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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.
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.