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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."
Said no person with a functioning brain ever.
Go ahead and walk into ANY game design studio. There will be slight differences, like the foosball table is on the left instead of the right. But one thing remains static across all of them.
Pasty pale, slightly overweight SPOTTY NERDS have built all of this infrastructure, not to even mention gaming specifically. What an ass hat. Coding is art, game design is art.
What an asshat
I agree - the design isn't always critical, just look at Minecraft and Tetris.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
No thanks, we don't want our games designed by PHB's. Go back to your own job of creating... uhm... what do PHB's actually create?
Game art is already designed by designers and artists. Game music is composed by musicians and composers. Game design is created by people who understand that mere game art and music alone does not make a good game.
Considering the size of the gaming industry, I guess plenty of people are happily playing games designed by those "spotty nerds".
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and Mount & Blade, all of the Paradox Games, the Civilization series, etc.etc.
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).
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.
I would counter that design is precisely why both of those are so successful.
First, don't confuse graphics with artwork, they are very different concepts. Further, don't mistake simplicity in design for a lack of design.
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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.
Gameplay design is not what "artistic designers" do. The gameplay design is done lone before designers get their hands on it.
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!
"long before"
But otherwise true.
There's a widely spread misunderstanding of the expression "game design".
Look up "game design tools" and you'll find plenty of level design tools or graphical design tools, none of which even come close to what "game design" actually is supposed to represent.
When you're designing the game, you're at the very first step. You expand the idea, write down the game rules, generate the game workflows, game mechanics, how things work together. You create the formulas, skill trees (if any), item properties, list of modifiers just to give a few examples.
Then you take that shitload of stuff and start implementing it. Game art and level design come much later.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.
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.
I've crossed paths with the CBI a number of times in a work context over the last decade and a bit. To be honest, I've never seen anything come out of them that wasn't either a) blindingly obvious or b) completely stupid.
They're a bit of an artifact from another age, really. They were founded in mid-1960s, at a time when UK Governments tended to be much more hostile to business and often at the beck and call of the trades unions. The CBI was set up as a counter-point to that; to act, as it were, for a union for big business. And to be fair, that was a perfectly valid objective in the circumstances of the times and remained so throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s.
Today, of course, British business is hardly cowering from the union menace and the CBI, like a lot of other institutions of the cold war era, is left without a clear purpose. With a divided and often disinterested membership, it mostly seems to exist largely only to perpetuate its own existence, which it does by making ponderous announcements on whatever vaguely business-related issue happens to be topical at the time. As I said above, sometimes it points out the obvious, sometimes it says something ridiculous.
It would be harmless enough if it weren't for the fact that, for legacy reasons, it still commands more press attention than it deserves. It can be an absolute godsend for lazy BBC journalists who can't be bothered going out to talk to actual industry; get a CBI rent-a-quote to say something and present it as the voice of business on any given story.
First off. F-You, John Cridland, for the 'spotty nerd' insult. And F-You for insinuating that coders aren't artistic and that coding isn't an art form.
The whole point of promoting STEM is because Art degrees are waste of time and resources. You may be personally fulfilled getting your Masters Degree in 18th Century French Poetry but it's not going to help make you a productive member of society.
As to game design, you have the game designer who designs the gameplay, then you have the coder who writes the code to implement the gameplay and then you have artist who creates the graphics (and sounds/music) for the game (among numerous other people). Game design is a team effort and everyone needs their own specific skills.
That you think coders need to be able to draw really shows that you have no idea of how the video-game industry works.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Imagine if all you knew about Cinema was the occasional trailer for a Michael Bay movie. Lets say you never actually watched movies. Ever. lets say all you knew was the trailers.
Cinema would be crap right?
Okay lets say all you knew about literature was whatever was in the airport book stand. That is what you thought books were. A collection of romance novels, spy thrillers, self help books, and other assorted shit.
Literature would be crap as well, no?
The first mistake this little twat made was in suggesting that game makers are not real artists. Anyone that has seen the work put into character design, modeling the various objects, creating the sound effects, etc... there are lots of artists in gaming and they're as good or better than the artists in other industries.
The second mistake he made was projecting HIS desires for what gaming should be without understanding what gaming is already. He probably wants the equivalent of art house movies in games. What he doesn't grasp is that first we already have those and second just like in film they're not very popular because they either are only of interest to a small demographic or they are outright boring. If its wrong for me to judge all movies by Michael Bay movies then where does this fuck come off thinking he can judge all games by grand thief auto etc?
And it was upon seeing this second error that I just rolled my eyes and stopped reading. If the man wants to talk about gaming then he can sit down and learn something about it. He knows nothing.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I completely agree with you that this guy's comments are insulting and don't necessarily make a lot of sense. However...
The whole point of promoting STEM is because Art degrees are waste of time and resources. You may be personally fulfilled getting your Masters Degree in 18th Century French Poetry but it's not going to help make you a productive member of society.
This is unnecessarily narrow-minded as well. First, while college degrees seem largely about "job training" for most folks today, for most of the 1000+ year history of universities, the assumption was that getting a degree was also about "broadening one's mind" and acquiring a breadth of skills that may be useful in various ways.
Someone who has a master's degree in 18th-century French poetry may not find a lot of jobs outside academia that value that very specific field. But there are loads of related skills that could be useful -- mastery of another language has practical use, historical perspective means an ability to think outside of one's current situation (a skill which can be helpful when trying to understand other people and other ideologies and perspectives), poetic analysis requires certain levels of creativity and abstract thinking (particularly outside one's native tongue), understanding rhetorical structure of language can be helpful in crafting everything from good reports to persuasive speeches, etc. And there are even specific benefits perhaps from this particular field: 18th-century France was the home of the so-called Enlightenment, whose philosophy has shaped our modern world, from science to political systems and law. Surely a grasp of some of the background to the place and time which gave birth to our modern pragmatic, scientific culture might be helpful at some point.
I know a LOT of people who have degrees at various levels in the humanities and make very successful careers in various fields. And those experiences they received by pursuing a humanities education often allows them to confront problems with different perspectives than someone with a STEM degree. This is NOT to say that that STEM degrees aren't "creative" -- obviously they can be. But there are different thinking and creative skills developed by different disciplines, and sometimes having someone working from a different set of background assumptions can be really helpful.
Thus, I'm not saying that we should all go out and pursue humanities degrees. But they're not necessarily "a waste of time and resources" either.
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!
No.
First off: "Fun" is subjective. What you find "fun" others may not. So off the bat, what you are asking is not possible because there isn't a universally accepted measure or definition of "fun".
Second off: Gamers make bad game designers. They have a penchant to make games they want to play. That may not necessarily make for good sales and sales are what keep the game makers paid. It also falls back on point 1: Their version of "fun" may not be what others consider "fun".
Finally: A lot of Gamers quickly become "Not Gamers" after a few games they created. They no longer see the "fun" in a game, but rather the vector points, trigger events, and critical paths in every game they play. Which the number of games they play dwindles fast after a game publish or two.
I am sure though there is a few gamers that are successful game designers but they are the exception, not the rule. Most game designers are part artist, part "spotty nerd" like the ass clown in the article calls them, and part psychologist to get the balance between "too hard" and "too easy" right. They see and assemble the worlds what you play through a different set of eyes that gamers may have difficulty seeing through. If they do, they lose the suspension of disbelief in the same way knowing how a magician does all their tricks.