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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
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'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.
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.
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.