Making notart.

Even though my motivation could probably be called artistic, I don’t feel comfortable considering myself an artist. I was trained a designer and I still very much create from a design perspective. I never considered design to be in any way inferior to art, though. I even went through a period, in art school, when I thought that making art today was simply decadent and that every talented creator should be designing instead, to make the world more beautiful. Design could go places where art could not. It could penetrate daily lives, and bring joy to people who might otherwise never visit a museum, attend a concert or read poetry.

I am now a lot more tolerant towards the idea of art creation, and I am happy that some people do, but my choice to make videogames is still in part related to this desire to bring art to the world, rather than expect the world to come to the art. And that feels like design work.

It’s not just a matter of creating a Trojan Horse wrapper around the art to smuggle it into the homes of unsuspecting gamers and then let it escape once inside. It’s a lot more complicated. I want to present the content of the piece in such a way that different kinds of people can get something out of it. This is a tricky thing to do, because adding an element that might make it easier for one group to enjoy the work, may harm the joy that another group finds in it. Finding the balance between a large amount of such decisions I consider design work.

If I would be a real artist, I imagine I would choose the most optimal way to express my content, that is to say the way that makes this content most clear to me. But this is not how I think when I make videogames. Sure, most of the production time, I only have myself as a player, to test the effect of the design on, but I continuously imagine how other kinds of people might respond. For that purpose I read many accounts that people make of playing games, to get an idea of how they enjoy them and come to an interpretation. And I attempt to make my expressions more inclusive.

As a result, my work will never be perfect. There will always be something wrong with it for someone, and another thing for someone else. This disqualifies it from being art in my very personal definition as that in which nothing is wrong.

However, inclusiveness and wide appeal is a very difficult thing to accomplish for me. And this often requires more resources than we have available. Ironically, if I fail to achieve my creative goals, if I make something that only a small and non-diverse group of people appreciate, but appreciate thoroughly, if I fail, my work becomes art.