Blog - Childhood Recall: Drawing with Crayons
Thursday, September 25, 2008Being at an art school after all, I've found myself in a traditional art class (i.e. drawing) this term.
Based on my professor's recommendation, I tried out this new material to draw with today (Prismacolor sticks) and found them very pleasurable to work with.
Now, I'm not one of those artists that like to get all dirty and paint-smeared when they work. That's why I find the primarily digital art required of video game development to be appealing. No mess! So, I've never been a fan of many kinds of art materials. Pastels, chalks, and charcoals get all over my hands and clothes and that bugs me. Paint can as well, and requires too much set-up and clean-up for my tastes.
I assumed this suggested material would be similarly annoying to me (it LOOKED like pastels/chalks) but was surprised when I touched it that it was waxy and didn't rub off onto my skin at all. That was a huge perk, but it also performs its function very well. It smoothly draws very nice, thick lines.
What does this have to do with game design, you ask?
I recognized that I was really enjoying something -that this particular tool was making drawing more pleasurable for me- and my game designer brain couldn't just ignore that fact. I had to think about why it was making the act of drawing more... well, "fun".
Now, it could have just been any of the things I've said above. It had a nice feel to it (tactile quality, which is always interesting to examine in games), and made drawing slightly more effortless then the pens and pencils I'm used to using.
But thinking about that, I'm wondering to what degree I enjoyed using this material because it reminds me of a crayon. It does, after all, come in short sticks, makes thick lines, and has a waxy sort of surface to it.
I already note that many play experiences found in games owe some degree of ancestry to common forms of play people experience as children.
The Sims involves elements of 'playing house', 'playing pretend', and dress-up, for example.
Doodling/playing with crayons is something we do as children, and I'm wondering if using this new material is recalling that experience in a similar way. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:10 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
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 Links to this post