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The Scratchware Manifesto
I think that this is worth posting, even though I wouldn't call VO "scratchware", though it does fall under the "few people developing" category, and ability to create a game that is meant to be played and enjoyed in an innovative universe.
This is only one third of it, and it looks prettier in it's original formatting, so rather than just reading this, I'd encourage you to go to the actual link.
Source: Home Of The Underdogs, http://www.the-underdogs.org/scratch.php
The Scratchware Manifesto
Phase One: Prelude To Revolution
The machinery of gaming has run amok.
Instead of serving creative vision, it suppresses it. Instead of encouraging innovation, it represses it. Instead of taking its cue from our most imaginative minds, it takes its cue from the latest month's PC Data list. Instead of rewarding those who succeed, it penalizes them with development budgets so high and royalties so low that there can be no reward for creators. Instead of ascribing credit to those who deserve it, it seeks to associate success with the corporate machine.
It is time for revolution.
Walk into your local bookstore; you'll find tens of thousands of titles. Walk into your local record store; you'll find thousands of albums. Walk into your local software store; you'll find perhaps 40 games.
Yet thousands of games are released each year.
The only games that fill those 40 slots are those on which publishers have lavished millions in placement and promotion and advertising and marketing dollars. The only games that make it to the shelves are those on which publishers have advanced millions in development funding, because they know that only a handful will succeed, will ever recoup the millions or tens of millions they spend in developing and launching them, because to succeed, a game must pass through the eye of the needle, become one of the handful that make it to the shelves or to the cover of PC Games.
When millions are at stake, the publishers become terrified. Each executive knows that greenlighting something offbeat that fails will lose him his job. So they greenlight the same old crap, imitations of what's on the list this month, simply to cover their own quivering asses. No one will fire them for going with the tried and true.
An industry that was once the most innovative and exciting artistic field on the planet has become a morass of drudgery and imitation.
A project that costs millions must have a development team to match; ten people, twenty, thirty, more. It must take years from project start to completion. It must involve so many talents, and so much labor, that no single creative vision can survive. Certainly, none can survive the clueless demands of marketing weasels and clueless executives drawn from packaged-goods industries and inexperienced external producers who think demanding unnecessary and counter-productive changes will prove their merit to their bosses.
We say: Basta! Enough! It doesn't have to be like that.
You need thirty talents to develop a game? Bullshit. Richard Garriott programmed Ultima by himself in a matter of weeks. Chris Crawford developed Balance of Power sitting by himself at his Mac. Chris Sawyer created RollerCoaster Tycoon--last year's #1 best-selling game--almost entirely on his own.
What do you need to create a game? Two people and a copy of Code Warrior.
You need millions in funding to create a great game? Garbage! As recently as 1991, the typical computer game lost less than $200,000 to develop. NetHack, still one of the best computer games ever created, was developedfor nothing, by a dev team working as a labor of love, in their spare time. TreadMarks, this year's IGF finalist, was developed by a team working for scratch and paying their groceries with the meager earnings of a little downloadable game they'd put up on their site.
What do you need to fund a game? Food stamps and enough scratch to pay the electricity bill.
You need to imitate existing products to reduce the risk of publishing? Sheer and utter lunacy, a theory in complete defiance of the facts of the history of our field. The products that have become huge hits have almost always been startlingly innovative, amazing departures from what has gone before: The Sims, SimCity, Doom, Command & Conquer, Populous, Civilization, and on and on. The real risk is in developing the me-too product, the poor imitation, the incremental change from something else. The real wins come with creative vision.
The narrow retail channel forces millions in promotional expense? Then kill it. There is no shelf space on the Internet.
You need hundreds of thousands in sales to recoup your costs? Yes, under the dysfunctional business model that rules today. But if you develop games the right way, the fearless way, the independent way, your costs are drastically smaller. A few thousand unit sales will pay the bills.
Death to Software, Etc.! Almost every PC in America is connected to a pipe that can carry bits. Why are we copying bits to a plastic-and-metal platter, sticking it in box full of air, and shipping it cross-country, when it is far easier, cheaper, and environmentally sensible to ship those bits down that pipe?
Death to EA and Vivendi! Your groveling to the retailers, your lack of understanding of what constitutes a game, your complete failure of aesthetic sense, your timidity in funding, your attempts to grow by choking off competitors, your inability to make developers and marketers understand each other, has led us to this pass. You are dinosaurs, your brobdignabian sloth nothing but a drag on what ought to be a field of staggering originality.
Death to Sony, Sega, and Nintendo! Your insistence on controlling every step of development, of ensuring that no product strays too far from your own blinkered twitch-game aesthetic, your absurdly high platform royalties, your gouging prices for development stations and SDKs, your boxes with the controllers wholly unsuited to a game of any depth make you irrelevant to anyone who wants to develop games of enduring merit.
Death to the gaming industry! Long live games.
We find our heroes not among rock stars, or game developers whose real desire is to direct movies, or designers who bare their breasts in the pages of Playboy. We find them among the men and women who created this industry, whose imaginative vision once sparked its rise, who developed games the way we mean to:
Chris Crawford, once vaunted as the world's greatest game designer, nowcast aside by a marketing machine that can't figure out how to sell anything that doesn't fit into its tedious categories.
Dani Bunten, who understood the importance of socialization in gaming far better than the Verants and Origins of the world, with their customer-hostile policies, spurned by a bigoted industry because she was a transsexual.
Richard Garriott, the virtual inventor of the computer RPG, cast aside like a used condom by a machine that thinks it's sucked what useful value it can find in him.
Julian Gollop, languishing in obscurity, the fruits of his own labor denied him by an industry that values trademarks more highly than talent.
Will Wright, who somehow still manages to force his vision through despite all the obstacles the machine puts in his path.
As they did, so shall we do.
We will develop for open platforms, not proprietary consoles.
We will work in the white-hot ferment of our own imaginations, striving to produce games of enduring merit, games so fine that generations to come will point to them and say, this, this was important in the creation of the great artistic form we know as games.
We will strive for innovation over imitation, originality over the tried and true.
We will explore the enormous plasticity of what is "the game," thefantastic flexibility of code, seeking new game styles and new approachesto the form.
We will create games we know gamers will want to play, because we ARE gamers, not MBAs or assholes from Hollywood or marketing dweebs whose last gig was selling Tide.
We will work in small, committed teams, sharing a unified vision, striving to perfect that vision without fear, favor, or interference.
We will find our market not by bribing retailers to stock our product, buton the public Internet, reaching our audience through the excellence of our own product, through guerilla marketing and rabble-rousing manifestoes, by nurturing a community of people passionate about and committed to games.
We will create, through sheer force of will, an independent games revolution, an audience and market and body of work that will ultimately redound to the benefit of the whole field, providing a venue for creative work, as independent cinema does for film, as independent labels do for music.
We reject the machine. We reject the retail channel. We reject big budgets and big teams. We reject $50 boxes of air. We reject end-caps and payments for shelf-space. We reject executives and producers who don't understand what they sell. We reject timidity. We reject the notion that "we know what works," and commit ourselves to finding NEW things that work.
We will turn this industry on its head.
Tremble, Redwood City! The forces of revolution are on the march.
Designer X
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
Gandhi
WE are gamers, game makers, writers and readers of computerized media.
We think some things are deeply fucked in the game industry -- no surprise, given how much is fucked in every other industry. We've figured it out: shareholders, corporations, managers don't care how good a game is to make or play. They're just looking for their return on investment to be higher than humanly possible.
We want to play good games, and we want making games to be an art, not an electronic sweatshop. This problem, also not unique to the gaming industry, is as old as Das Kapital and as new as The Matrix.
It's ugly,
It's pervasive,
And it can and will be changed.
Designer J1
Marketing should be geared towards selling the game that the developers have created and not used as an extension of management. They work for you, the developer, not you for them. If they want a game with a feature list, then they should program it. If they can't sell the game that you've created then fire them and find someone who can.
Designer J2
We reject crunch time.
It is anathema to the principles of quality for which we strive. Nobody EVER does their best work at the end of a 12-hour day. And if you're not doing good work, then what the hell are you doing? Go home. Sleep. Play with your kids. Mow the lawn. Watch some television. Then, when you have some creative energy to give, come work.
We will declare a game done when it IS done, not when marketing says it has to be done. If it's not done, it will suck. If it sucks, then no one will want to buy it (or even download it for free) and no one will pay attention when we release the next one.
A corollary: no one should pay for being a beta tester. Listen up, everyone -- yes, even you, id software: we will do our level best to make sure the damn thing is done. If it ain't done, it's a beta. And those are free. If we discover something is wrong, we'll fix it.
Another corollary: our games are our responsibility. (You listening, Jason Hall, King of teh monstars?) If it's broke, we fix it. We don't blame it on other people, even computer and video card makers who don't adhere to standards. If we can't fix it, we let people know that we can't, why we can't... and we give them their money back if they ask.
What we're about is credibility, in a fundamental way. We're saying that games should be created by people who play them and love them. That comes with a responsibility to create games we would want to play -- and we sure as hell don't want to play buggy, unfinished games that make our systems crash.
Designer K
The original Incredible Machine was developed for $35,000, and went on to sell over 800,000 units.
Dynamix
The Quotable R
Someone is raking in so much dough that even Zaphod Beeblebrox, or John Romero, would blush.
As for the state of game development...I need to use an even more disturbing metaphor: The Donner Party tragedy...their journey was also doomed to fail, and in the worst imaginable ways, due to inexperience, overconfidence, bad judgment, wasted resources, in-fighting, taking short cuts and heeding what turned out to be just plain bad advice...I have come to the conclusion that if game development is going to be so blindly ignorant that it only succeeds in causing itself to relive some bizarre version of the Donner party story again and again...then it deserves whatever grim fate awaits...
There is a denial of failure pervasive in this business, from top to bottom, that defies common sense. Taking risks and failing is an important part of the creative process. Denying one's self of this experience is to enter the realm of the mediocre.
I see a utopia for game designers, artists, writers and musicians. I see a perfect balance of freedom, lifestyle and creativity as the norm, not the goal or the exception. However, this utopia cannot arise within a system which is based upon concepts of management, marketing and product development which are uncreative, out-dated, wasteful and ineffective.
Do you want an arcade-based, shoot-'em-up, puppet-show, Saturday-morning-cartoon aesthetic criteria to dominate the industry? Do you want more crappy games made with assembly-line techniques by yuppie puppies in luxury sweatshops?
Remember: John Romero wants to make you his bitch. As a matter of fact, so do about a dozen other game developers I know...
Designer R
Creator's Bill of Rights
The full version of the Creator's Bill of Rights that Scott McCloud created in 1987 can be read by clicking here. It is very applicable to the computer game industry.
The Rights are:
1. The right to full ownership of what we fully create.
2. The right to full control over the creative execution of that which we fully own.
3. The right of approval over the reproduction and format of our creative property.
4. The right of approval over the methods by which our creative property is distributed.
5. The right to free movement of ourselves and our creative property to and from publishers.
6. The right to employ legal counsel in any and all business transactions.
7. The right to offer a proposal to more than one publisher at a time.
8. The right to prompt payment of a fair and equitable share of profits derived from all of our creative work.
9. The right to full and accurate accounting of any and all income and disbursements relative to our work.
10. The right to prompt and complete return of our artwork in its original condition.
11. The right to full control over the licensing of our creative property.
12. The right to promote and the right of approval over any and all promotion of ourselves and our creative property.
[/end part one]
Enjoy
This is only one third of it, and it looks prettier in it's original formatting, so rather than just reading this, I'd encourage you to go to the actual link.
Source: Home Of The Underdogs, http://www.the-underdogs.org/scratch.php
The Scratchware Manifesto
Phase One: Prelude To Revolution
The machinery of gaming has run amok.
Instead of serving creative vision, it suppresses it. Instead of encouraging innovation, it represses it. Instead of taking its cue from our most imaginative minds, it takes its cue from the latest month's PC Data list. Instead of rewarding those who succeed, it penalizes them with development budgets so high and royalties so low that there can be no reward for creators. Instead of ascribing credit to those who deserve it, it seeks to associate success with the corporate machine.
It is time for revolution.
Walk into your local bookstore; you'll find tens of thousands of titles. Walk into your local record store; you'll find thousands of albums. Walk into your local software store; you'll find perhaps 40 games.
Yet thousands of games are released each year.
The only games that fill those 40 slots are those on which publishers have lavished millions in placement and promotion and advertising and marketing dollars. The only games that make it to the shelves are those on which publishers have advanced millions in development funding, because they know that only a handful will succeed, will ever recoup the millions or tens of millions they spend in developing and launching them, because to succeed, a game must pass through the eye of the needle, become one of the handful that make it to the shelves or to the cover of PC Games.
When millions are at stake, the publishers become terrified. Each executive knows that greenlighting something offbeat that fails will lose him his job. So they greenlight the same old crap, imitations of what's on the list this month, simply to cover their own quivering asses. No one will fire them for going with the tried and true.
An industry that was once the most innovative and exciting artistic field on the planet has become a morass of drudgery and imitation.
A project that costs millions must have a development team to match; ten people, twenty, thirty, more. It must take years from project start to completion. It must involve so many talents, and so much labor, that no single creative vision can survive. Certainly, none can survive the clueless demands of marketing weasels and clueless executives drawn from packaged-goods industries and inexperienced external producers who think demanding unnecessary and counter-productive changes will prove their merit to their bosses.
We say: Basta! Enough! It doesn't have to be like that.
You need thirty talents to develop a game? Bullshit. Richard Garriott programmed Ultima by himself in a matter of weeks. Chris Crawford developed Balance of Power sitting by himself at his Mac. Chris Sawyer created RollerCoaster Tycoon--last year's #1 best-selling game--almost entirely on his own.
What do you need to create a game? Two people and a copy of Code Warrior.
You need millions in funding to create a great game? Garbage! As recently as 1991, the typical computer game lost less than $200,000 to develop. NetHack, still one of the best computer games ever created, was developedfor nothing, by a dev team working as a labor of love, in their spare time. TreadMarks, this year's IGF finalist, was developed by a team working for scratch and paying their groceries with the meager earnings of a little downloadable game they'd put up on their site.
What do you need to fund a game? Food stamps and enough scratch to pay the electricity bill.
You need to imitate existing products to reduce the risk of publishing? Sheer and utter lunacy, a theory in complete defiance of the facts of the history of our field. The products that have become huge hits have almost always been startlingly innovative, amazing departures from what has gone before: The Sims, SimCity, Doom, Command & Conquer, Populous, Civilization, and on and on. The real risk is in developing the me-too product, the poor imitation, the incremental change from something else. The real wins come with creative vision.
The narrow retail channel forces millions in promotional expense? Then kill it. There is no shelf space on the Internet.
You need hundreds of thousands in sales to recoup your costs? Yes, under the dysfunctional business model that rules today. But if you develop games the right way, the fearless way, the independent way, your costs are drastically smaller. A few thousand unit sales will pay the bills.
Death to Software, Etc.! Almost every PC in America is connected to a pipe that can carry bits. Why are we copying bits to a plastic-and-metal platter, sticking it in box full of air, and shipping it cross-country, when it is far easier, cheaper, and environmentally sensible to ship those bits down that pipe?
Death to EA and Vivendi! Your groveling to the retailers, your lack of understanding of what constitutes a game, your complete failure of aesthetic sense, your timidity in funding, your attempts to grow by choking off competitors, your inability to make developers and marketers understand each other, has led us to this pass. You are dinosaurs, your brobdignabian sloth nothing but a drag on what ought to be a field of staggering originality.
Death to Sony, Sega, and Nintendo! Your insistence on controlling every step of development, of ensuring that no product strays too far from your own blinkered twitch-game aesthetic, your absurdly high platform royalties, your gouging prices for development stations and SDKs, your boxes with the controllers wholly unsuited to a game of any depth make you irrelevant to anyone who wants to develop games of enduring merit.
Death to the gaming industry! Long live games.
We find our heroes not among rock stars, or game developers whose real desire is to direct movies, or designers who bare their breasts in the pages of Playboy. We find them among the men and women who created this industry, whose imaginative vision once sparked its rise, who developed games the way we mean to:
Chris Crawford, once vaunted as the world's greatest game designer, nowcast aside by a marketing machine that can't figure out how to sell anything that doesn't fit into its tedious categories.
Dani Bunten, who understood the importance of socialization in gaming far better than the Verants and Origins of the world, with their customer-hostile policies, spurned by a bigoted industry because she was a transsexual.
Richard Garriott, the virtual inventor of the computer RPG, cast aside like a used condom by a machine that thinks it's sucked what useful value it can find in him.
Julian Gollop, languishing in obscurity, the fruits of his own labor denied him by an industry that values trademarks more highly than talent.
Will Wright, who somehow still manages to force his vision through despite all the obstacles the machine puts in his path.
As they did, so shall we do.
We will develop for open platforms, not proprietary consoles.
We will work in the white-hot ferment of our own imaginations, striving to produce games of enduring merit, games so fine that generations to come will point to them and say, this, this was important in the creation of the great artistic form we know as games.
We will strive for innovation over imitation, originality over the tried and true.
We will explore the enormous plasticity of what is "the game," thefantastic flexibility of code, seeking new game styles and new approachesto the form.
We will create games we know gamers will want to play, because we ARE gamers, not MBAs or assholes from Hollywood or marketing dweebs whose last gig was selling Tide.
We will work in small, committed teams, sharing a unified vision, striving to perfect that vision without fear, favor, or interference.
We will find our market not by bribing retailers to stock our product, buton the public Internet, reaching our audience through the excellence of our own product, through guerilla marketing and rabble-rousing manifestoes, by nurturing a community of people passionate about and committed to games.
We will create, through sheer force of will, an independent games revolution, an audience and market and body of work that will ultimately redound to the benefit of the whole field, providing a venue for creative work, as independent cinema does for film, as independent labels do for music.
We reject the machine. We reject the retail channel. We reject big budgets and big teams. We reject $50 boxes of air. We reject end-caps and payments for shelf-space. We reject executives and producers who don't understand what they sell. We reject timidity. We reject the notion that "we know what works," and commit ourselves to finding NEW things that work.
We will turn this industry on its head.
Tremble, Redwood City! The forces of revolution are on the march.
Designer X
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
Gandhi
WE are gamers, game makers, writers and readers of computerized media.
We think some things are deeply fucked in the game industry -- no surprise, given how much is fucked in every other industry. We've figured it out: shareholders, corporations, managers don't care how good a game is to make or play. They're just looking for their return on investment to be higher than humanly possible.
We want to play good games, and we want making games to be an art, not an electronic sweatshop. This problem, also not unique to the gaming industry, is as old as Das Kapital and as new as The Matrix.
It's ugly,
It's pervasive,
And it can and will be changed.
Designer J1
Marketing should be geared towards selling the game that the developers have created and not used as an extension of management. They work for you, the developer, not you for them. If they want a game with a feature list, then they should program it. If they can't sell the game that you've created then fire them and find someone who can.
Designer J2
We reject crunch time.
It is anathema to the principles of quality for which we strive. Nobody EVER does their best work at the end of a 12-hour day. And if you're not doing good work, then what the hell are you doing? Go home. Sleep. Play with your kids. Mow the lawn. Watch some television. Then, when you have some creative energy to give, come work.
We will declare a game done when it IS done, not when marketing says it has to be done. If it's not done, it will suck. If it sucks, then no one will want to buy it (or even download it for free) and no one will pay attention when we release the next one.
A corollary: no one should pay for being a beta tester. Listen up, everyone -- yes, even you, id software: we will do our level best to make sure the damn thing is done. If it ain't done, it's a beta. And those are free. If we discover something is wrong, we'll fix it.
Another corollary: our games are our responsibility. (You listening, Jason Hall, King of teh monstars?) If it's broke, we fix it. We don't blame it on other people, even computer and video card makers who don't adhere to standards. If we can't fix it, we let people know that we can't, why we can't... and we give them their money back if they ask.
What we're about is credibility, in a fundamental way. We're saying that games should be created by people who play them and love them. That comes with a responsibility to create games we would want to play -- and we sure as hell don't want to play buggy, unfinished games that make our systems crash.
Designer K
The original Incredible Machine was developed for $35,000, and went on to sell over 800,000 units.
Dynamix
The Quotable R
Someone is raking in so much dough that even Zaphod Beeblebrox, or John Romero, would blush.
As for the state of game development...I need to use an even more disturbing metaphor: The Donner Party tragedy...their journey was also doomed to fail, and in the worst imaginable ways, due to inexperience, overconfidence, bad judgment, wasted resources, in-fighting, taking short cuts and heeding what turned out to be just plain bad advice...I have come to the conclusion that if game development is going to be so blindly ignorant that it only succeeds in causing itself to relive some bizarre version of the Donner party story again and again...then it deserves whatever grim fate awaits...
There is a denial of failure pervasive in this business, from top to bottom, that defies common sense. Taking risks and failing is an important part of the creative process. Denying one's self of this experience is to enter the realm of the mediocre.
I see a utopia for game designers, artists, writers and musicians. I see a perfect balance of freedom, lifestyle and creativity as the norm, not the goal or the exception. However, this utopia cannot arise within a system which is based upon concepts of management, marketing and product development which are uncreative, out-dated, wasteful and ineffective.
Do you want an arcade-based, shoot-'em-up, puppet-show, Saturday-morning-cartoon aesthetic criteria to dominate the industry? Do you want more crappy games made with assembly-line techniques by yuppie puppies in luxury sweatshops?
Remember: John Romero wants to make you his bitch. As a matter of fact, so do about a dozen other game developers I know...
Designer R
Creator's Bill of Rights
The full version of the Creator's Bill of Rights that Scott McCloud created in 1987 can be read by clicking here. It is very applicable to the computer game industry.
The Rights are:
1. The right to full ownership of what we fully create.
2. The right to full control over the creative execution of that which we fully own.
3. The right of approval over the reproduction and format of our creative property.
4. The right of approval over the methods by which our creative property is distributed.
5. The right to free movement of ourselves and our creative property to and from publishers.
6. The right to employ legal counsel in any and all business transactions.
7. The right to offer a proposal to more than one publisher at a time.
8. The right to prompt payment of a fair and equitable share of profits derived from all of our creative work.
9. The right to full and accurate accounting of any and all income and disbursements relative to our work.
10. The right to prompt and complete return of our artwork in its original condition.
11. The right to full control over the licensing of our creative property.
12. The right to promote and the right of approval over any and all promotion of ourselves and our creative property.
[/end part one]
Enjoy
*zamzx hands the writer of that a chill pill*
O.O
o.0
0.o
O.O
o.0
0.o
thats been around since 2k
yup, sure has. It got slashdotted today, so I thought I'd bring it up here, since parts do apply to what the dev's are experiencing now.
judging from the three lines of text I managed to force myself to read, all this is is a big great long and most importantly irrelevant load of poopoo.
From penny-arcade:
ren·ais·sance (rn-säns, -zäns, rn-säns, -zäns, r-nsns)
n.
A rebirth or revival.
A revival of intellectual or artistic achievement and vigor
to be born again, from Vulgar Latin
Games are art and this is the renaissance.
Video games are art. However they are not the cutting edge revolutionary works of art that many people seem to think they are. No, video games in their current state are more like traditional art of the mid to late nineteenth century. It may be hard to believe but sitting here in the year 2002 in front of our computer screens we are the modern day equivalent of the visitors to Paris's Salon in 1863. The art work we see is being carefully chosen by people who are kind enough to decide for us what we like and don't like. We are being shielded from innovation and experimentation by critics and marketers. These are conditions that drove artists in the late nineteenth century to impressionism and art was never the same again. Videogames are on this same path and we are just now beginning to see the first signs of our own rebirth and revival.
The parallels between videogames and traditional art before the impressionist movement are striking. It used to be that if an artist wanted to be successful he had to get his work shown in Le Salon. The Salon however would only accept conservative paintings that illustrated and taught moral lessons using historical, religious or mythical subjects. The same thing is happening today in the world of videogames. If you want to have a successful game you need to have it published by one of the big publishers. However these companies are leery of accepting titles that deviate from tried and true genres. If your game does not fit nicely into the mold of a first person shooter, RTS or a handful of other genres then chances are it won't be published. These companies are deciding for us what we want and don't want. They are rewarding stagnation and sameness while at the same time squashing innovation.
Traditional artwork before the impressionists had to conform to very specific criteria. Artists were meticulous, painting with smooth strokes and carefully finishing surfaces in order to hide their own brushwork. They were designed to create the illusion that viewers could look right through the frame into real space beyond. The idea was to remove all evidence of the artist. Today's games are constructed with the same exact goals. Designers strive for the academic/realistic depiction of environments. Their frame is our monitor and our games are intended to be windows into a real space. They are 3D canvases that allow the artists to actually reproduce photorealistic environments that are totally convincing. So once we are capable of creating environments that are all but indistinguishable from reality where do we go from there? The video game industry needs its own Impressionists.
A traditional artist would paint each and every leaf on a tree as he knew it to be there. An impressionist wanted to paint what he saw rather than what he intellectually knew. What he saw was not separate leaves, but splashes of constantly changing light and color. Impressionists discovered that even the darkest shadow contained an infinite number of colors. Most games are happy to render lighting in a very stale, mathematical way. Shadows are cast in the appropriate directions depending on light source and one might even catch a pre-packaged sun glare effect should you look in just the right direction. One game stands out as depicting light as we actually see it. In ICO sunlight can be so overwhelming that it completely obliterates your view of your surroundings. Claude Monet was fascinated by this effect. In one of his more famous series of paintings he studied this. He made multiple paintings of La cathedrale de Rouen in 1843. Each painting was done under different conditions. Some with direct sun light others in early morning fog. He marveled at how light could actually destroy the stone walls of the cathedral. In fact, under certain circumstances it was all but impossible to make out the details of the building. This same effect is used beautifully in ICO. The sunlight in ICO breaks through windows and eats away and the stone castle. When leaving a dark room into a sunlit tower it momentarily blinds you. This is the same thing that the impressionists were striving for and to see it captured so well in a game is breathtaking.
Another example of a game that is a step in the right direction is REZ. Here the designers have shifted the emphasis from realism to style. There are brief moments in the game where you might find yourself rocketing through a beautiful forest with birds taking flight as you whip past the tops of trees. However you will spend the majority of your time playing through wire frame representations of music full of constantly changing geometric shapes and pulsating lights. The visualization of music and your interaction with it is the focus and the game is better off for it. REZ pushes the boundaries of what we consider a game to be and in doing so delivers a totally unique and refreshing experience. As gamers it is important for us to support ground breaking titles like this. We need to send a strong message to Publishers that there is an audience for games that push the envelope. By rewarding companies for taking risks like REZ we create the opportunity for even more imaginative titles in the future.
The impressionist painter's reputations as renegades eventually lead to their success. Impressionism with its anti-establishment trappings appealed to the middle class and finally gave them access to art. By challenging critics of the time and creating experiences with their work that could be related to and enjoyed by almost anyone impressionism opened the door for even more dramatic changes in the world of art. It was because of painters like Monet and Degas that we eventually got Cubism and what we consider modern art today. So while the question of who the videogame industries Monet will end up being is interesting, it leads to an even more exciting question in my mind. Who will be its Jackson Pollock?
-Gabriel
ren·ais·sance (rn-säns, -zäns, rn-säns, -zäns, r-nsns)
n.
A rebirth or revival.
A revival of intellectual or artistic achievement and vigor
to be born again, from Vulgar Latin
Games are art and this is the renaissance.
Video games are art. However they are not the cutting edge revolutionary works of art that many people seem to think they are. No, video games in their current state are more like traditional art of the mid to late nineteenth century. It may be hard to believe but sitting here in the year 2002 in front of our computer screens we are the modern day equivalent of the visitors to Paris's Salon in 1863. The art work we see is being carefully chosen by people who are kind enough to decide for us what we like and don't like. We are being shielded from innovation and experimentation by critics and marketers. These are conditions that drove artists in the late nineteenth century to impressionism and art was never the same again. Videogames are on this same path and we are just now beginning to see the first signs of our own rebirth and revival.
The parallels between videogames and traditional art before the impressionist movement are striking. It used to be that if an artist wanted to be successful he had to get his work shown in Le Salon. The Salon however would only accept conservative paintings that illustrated and taught moral lessons using historical, religious or mythical subjects. The same thing is happening today in the world of videogames. If you want to have a successful game you need to have it published by one of the big publishers. However these companies are leery of accepting titles that deviate from tried and true genres. If your game does not fit nicely into the mold of a first person shooter, RTS or a handful of other genres then chances are it won't be published. These companies are deciding for us what we want and don't want. They are rewarding stagnation and sameness while at the same time squashing innovation.
Traditional artwork before the impressionists had to conform to very specific criteria. Artists were meticulous, painting with smooth strokes and carefully finishing surfaces in order to hide their own brushwork. They were designed to create the illusion that viewers could look right through the frame into real space beyond. The idea was to remove all evidence of the artist. Today's games are constructed with the same exact goals. Designers strive for the academic/realistic depiction of environments. Their frame is our monitor and our games are intended to be windows into a real space. They are 3D canvases that allow the artists to actually reproduce photorealistic environments that are totally convincing. So once we are capable of creating environments that are all but indistinguishable from reality where do we go from there? The video game industry needs its own Impressionists.
A traditional artist would paint each and every leaf on a tree as he knew it to be there. An impressionist wanted to paint what he saw rather than what he intellectually knew. What he saw was not separate leaves, but splashes of constantly changing light and color. Impressionists discovered that even the darkest shadow contained an infinite number of colors. Most games are happy to render lighting in a very stale, mathematical way. Shadows are cast in the appropriate directions depending on light source and one might even catch a pre-packaged sun glare effect should you look in just the right direction. One game stands out as depicting light as we actually see it. In ICO sunlight can be so overwhelming that it completely obliterates your view of your surroundings. Claude Monet was fascinated by this effect. In one of his more famous series of paintings he studied this. He made multiple paintings of La cathedrale de Rouen in 1843. Each painting was done under different conditions. Some with direct sun light others in early morning fog. He marveled at how light could actually destroy the stone walls of the cathedral. In fact, under certain circumstances it was all but impossible to make out the details of the building. This same effect is used beautifully in ICO. The sunlight in ICO breaks through windows and eats away and the stone castle. When leaving a dark room into a sunlit tower it momentarily blinds you. This is the same thing that the impressionists were striving for and to see it captured so well in a game is breathtaking.
Another example of a game that is a step in the right direction is REZ. Here the designers have shifted the emphasis from realism to style. There are brief moments in the game where you might find yourself rocketing through a beautiful forest with birds taking flight as you whip past the tops of trees. However you will spend the majority of your time playing through wire frame representations of music full of constantly changing geometric shapes and pulsating lights. The visualization of music and your interaction with it is the focus and the game is better off for it. REZ pushes the boundaries of what we consider a game to be and in doing so delivers a totally unique and refreshing experience. As gamers it is important for us to support ground breaking titles like this. We need to send a strong message to Publishers that there is an audience for games that push the envelope. By rewarding companies for taking risks like REZ we create the opportunity for even more imaginative titles in the future.
The impressionist painter's reputations as renegades eventually lead to their success. Impressionism with its anti-establishment trappings appealed to the middle class and finally gave them access to art. By challenging critics of the time and creating experiences with their work that could be related to and enjoyed by almost anyone impressionism opened the door for even more dramatic changes in the world of art. It was because of painters like Monet and Degas that we eventually got Cubism and what we consider modern art today. So while the question of who the videogame industries Monet will end up being is interesting, it leads to an even more exciting question in my mind. Who will be its Jackson Pollock?
-Gabriel
"Death to Software, Etc.!"
Ummm... Okay.
Who wants to play some Battlecruiser 3000 A.D.?
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6464_7-6300449-1.html?tag=cnetfd.sd
Ummm... Okay.
Who wants to play some Battlecruiser 3000 A.D.?
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6464_7-6300449-1.html?tag=cnetfd.sd
[Picked up by revolutionaries and hauled bodily from its hilltop villa to the remote jungles of Off Topic]
I agree with Genka, specially about the PA piece of crap. Didn't read it, BTW, just knowing it was from PA was enough to make me avoid it for the kind of crap that "comic" deals out.
Ah, blissful ignorance... the opiate of the masses...
Viva la revolution! ;p
Viva la revolution! ;p
Hey, I LIKE Madden and Halo!
Halo was good, but was it anywhere as good as Marathon (the game created by Bungie waay back in the day)? I say no. Marathon was a true classic, and it remains a favorite despite it's poor graphics, and low quality sound. It's a favorite because it is still NEW, to a degree. It has a terrific story, and incorporates design elements that no other game really has. Games that rely entirely on graphics and special fx will be lying in dusty piles on the floor, and I'll still be here playing Marathon, Alpha Centauri, Starcraft, and Final Fantasy VI and VII (just to name a few).
Interesting reading.
I really wish I had not lost my copy of Marathon, I play Alpha Centauri at least 2 times a month, and it's in my comp as we speak. FF's require a console, and I don't have those anymore but those were good titles.
I really wish I had not lost my copy of Marathon, I play Alpha Centauri at least 2 times a month, and it's in my comp as we speak. FF's require a console, and I don't have those anymore but those were good titles.
I'v been playing command and conquer since it was first relesed for beta testing. I have the entire series except for the zero hour expansion for generals.
On a side note the tenth anniversary of the relese of the original Command & Conquer was on agust 30th. also the 20th birthday of westwood studios.
On a side note the tenth anniversary of the relese of the original Command & Conquer was on agust 30th. also the 20th birthday of westwood studios.
"I really wish I had not lost my copy of Marathon"
Go download it! It's one of the free games in the link I provided.
Go download it! It's one of the free games in the link I provided.
....omg....
thank.... you.... Tyrdium....!
/me disappears for a week as he plays Marathon start to finish for the first time in 10 years
thank.... you.... Tyrdium....!
/me disappears for a week as he plays Marathon start to finish for the first time in 10 years
It's a shame these Underdogs could not direct all that energy and revolutionary spirit towards helping the more unfortunate in the world. While gamers can certainly come from all categories, I'd be surprised if there's any among the poor living in the cardboard villages and shantytowns outside of Cape Town, the homeless on the streets of USA, the eastern europeans still suffering from wars 10 years ago, or even among all the abandoned dogs and cats of the world... ;-)
Phaserlight, http://source.bungie.org/ is a good place to visit. It's an open source OS X port of Marathon with additional goodies, such as enhanced textures and some new features.
Phaserlight, http://source.bungie.org/ is a good place to visit. It's an open source OS X port of Marathon with additional goodies, such as enhanced textures and some new features.
God I love that game... the prequel to Halo.
Random bit of trivia, "Phaserlight" is the gamer handle I came up with playing Marathon over LAN back in the day.
(as though anyone cares, right?)
Oh well... mad props to Bungie for open-sourcing!
Random bit of trivia, "Phaserlight" is the gamer handle I came up with playing Marathon over LAN back in the day.
(as though anyone cares, right?)
Oh well... mad props to Bungie for open-sourcing!