Blog - The Art of Game Design...
Tuesday, April 22, 2008I just thought of this now, so perhaps it is still a bit ill-conceived yet given I just thought of it, and its late, and my work has been sapping sleep from me all this quarter so I'm somewhat mentally exhausted...
...but I devised an interesting formula to define art:
Art reveals, via some means, truth that it takes an artist to "see".
This formula came about as a result from trying to explain to someone what I've learned in drawing classes before, so I'll start with drawing as a model:
the art of drawing reveals, via rendering, the truth of how something actually looks (or would look, if real), that it takes a trained artist to see instead of how the mind actually perceives it visually (which is, for the record, distorted in order to process the visual data more easily...)
As another example, the art of music reveals, via performance, emotional truths it takes a musician to "hear" as composition of musical sound.
(I don't mean to imply, by the way, that a drawing can't reveal emotional truths too...)
Storytelling reveals, via a narrative, universal human truths, etc.
But now to try a fun experiment: Let's put the art of game design into the formula!
First, how do games reveal their "truth"? That's the easy part:
Games reveal their "truth" through the dynamics created when the players interact with mechanics.
The last part of the equation (the artist) is also not hard to find: the game designer is the artist in question here.
But what "truth" does game design reveal?
That's a trickier matter.
At the smallest level, I'd reckon things like: mathematical patterns, cause and effect relationships, etc.
However, those things are rarely used so abstractly and are given some sort of dressing. For example, those relationships and patterns of a game about the battle of Waterloo can express a sort of truth about why the battle went the way it did.
That is how things get kind of muddy, it seems.
It gets muddier particularly in context of the last part of the formula: how the artist (game designer) has the talent to perceive said truth. Is the talent in the ability to first find and devise such mathematical patterns and relationships, finding them as "fun" ones to give to players to explore and discover...
or is the talent in seeing a truth and applying a mathematical pattern/relationship to it?
I'll have to ponder this later, when I'm not so mentally exhausted... posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 1:51 AM
1 Comments:
Jeff said...
It sounds like the idea needs some tweaking and developing. Personally, I'd have to say that your formula for art is a bit narrow, in that the truths art reveals are an assortment of things and rarely come in as one thing [which you mentioned for drawing, so I'm sure you already understand this]. Art even reveals lies, we have to remember. The fact that the lie exists may warrant the effort a revelation of truth, but it's still revealing a lie. In fact, a lot of times art tries to convey something that the artist "thinks" is true, when in reality it isn't. Literature does this all the time. Also, by saying art conveys truth, does that imply a moral obligation to the artist to TELL the truth? If not than IS art really revealing truth? The idea of truth is so varied in today's society, who in large part don't even believe in it. I'm very interested to see what you come up with, though in the end we may have to fall back on this: that art is what an artist knows and the average Joe doesn't. Plain and simple.