I actually think the artists that you should be pointing at here are creative directors instead of engineers. In any given game company, there will be someone who decides it’s ok to have engineers code normal mapping, reflections, etc. Whoever makes that decision is the artist, and he/she directs the engineer to code the shader. Often times these directors will have risen to their role from some other specific field (like programming), or in other cases, they’ll let the lead programmers make those creative decisions themselves. In the context of this argument, giving up the directing role would be a bad idea, and that should be the problem. The engineers are simply doing their jobs the best they can.

I don’t like comparing games to film, but in the production sense, the film industry works the same way with it’s directors. If what I say is true, then the problem is simply that most directors in the game industry have poor taste or are giving up their role to people who aren’t qualified. So to answer the question, “how can we solve this?”, I would base my solutions on the assumption that the problem is actually with the creative decision-making – or directing – and not with the production art or engineering, specifically.

An easy place to start with the solution is with the business structure. Directors will often give artistic control to engineers who are not qualified. I think a lot of the reason why they are given this control is to make their job more enjoyable, which makes them more productive, or because the decision-makers see these decisions as a problem to be solved (an engineering task) in order to make a good product (often a marketing decision).

Another problem is technology, and as you mentioned, it’s important to choose a technology that won’t get in the way, while still leaving room for expression.

I think one of the biggest hurdles lies in the vision itself. We still don’t know what exactly lies at the heart of this medium. From what I can tell, there are those who think it is pure entertainment, those who think it is expression through rules or gameplay systems, and those who think it is expression through dynamic, real-time interaction and emotional experience. IMO there isn’t enough evidence yet to confidently choose any one of these views. But part of the solution should be exploring the medium through experimentation, and striving to create an environment that cultivates great directors that have good taste and understand the medium.

The art of a game lies in its mechanics and how they blend with the other elements of the game (graphics, sound, narrative, etc). How those mechanics state a message, an opinion, a value from the one who created it. This could be a designer, programmer, artist, or some combination.

To think of art in games in purely a painting, sculpture, texture way is to not take advantage of the power of this medium.

This line of thinking also encourages staying away from the cutting edge of technology, and perhaps suggests that game developers need to take special care to be skeptical of new effects.

There was a utilitarian practicality to all of this when originally employed in the mass manufacturing of goods, however, with the advent of the WWW, this mindset seems to be losing a lot of steam… rapidly.

I would agree that, as these digital tools become more sophisticated, artists will likely focus less on the “how-to-just-get-it-to-work” aspects of the medium and more on creative possibilities which they provide. However, I don’t feel that this possible uptake needs to ultimately reinforce an unnecessarily narrow “us vs. them” mentality.

On a more random note: German rennaissance painter Mathis Gothart-Neithardt also was an engineer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Gruenewald

I don’t think we need a “powerful enough,” computer, we just need stability. If you can pick platform which is not constantly evolving and demanding new technology, where the hard problems are for the most part solved and packaged up nicely, then you can give the control back to whoever is best suited for it.

We can actually do this currently, as long as we pick a platform which is quite a bit out of date. So in a sense, the control you want is here, just with technology lagged 10 or 20 years behind ;)

One thing that I’ve learned during my AI courses at Amsterdam university is that there is great need for methods that focus on user in a very specific context (in this case art) to help them in such creative processes as game programming. We often see this in tools written by ‘programmy’ artists that address a specific problem they have in creating their art of which us more hard core programmers had absolutely no idea that they where needed, but which we can improve upon.

The good news is that this is already happening. At the human computing studies lab here there are often workshops focusing on bringing programming tools to artists. And ofcourse there are such initiatives as processing and nodebox which seem to me to be a step in the right direction.

I know you are not in favor of a sectioning off artists and engineers – but it’s difficult to escape. I think it’s sort of built in to the language we use to talk about these issues. The assumption is: artists are all about visual aesthetic, engineers are all about better code. I think part of the challenge is to break down those categories as frequently as possible.

I think those who come from an engineering background can afford some education in visual aesthetics… just enough to practice restraint. Maybe the kind of restraint that is used by Google in their UI practices for example.

The real artists are the ones who create the normal mapping, the lighting systems, …

I tend to agree with this, but cautiously. It is always tricky to identify “real artists.” I agree with it to the extent that those individuals are working somewhere in between categories, and that’s what is needed. I am cautious about it because physics, normal mapping, lighting, etc. are all a visual language based in very old traditions of visual aesthetics. I tend to think once we get more visual-artist-coder types working we’ll get more unexpected visual vocabularies…

I agree that the aesthetics of computer games cannot be divorced from interaction and other dynamic processes. But I don’t see a lot of games that make up for their ugliness with gameplay. The two go hand in hand for me.

My statement is not as bold as you may think. If there were no artists in this world, I’d have no problem with engineers making art. But since we do have artists, I would like to see them use this technology. The engineers could enable this. But it seems like they’d rather play at making art themselves.

btw: i like botticelli, but ever since i visited the louvre i know why the mona lisa plays a role of this importance in art history.

concerning your naivety about the complexity of programming: history tells us that the more complicated machines get the more complicated the programming gets. simply put: the more possibilities you have the more code you need to handle them. even simpler: code for the c64 is _far_ less complex than that for the cell.

ps: a lot of technical artists and engineers lack taste and artistic capabilities. i subscribe to that. but that does not lead me to a bold “engineers should not do art”.

pps: what do you think about eskil steenberg’s LOVE mmo? http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/index.html

ppps: at last: i anyway think that the aesthetics of computer games largely originates in the gameplay. that’s usually not taught at art schools (there are exceptions, of course).