions more "normal" people have computers in their pockets now, so even if "spotty nerds" want to use them, the UI can't be made functional because it has to be dumbed down for everyone.
I agree that just letting the developers do a user interface would probably leave us at slightly above the verbosity level of vi, and a complexity level of emacs, but there's a happy medium. Not everything needs to be rendered in a flat, featureless Jony Ive rounded rectangle style. Seriously, if people who are used to computers have to look at a user interface for more than a few seconds to figure out what performs an action, and where that action is located, than form has won over function.
I'd rather have an ugly, functional UI any day. AS/400 style green screens are hideously ugly and primitive, but they're laid out well, the intelligent use of color highlights important things, and they're easy to stare at for long periods of time. I'm absolutely sick of web pages and app screens that have bright white backgrounds and tiny light grey text, chosen simply because it's pretty.
The most galling fallacy in this short statement isn't that he thinks "geeks" aren't creative; it's that he thinks art education makes people creative. Here's some news for you: it doesn't.
The MOST an art class can teach you is to learn how to follow the design memes of people who came before you. However, this is not necessarily a good thing. Those design features may have been very creative and engaging when they first started being incorporated into works, but if they are used in such a widespread way as to be monotonous, it actually makes a product *worse* to start throwing them in.
Consider, for instance, how many games have a soundtrack that is extremely similar to every other game in their genre. It's not similar enough to lead to a copyright infringement lawsuit -- usually -- but it's "generic" in the sense that it borrows 90% of its design features from past works, whether previous titles from the same developer or competitors. These soundtracks often receive poor reviews when they don't stand out in any particular way from the other games that came before, and players tend not to remember the music after they stop playing the game.
On the other hand, the best, most memorable and enjoyable game music soundtracks that have existed have all been extremely original, with major innovative design features that give a distinct "feel" or "sound" to the title. This can be VERY powerful and greatly boost the sales of the product.
Similar comparisons can be made of visual assets in games, of course.
The problem is, even though you can teach someone to mimic what's been done in the past and grade them on their ability to do so, you can't teach people to be able to come up with entirely new design features or concepts on their own. And if you tried to grade an art class based on how unique or original the design features were, most students at the high school and 4-year degree level would fail the class because they couldn't think of anything creative that was also good (you could technically consider any random selection of features to be "unique", but not all things that are unique are beautiful, appreciable, or easily digestible by the person accessing (reading/viewing) the work.)
Most truly creative, novel design features that win awards and universal acclaim happen *spontaneously*, without any sort of directed methodology used to derive the aspects chosen. Sure, the creator may digest some existing art aspects of the game as "input" when trying to determine how to come up with more assets (textures, sounds, music), but even with that input, there are numerous ways you could go with creating the new content that seem equally viable from the outset. It's not until you get others to experience your content that you start to get feedback, like, "wow, this is incredible!" or "this sounds very generic".
So yeah, throw away money, making coders spend extra hours bored in art class doing watercolor paintings, as if that's going to make England's creative output any better. People who are born to be creators tend to do whatever they love doing on their own, without having to be forced to sit in a class to do it. You really can't force creativity, or the "forced-ness" of it becomes obvious in the content that's been created. That's just the way it is.
And don't even get me started on the stereotype that "geeks" are lacking in creativity. Coding shops used to ask people in interviews what their creative outlet is, whether it's singing, playing instruments, drawing, etc. - and those who didn't have any to speak of were often passed over in favor of candidates who had a creative passion. I imagine that type of thinking is even more prevalent in game studios, though I've never worked at one.
"Us"? Which "us" are you talking about, game designers or spotty nerds?
You are welcome on my lawn.