Ragdoll Metaphysics: Concept Recognition, Or When Artists Fight Back

Inverse Square

#1 – 12:25 PM September 9, 2009

Eh, no pun intended, but you've got to look at the big picture. Some of the best games' aesthetics have evolved over their development, rather being tied to the first things the concept artists did. And often, you have to face the fact that some things are unworkable, or can't be implemented in a realistic way. There again...

Lots of games have had major re-envisionings throughout their development, probably most notably Resident Evil 4 (everyone's seen this video, but whatever: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGRZwypXMFg), and there are probably many more than we know. Casey Muratori has redone Sushi Bar Samurai (http://mollyrocket.com/481) several times. Did their developers go to all that trouble because what they had wasn't what they had originally wanted? Or was it because what they had originally wanted just wasn't all that great?

This is a bit out there, but I think that the best aesthetics could be the ones made up entirely out of visuals that are significant to gameplay. In "Everyday Shooter", every single visual asset means something important to the player, and everything changes as you play the levels. I don't know if Everyday Shooter even had concept art; I like to imagine it didn't.

Last thing: is anyone else getting a bit bored of indy games where everything is black? Stuff like Night Game and The Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet look to be interesting games, and I can understand that they need to draw a well-defined line between what you can touch and what you can't, but Braid managed to have varied backgrounds. Experimeeeeent, dude.

Icupnimpn2

#2 – 2:13 PM September 9, 2009

It's the Team Fortress 2 Effect; the same phenomenon that gave us Battlefield Heroes. You can thank Valve for brightening up our FPS games after a decade of brown-grey.

Rob

#3 – 4:07 PM September 9, 2009

We're at a stage in the development of technology now where we don't simply have to aim for verisimilitude, but can instead explore some artistic directions.

We've been there for a long time. People just prefer to push out the realistic over not for some reason. Okami was gorgeous, on much less hardware than the current gen.

tturrill

#4 – 11:31 AM September 10, 2009

As a working concept artist, and as a gamer, I've gotta say, hear hear.
I've worked for 3 years at a startup staffed mostly by junior designers with little-to-no creative direction in terms of gameplay or systems. So far the only saving grace is the feistiness of the art team in making things look halfway decent.
And even then, eeeeevery visual decision is a battleground.
I've heard the same story out of numerous studios, from all over. There's a penchant that if you follow a model of a successful game, everything will automatically fall in line.
But it's great to see studios like Gearbox doing big visual re-evaluations that give the art some love.

shutz

#5 – 12:12 PM September 10, 2009

The situation is actually similar to the problems Hollywood has been faced with in the past 10 years or so: how many great premises or original scripts have been ruined by studio meddling?

AAA video games, these days, have budgets in the tens of millions, so the people with the money are not likely to take many chances, so they go for the safe choices, instead of trying an edgy art style, or an unconventional game mechanic.

Decisions are made by committee, the same way they're often made for big-budget movies, gradually watering down any vision the original script might have had, and constraining some visionary directors in what they're allowed to do.

That's why indies (whether games or movies) tend to be more adventurous, taking more chances and trying new, edgier ideas.

It's also why it take one successful indie to show that one particular idea or style is worthwhile before the bigger-budget games/movies end up incorporating it.

scar3crow

#6 – 4:52 PM September 10, 2009

"If videogames want to be taken seriously as art, then they need to be art."
I think this is taking art a bit too seriously in definition, a definition which seems to point towards a highschool or college art class. If games want to be taken seriously as art, they need to define themselves independently of film, painting and other mediums, and they can do this by expanding on their principal unique trait: interactivity and reactivity.

But maybe I'm just biased against rigid scripted events, linear progressions and being locked in a room while an invincible npc cues a sound file, no matter how good the lip syncing may be, or how interesting the story is, because I have effectively been removed from the game, and we have deviated from the unique strength of games in contrast with other mediums. Or maybe I'm just a bitter old gamer who feels like we've been backsliding for a long time, and congratulating ourselves on our latest post processing effect.

I do look forward to Borderlands though, and am happy to see something look a little visually different, without feeling gimmicky.

ilpalazzo

#7 – 4:51 AM September 11, 2009

I had very similar thoughts recently. The problem resembles a change in paradigm that happened with art in late XIX and early XX. Up to that time visual art was supposed to picture reality with as much similitude as possible, in fact pursuing this similitude was considered main task for visual art. Then came modernist movements and realization that art should pursue its intristic qualities as a medium rather than imitating something other (reality other than inner reality of a work of art). I think we need a similar paradigm shift with games as well, if we want to have works of art among them. And, of course if we want works of art, we should ask artists. We need more auteurs of game developing and less, nomen omen, engineers.

Professor Booty

#8 – 12:05 PM September 11, 2009

This post makes it seem like game development is artists vs. everyone else. "Games would be beautiful, if only those damned engineers and suits didn't hate us artists! Why do they love ugly games?! Can't they see we're right?!"

It's nice to want things.

Artists, particularly those not experienced in the industry, are typically very bad at grasping the limitations of the technology that will be utilizing their work. Concept art always looks great. That makes sense: it's not hindered by technology. That skybridge image, for example. How many millions of polygons is it going to take to make that? How many post-processing shaders do we need to get the lighting and fog right? Does it look as good in motion, with the player exploring the area, as it does in a still? How will it play? How often does the player see it: is it worth dedicating a few weeks of an artist's time for something the player will spend a few minutes exploring?

In the case of Borderlands, it sounds like the art team decided that all of the art for the game- art that THEY created- was crap. That THEY hadn't stuck to the vision of the concept art. They did what the art team is payed to do- influence and improve the visual style of the game! If anything this story is a testament to the fact that art teams need to retain focus on the original goal and not be thrown off as development progresses. It's not the programmers that are painting all your textures brown. So long as your concept is within the bounds of available technology, there's no excuse for not sticking to it.

In all fairness, if the management sucks and forces the art team to be "just like that million-selling game from last year," there's not much they can do. That's a crappy team and they won't be around for long. But barring overbearing management that REFUSES to listen... Have a backbone, bring more to the table than just pixel pushing, and make the game better. Otherwise you're just a trained monkey.