I share your feeling that the frequency with which this happens is a sad turn for the art of game design. However it’s simplistic, harmful and ultimately pointless to lay the blame for this on any one discipline, any one personality type, any one approach to creativity. The blame really is spread evenly across technical, creative and business people in the game industry.

But rather than point fingers, the best thing we can do is create and promote the kind of work we want to see more of. One positive example is worth a thousand rants and flamewars. My thoughts and feelings about what I do got a lot clearer when I stopped focusing on “those Others that are screwing everything up” and started focusing on what I loved, how I worked best, what theories made the most sense to me.

There may also be some confusion resulting from the inclusiveness of our respective definitions of “game”. To me, Jason Rohrer’s “Passage” is still very much a game – quite a traditional one with a numeric score at that – but that has no bearing on its effectiveness as a work of emotional expression. Again, game logic can be given a multitude of metaphors – and as artists we have a responsibility to choose metaphors that contribute positively to human experience.

I could be wrong about mathematics. Maybe game logic is not the same as mathematics. I just feel that the cold and hard logic of the game structure leads to cold, hard and cynical stories. And I don’t like those.

Perhaps just as Reveling John, I turn to games as an alternative to contemporary (museum-) art, which is also cynical, but in a different way (i.e.: on purpose -possibly because of the market forces you are referring to, JP). I have given up on contemporary fine art. But I have high hopes for games.

I think I have a hard time believing that the people who make games are only interested in telling the horrible, cruel and stupid stories that they do.

Likewise, I suppose I have a hard time believing that mathematics is Cruel.

Which is why I mention market forces in my previous post. All it takes is one panderer to start a race to the bottom.

And that’s why I choose to attribute these stories to consequences of the format they choose to work in.

By “format” do you mean medium? If so, what sort of values do you suppose are intrinsic to painting? To film? To music? I’m skeptical one can ascribe any such value to a medium out of anything other than personal prejudice.

When game logic is presented as a story, we get racism, sexism, violence, determinism, power struggle, etc. Horrible horrible stories. Very limited stories.

Michael, can you at least see how if one doesn’t agree with this statement, an entirely different line of reasoning follows?

Pure logic is none of the things you attribute to it. All the racism, sexism, and so forth in modern games come from things like market forces, the creative and ethical bankrupcy of the creative talent making games, and the societal perception of games that shapes what those people do.

None of these things are intrinsic to the craft of game design. I want to make sure whether or not this is what you are actually suggesting. If it’s not, then perhaps I have completely misunderstood your initial arguments.

If it is, perhaps my best recourse is an analogy. Some religious people try in a similar way to smear evolution as a soulless, ruthless, mechanistic explanation that precludes any sense of beauty or meaning in the natural world. The motivations for doing this vary from person to person, but they almost always come down to one of the following: they don’t understand logic, they feel threatened by logic, they can’t connect socially or emotionally to people who do understand and practice logic. The opposite is sometimes true as well: rationalists can see people of faith as blind, unthinking creatures of pure emotion, dangerous to society.

All of these divisions and prejudices disappear when one learns enough about the Other to be able to “see into” the world-views of people unlike themselves.

To do otherwise, within the scope of this discussion, is to say in effect that there is an objective “right” way to create art and an objective “wrong” way. Using empiricism to defend an anti-empiricist position is massively ironic.

As for art, I will make another post soon. But all in all, art is that which speaks for itself to those who can hear. There is no translation for good art. Or it wouldn’t be good art. If you can say it in words, why bother saying it through art?

When game logic is presented as a story, we get racism, sexism, violence, determinism, power struggle, etc. Horrible horrible stories. Very limited stories.

I’m not sure I agree, but I sort of see the argument you’re making. And then in one of your comments:

On the one hand, we think of science as the only source of truth. (yes, I’m taking this out-of-context to draw a connection…)

So if art in which logic/rational design dominates yields stories of destruction (in one form or another) and western society on the whole attributes the greater truth telling ability to logic, are we finding that society has an overall vision of truth as the expression of determinism, violence, power struggle, etc.?
This is probably not the point you were making, but if this were a truth about our world, I have a different approach: Make games ruthlessly unjust. Make games that are so unfair in their treatment of the “people” being represented in the game that the player is pushed to tears.
You might say that this is manipulative. I would say that it is, only if there’s a silver lining at the end. The characters should be without redemption, without a saving grace that makes what they’re doing forgivable. But frame it all in such a way that of all the nasty characters he meets, the player (or players) becomes the most egregious and immoral actor in the game. Where are the Richard Wright’s, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s, and Harriet Jacobs’ of the game art form? Where is a TRUE depiction of racism, slavery, antisemitism, misogynism? How about the George Orwell’s and Aldus Huxley’s? Don’t even mention HL2, where the social situation is just a reason to blow up head-crabs. How bout a Half-life narative where there is no vengeance, no righting wrongs, just you surviving to witness horror after horror. Losing your dignity. Doing things to people you care for because you’re so traumatized that you have no more capacity for moral distinction than a wild, hunted dog.

Maybe there’s ultimately nothing that’s logical about that scenario. Yet, when you look at our history, is there any thing more true? Can we really recognize anything that doesn’t acknowledge that ongoing stain of our existence as a statement of truth? Even in the good stories, where people live happily ever after, there’s the untold truth about their guilt-free existence: They are a part of the the entire human narrative, as guilty as the most guilty for the history that propels us forward.

I can think of no one with more potential for transformation than the person that has been the lowest of the low. Who has any fathom of the depths of sympathy that this person has the capacity to feel, though they act in the most merciless and apathetic way imaginable? I don’t think that your ideas, Michaël, will be widely embraced as long as we, as a people, remain submerged in the fallacies of righteousness and moral certitude.

Perhaps the fact that some people have a hard time “wrapping their heads around” it, illustrates what I am talking about. Or perhaps I suck at writing. :)

Your perspective is one that I want to understand and wrap my head around, I appreciate your efforts to articulate it, and defend it, in public.

I’m not attached to this construction. I’m more interested in what it might inspire. I personally find the distinction between abstract gameplay-based games and figurative story-based games inspiring. It helps me understand certain game designs better. And it gives me a plausible reason why others make me feel uncomfortable.

Maybe it doesn’t help you, JP. But I would prefer to discuss this with you privately. I don’t think our personal battle contributes much to this thread. You can find my email address here.

If anything, the endless trail of dead bodies in game design started when English majors, Tolkien fans and “dragon drawers” started grafting fantasy and sci-fi onto strategy games. That impulse, to conjure up a fantastic violent fictional world, is a creative impulse – it comes from the imagination. An impoverished imagination, perhaps, but that’s a quantitative axis not a qualitative one. How are engineers to blame for any of that?

In the initial post you seem also to suggest that artists are better suited than engineers to be the moral gatekeepers or stewards of our society. I consider myself both, so if either is true I guess I’m still depraved – unlike you however I don’t have an Other to write off as morally flawed. For what it’s worth, a large portion of the art I’ve found really beautiful and enriching has come from artists who are personally quite damaged and often possessing a pretty broken outlook on life. Again, it takes all kinds, so I fail to see any good coming from blanket statements like yours.

At the end of the day, artists and writers are right there together with engineers in the primordial slime that gave birth to an industry full of violent power fantasies. I salute and share your aspirations for what our medium could be beyond that. But I don’t think that gives you the right to reduce the medium to two camps and say “everyone on the side opposite me is an amoral, monkey-brained mathematician with no right to create, everyone on my side has the keys to the future”.

I don’t want science to become artistic or art to become scientific. On the contrary, they should try to become even more different.

You’re thinking in Venn diagrams when really these fields weave in and out of each other with varying points of contact, all across human experience. This is understandable when you don’t understand much about the other field, and treat it as a black box. You claim you don’t want the culture divide to widen but everything else you say contradicts this. You seem to subscribe to the very common, simplistic and ultimately rather flawed “Boys in the Bubble” explanation for the state of games today. Us against Them is not a useful vision for the future of an art form.

I’ve read through everything on this blog, and I come across statements like “Stories are more important than rules”, and it’s pretty clear that you’ve created a framework for explaining our medium that happens to privilege your own prejudices and way of thinking about art. That’s the mark of an immature artist. There is plenty to say about art, creativity and games without pissing on different disciplines. You need to stop making proscriptive proclamations.

Both art and science are similar in their methods: they require creativity and inspiration and, indeed, constraints often lead to better results. But the goals of art and science are different. The end result is different. Science talks about objects. Art talks about subjects.

Your reasoning is starting to unravel here. Are earlier game designs more like science? They have nothing in common with scientific inquiry. They are naive creative investigations of subjects done at varying levels of self-consciousness. Bad art is still art.

I am not arguing for a greater divide between “the two cultures”. I am arguing for a more efficient collaboration in which both can operate optimally. People like Da Vinci and Bach may not need this type of collaboration because they have such extraordinary minds. But for this rest of us, it is important to be practical.

Many stories in games come from literature and folklore. They are good stories in and of themselves. Games are just not very good at telling them. And telling the story is what makes the difference.

The charicature I might have sketched in my post is only meant to be helpful. To help us understand some of the problems and perhaps suggest a solution.

But the resistance to the idea points to another problem. A problem of values in our society. On the one hand, we think of science as the only source of truth. But despite of that, art is still perceived as something high(er), giving the scientists and their defenders a desire for the title of artist. I think this is ridiculous.
Why do we want to fuse the two? For me art and science are two ways of looking at and talking about reality. I like the idea of having two ways to do this. I don’t want science to become artistic or art to become scientific. On the contrary, they should try to become even more different. This plurality makes life more interesting, in my opinion. And it makes a collaboration richer.

I’m sorry, but scientists and engineers are a sad bunch when it comes to the arts. As much as we don’t trust a painter to build an airplane, we shouldn’t trust an engineer to write a poem. But, by all means, let’s work together.

The only thing that I find important is that the right person takes the lead in such collaborations. And when you’re dealing with story, then an artist should take the lead.

In the most general sense you seem to pin everything that’s ever been done in our medium that is morally retrograde on what you imagine to be the soulless, mechanistic, dog-eat-dog world view of scientists and engineers. What’s more you handle the subject of algorithms at the end of a long stick, holding your nose and refusing to acknowledge their centrality to the art form in which you work. Yes, most players of modern games do enjoy interacting with characters, exploring beautiful worlds, and the way the stories unfold. In short they enjoy the interactive experience. That is indeed why they have chosen a game over a book or a movie.

You seem willing to assume the worst possible ethical intent of many classical ludic patterns. Is Chess really the ruthless conquest of one army by another, or is it a meeting of minds, like the discussion happening in this thread? I’d happily argue for either, but you have prescribed the former because it proves your point.

Carl Sagan spent most of his life looking through telescopes and writing scientific papers, was his poetic notion of the cosmos a fluke, or fakery? What about Da Vinci? Would he have been a better artist if he wasn’t also having his soul sucked away by his considerable scientific mind?

Paul Eres is absolutely right, your notion of science or engineering is a straw man. Maybe you’d see things differently if you stepped into that realm and educated yourself more.

Read Gödel, Escher, Bach and understand just how closely related all these fields really are. Learn about algorithms, understand that there is in fact a great need for creativity in their creation. Examine your own art, and understand the push and pull with which an artist weighs even the most intangible matter, like the choice of colors in a painting, is still an echo (if subconscious) of the same analytical processes a technical choice demands.

There is indeed a two cultures problem in game development, but the solution will not come from people standing in either and pissing sanctimoniously into the unknowable darkness of the other. It will come from engineers with the souls of poets, and artists with the minds of engineers.

For what it’s worth, the man who wrote Bioshock’s story was a playwright.

I don’t think innovation is necessarily relevant. Innovation is only required in as far as it allows us to do our jobs better. I’m perfectly happy with a traditionalist attitude, as long as the tradition in question is respectable.

Innovation, whether that be in technology or emotional perception, should be the rule, not the exception.

I’ve always that that was what art was about.

“Let’s just be practical, shall we? We don’t need a genius to fix this problem.”

If so, I don’t think we diverge simply on a issue of game design philosophy. Why make art, any kind art, if you don’t feel that genius, transcendence, truth (etc.) are the essential qualities of what you’re creating? Isn’t the experience of love a kind of genius that everyone can access on some level (which seems to be the level of experience you want to create)? I don’t think that their are any quintessential challenges in the history of the human condition that have not required genius (defined as seeing beyond the common vision) to catalyze a process of transmutation (even when that process occurs beneath the surface of consciousness).

Name one noteworthy artist who is not genius in the domain of what she creates (or an engineer for that matter). Michaël and Auriea would fail such a test by the work I’ve seen on this site alone. Maybe you meant genius as in the abstract reasoning and rationalizing that characterizes scientific geniuses. Well, if they didn’t utilize the same creative and imaginative powers that “artist” use, they probably are not considered geniuses by anyone. I’m not talking about exceptions, but rather any notable in the history of the arts or sciences. Unless you’re saying all of the innovators were exceptions in their field. Not that I disagree with you, but is that really an acceptable model to perpetuate?

I don’t want anyone to get defensive around this. I find the conversation fascinating because of how far it reaches beyond the scope of game design, and yet everything we’re touching on is reflected in the issue of modern game design. Sometimes fascination and lots of time to think makes my words look aggressive, but they’re not :)

For every rule there are exceptions. And I’m sure that there’s many examples of people who are good at both engineering and art. And of course they are the ideal supreme ueberbeings that most of all can only hope to be.

In the mean time, thousands of ethical disasters are being released because a bunch of engineers create games without the slightest artistic intention, let alone talent. We could wait around until they develop some. Or we can just give them a helping hand and let an artist take control of the design aspects of the product.

There’s not enough Leonardos and Bachs in the world to design all games. Let’s just be practical, shall we? We don’t need a genius to fix this problem.

I think the duality of artist/engineer is a useful one, though of course it is an oversimplification. I’d consider myself on both sides, for example. :)

I’m not sure how interested I am in either of your suggested approaches to making games – I’m certainly interested in both, and I imagine that I could find a way to mix the two effectively.

Or maybe I’m just an engineer who likes to make pretty things, with just enough design sense to fool himself into thinking he’s an artist.

I’d say the tools are WAY better. Sorry, Mike.

Also Kepler, Leibniz, and Pythagoras were all brilliant musicians, and in ways that greatly impacted the development of western music. If you ask a group of music majors in a counter-point class, which ones are most comfortable with the material, those that raise their hands tend to be competent in math and science as well. On the other hand I have a friend who is a brilliant guitarist, arranger, composer, who almost dropped out of high-school because of his challenges with getting through math classes (American remedial high-school math class, but the kid loves Messiaen and James Joyce: go figure).

Yet, if you’ve spent ANY time in Second Life, you quickly realize that along with the unlimited capacity for growth and expression, and the realized manifestations that are actually available, is the biggest, most inefficient, un-optimized, messy 3 dimensional environment that man could ever dream up. You could get rid of 75% of the polygons, tile 80% of the textures (these are arbitrary figures btw), re-design the entire network topology and still have the exact same visual appearance (because of all the wasted, unseen poly’s) with a system that runs 4 times faster, and downloads in half the time. But then you couldn’t leave your users free to create ALL the content. Polygon-literate pros would have to come in and remodel everything. Programmers would have to come in and re-script every animation, every user-defined action, every rule structure for the pseudo-games in each sandbox.

Sometimes I want to listen to bootleg tapes of Jimi Hendrix’s ideas before he made it into the studio. But mostly I like to get lost in the pristine version of “1983… A Merman Should I Turn To Be” in the rendition that only could have been accomplished by way of Hendrix’s collaboration with engineer Eddie Kramer. No Well-Tempered Klavier without the Klavier-maker, and the development of well-tempered tuning as argued over by scientists, mathematicians, composers and philosophers since the time of Pythagoras, right? Oh yes, and there’s that part about Bach being metrically (math), harmonically (math), rhythmicly (math), and melodically (some math, but you really can’t seperate any of these rudiments from the other) on another plane of existence. Hehehe, I’m still leaving out Religion, as in Bach’s devotion to it, as well as the Church’s role in the development of notation, modal counterpoint, 4-part harmony, tonal counterpoint (Religion, Math, Science and Art really can mix).
And where do we stick Leonardo Da Vinci? The Mona Lisa is overrated anyway :)

It’s all very nice to argue for a dialogue. Or for mixing the two cultures. But I see a large majority of engineers in technology-based industries. They have effectively made it impossible for artists to even join the discussion because the tools that they have created are virtually impenetrable to the non-mathematical mind. So instead of giving real artists acces, they imagine themselves to be artists. Or they create machines that do the art for them.

This is a very sad situation considering that the audience is looking at games as if they were art.

I don’t think it is unreasonable to wish for an artist at the helm of a game development team, given the kinds of things that the technology is capable of. Yet how often does this occur? Virtually all game designers are mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, etcetera. I think it’s no surprise that most games are cruel and distasteful to the less objective observer.