Betterblog

Jeff Vogel (who's been making fine, intelligent old-school CRPGs since they days when they were in fact new-school) says intelligent things that I agree with.

 

 

The Ebert Affair: Ebert's grumpy post and the many, many responses from the gaming community. The (varied but interesting) pieces in this month's Escapist finally persuaded me to emit a blog post on the subject. For God's sake don't expect much insight here. It's more indigestion than anything.

Let me summarise the argument a moment:

• Ebert: Games aren't art because I don't really like them.
• Gamers: Games are art because we really, really like them.
• Gamers (supplementary argument 1): Also, games are art because, Flower Braid Passage Bioshock the Path.
• Gamers (supplementary argument 2): Also, the definition of art is so subjective this whole argument is pointless.

There were a wider range of responses than that (I like Troy Goodfellow's 'Are games art? most of the games I play are barely even games') but those were the bulk of it.

What I find bothersome is the rather peevish tone of so many of the responses: like we (yup, I'm a gamer, it's 'we') are taking it personally. Why does it matter that much whether a respected middlebrow film critic thinks games are art? I think it's partly simple emotional attachment, but more, if games are art, it means I haven't wasted my time playing thousands of hours of mediocre shooters. I get the same cultural credit I would if I'd spent thousands of hours listening to challenging atonal music.

The obvious gap in this rather cheering line of reasoning here is that if games are art then not all games are necessarily art, and not all games-which-are-art are necessarily good art. Tom Chick makes this point cogently but he's the only responder I've seen who's come out and said '*these* are examples of games which are *not* art'.

A related point. Ebert said: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets [sic]." I haven't seen any of the responders take up this challenge. Never mind the comparisons to the big cultural monoliths, I haven't seen anyone step up and say, yes, [highly respected game] is a better treatment of [theme] than [minor work by respected, non-legendary artist]. I see roughly one puff piece a month that talks about how games are *going* to be worthy of comparison, but I've been seeing those puff pieces since the coming thing was hypertext novels in the nineties.  You know how they say fusion power is fifty years away, and it's been fifty years away since 1955? It's beginning to sound to me like gaming's Citizen Kane is five years away, and it's been five years away since 1990.

I think we owe it to ourselves as gamers and game designers to ask *why* there seems to be less gaming art about the place than you'd expect, compared to other media. I think if we want to grow little beards and sit at the big table the onus is on us to provide an explanation.

One standard rejoinder, and one that runs under the Ebert debate, is that it's because the Man is putting us down. I don't have much sympathy with this line of argument.

Another is that it's early days for video games. I hear this point a lot. Kelly Santiago made it in the video that Ebert linked to: film started out as cheap thrills. But the comparison doesn't stand up. Pong was 1972. Melies' Trip to the Moon, Santiago's jumping-off point, was 1902. We're 38 years on from Pong. 38 years on from Trip to the Moon, we had Battleship Potemkin, Nosferatu, Metropolis, The Wizard of Oz. We had Hitchcock, Ophuls, Ozu, Murnau. Go on just a couple more years and you have Citizen Kane and Casablanca. There had been heavyweight, culturally respectable film criticism in the mainstream press for more than ten years. (At least in Britain, I don't know about the States, and I don't really know much about film criticism in Britain beyond blog blag level). And this is actually an unfairly flattering comparison for games: culture changes faster now. The gatekeepers of the cultural pantheon are a lot more liberally inclined. So what have we been doing with ourselves?

A refined version of the 'early days' point is that tech has only just got far enough to open up real possibilities. But we had Colossal Cave in 1976. Text is all you need: ask Ebert's novelists and poets. With the honourable exception of the underground, commercially irrelevant IF subculture, this has gone nowhere. Most gamers aren't terribly interested.

Approaching the tl;dr boundary, but I suppose having got so firmly on my high horse about this I need to make some conjectures about why myself. Another post when I feel the need to procrastinate further.

 

Some of the icons in Echo Bazaar took a mere twenty minutes to create from sketch to site, while others - usually the simple ones - took many days.  The most extreme example of this is the little button that gives a tweetable postcard of your location, which took two weeks, fifteen iterations, one very unprofessional huff and a semi-serious threat to replace the existing art with a pair of luminescent green breasts.  And after all that, maybe five people clicked the goddamned thing. Anyway, I thought it might be fun (and pleasantly narcissistic) to run through the evolution of a single icon. Typically, the process starts with a brief from Alexis. In this case:

“A wild-haired lunatic with eyes and mouth agape and a blood-dripping meat-cleaver. Sticky stuff dripping from his mouth. Expensive-looking clothes in disarray, evening dress maybe. Narcotic honey is the drug of choice downstairs. This gent has overdone it.”

Which led to the following, somewhat crappy sketch (done in ArtRage on a WACOM pad):

(Can I just say, I must have drawn a thousand top hats in the last three months? Thank you, I feel better now).

Next we shift into Photoshop, tidy up the lines, cut out the crappy bits, resize and add a cutout filter. Practically everything in EB gets a cutout filter at some point, it gives images a lovely classic cartoony feel, and negates my tendency towards wavy, wishy-washy lines. Like so.

Not sure what's happened to his nose here. Ah well, we'll put it back later. More clean-up and adjustment follows, and eventually we get an outline we're happy with. One of the most useful tricks I've learned on the Echo Bazaar crash-course is the usefulness of clear silhouettes in icons. If you stick a colour overlay on your image and you can't tell what it is, chances are it will be a lousy icon. In this case, it's relatively readable:

Time to add some colour. We go back to the outline and remove all white with the magic eraser. Then we stick a new layer *beneath* the outline - this is very important for cartoony illustrations where you want to lay in big blocks of colour without losing the clarity of the black outline or going over the edges. A third layer holds shadows and highlights.

...and the nose seems to be back, which is nice. Incidentally, nailing the metal shine on that cleaver took ages. I looked at a lot of knives and daggers on Google, but eventually I just borrowed my girlfriend’s cleaver, stuck it under a desk lamp and copied.

Finally, we add a background - just a simple gradient in EB's house colours (pale beige and slightly darker beige), resize and convert to a PNG.

and that's the finished product. You can't really tell he's dribbling honey any more, to be honest. But he does look nice and mad.