GDC 2017 Education Soapbox: Game Academia's "Art Problem"
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This document discusses the lack of focus on art and aesthetics in game development academia. It notes that topics at the DiGRA conference primarily centered around serious games, learning, cognition, and behavior rather than art, design, sound, or music. The document proposes ideas to incorporate more fine arts techniques into game development, such as using artistic materials and processes to create game assets or designing games around artistic performance and creation. It highlights some existing art games and concludes by advocating for seeing games as a medium that combines different artistic disciplines.
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GDC 2017 Education Soapbox: Game Academia's "Art Problem"
- 1. Game Academia’s “Art Problem” Christopher W. Totten Game Artist in Residence, American University Author, An Architectural Approach to Level Design Founder, Smithsonian American Art Museum Arcade
- 6. HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED TO YOU?
- 13. “Art Games”
- 14. Hi dad…
- 15. DiGRA online conference proceeding topics ●Top keywords ● Serious games (25 uses) ● Learning (23 uses) ● “Game design” (overwhelming number, mainly referring to game interactivity)
- 16. DiGRA online conference proceeding topics ●Top keyword variations ● Behavior and behavior modification (7 associated keywords) ● Cognition (8 associated keywords) ● Social-science topics (42 associated keywords)
- 17. DiGRA online conference proceeding topics ●Art and aesthetic topics ● Level design (4 uses, 2 keywords) ● Sound design (4 uses, 3 keywords) ● Game art (8 uses, 2 keywords) ● Music (1 use, 1 keyword)
- 18. vs. Cyber Awareness Challenge by Carney, Inc.
- 19. “Visual arts”
- 29. How art is made How games are made I dunno…dragons?
- 30. Candice Drouet, Wes Anderson’s Influences, vimeo.com/204671247
- 34. *Financial and Leonardo DiCaprio-related results may vary
- 35. Lissitzky’s Revenge, made with paper cutouts. Shown at the Smithsonian’s Innovation in Art and the Baltimore Artscape festival. Ever Yours, Vincent by Fredrica Orlati. “Mixed media” game created for an MFA thesis.
- 36. Natasha, A Game of Dance by Boris Willis. Shown at The Kennedy Center. Bounden by Game Oven. IGF Nuovo Award and Game Developers Choice Innovation Award finalist
- 37. Writers in the Schools (WITS) program wins NEA grant for using games to teach creative writing.
- 39. =
- 40. =
- 41. =
- 42. To review: ●New game studies material via fine arts knowledge ●Experiment with how assets are created with fine arts techniques/materials ●Games that incorporate fine arts performance/creation techniques into game design ●Finding funding areas related to the arts
- 43. “It is the best of what we can do with art all wrapped up into something that becomes greater than its parts. Within games we have illustration, sculpture, musical scoring, narrative, and poetry.” ~ Chris Melissinos, game developer and curator, The Art of Video Games
- 45. Game music cover bands playing at MAGFest
Editor's Notes
- Hi there, my name is Christopher Totten
- I teach here…
- I am an indie game developer and game community advocate…
- I’ve published books about game making, including An Architectural Approach to Level Design and the recently released edited volume, Level Design: Processes and Experiences
- And I’m one of the lead organizers of the Smithsonian American Art Museum Arcade.
- But today I’m here to ask, HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED TO YOU?!
- A colleague comes to you offering a “collaboration”…
- …but REALLY, they mean you’d be illustrating THEIR research article or report?
- Or has a game art student skilled with software ever asked you to look at their work…
- only for you to find an abject horror that could have been prevented if only they’d taken an intro drawing class? Then you may be a victim of…
- GAME ACADEMIA’S ART PROBLEM!!! So what do I mean by “game academia has an art problem”?
- I’m going to define it as the way that our field de-emphasizes game making disciplines descended from the arts in favor of others.
- I also want to be clear, I’m not talking about games that use the affordances of contemporary art to design interactivity, but rather…
- Acknowledging the lineage between game asset creation specialties and the historic fields that they are descended from.
- So what are some of these other disciplines? Looking through the keywords used in the DiGRA online library shows the dominance of serious games, learning, and game interactivity design as research topics.
- Likewise, there are large numbers of keywords derived from terms in the social sciences, cognitive development, and behavior studies.
- What you don’t see are the same numbers of topics in areas like spatial design in games, sound design, visual arts, or even music.
- So our first part is that there’s a distinct preference towards serious games, social science research and others that favor mechanics but away from deeper understandings of the aesthetic qualities of games.
- The second part comes when you look at industry conferences like here at GDC, the East Coast Games Conference, or any other professional conference with a “game art” track.
- Talks at these conferences seem more related to graphics development than the visual arts.
- Sessions at GDC 2016 in the "visual arts" track, for example, have titles like "HDR Rendering in Lumberyard", "Shaders 101: Foundational Shader Concepts for Technical Artists", and "Photogrammetry and Star Wars: Battlefront." Of the seventy-seven scheduled sessions at GDC 2016 in the visual arts track, only eight cite techniques or concepts explicitly derived from the fine arts such as color theory or composition.
- So who cares? Why is this a problem?
- Many of these attitudes trickle down into academic game programs, appearing in class design, research questions, and the structure of development teams in these environments.
- In many programs, there is a bias towards software usage and technical art pipelines, and away from studying fine art principles.
- The dominant subjects in games research focus on the work of game mechanic designers while putting artists, composers, and sound designers in utilitarian roles that de-incentivize them from being researchers in their own right.
- The underlying issue for all of these is that we view games as monolithic objects, rather than as collections of works by collaborating professionals. And instead of evolving from this monolith we keep banging our heads against it.
- So what might be some practical solutions to this?
- While there are many many MANY works, all very good, studying game mechanics or meditations on the nature of play, there are few intellectual investigations of things like art production or sound design.
- Given that many of these under-studied disciplines are descended from established fields, there are chances for true impact if you can discover what lies in the mysterious region between games and the arts.
- While the use of techniques or references from our broader arts and media history is common in other fields, it’s not commonplace in games yet.
- Remember the DiGRA theme of “DeFragging” game studies – I challenge you to do the opposite: frag games with a BFG, pick a favorite chunk, and milk it for all its worth!
- Remember the DiGRA theme of “DeFragging” game studies – I challenge you to do the opposite: frag games with a BFG, pick a favorite chunk, and milk it for all its worth!
- Remember the DiGRA theme of “DeFragging” game studies – I challenge you to do the opposite: frag games with a BFG, pick a favorite chunk, and milk it for all its worth!
- Remember the DiGRA theme of “DeFragging” game studies – I challenge you to do the opposite: frag games with a BFG, pick a favorite chunk, and milk it for all its worth!
- If you are making games as part of your research, there are also benefits to including research agenda items from the arts. Games that emphasize fine art processes in their asset creation have both creative novelty and can get your game displayed in museums and other institutions.
- Arts-inspired games can and have provided meaningful collaborations – allowing arts professionals a real seat at the table and mechanic designers to discover new methods of interactivity.
- Arts professionals can also be your subject matter experts on fundable projects that use games in arts education or to teach art principles.
- As for teaching: software is necessary, but we should blend the fine arts into the core of teaching it. Use software as a tool for practicing the arts and teach your students to do the same. We can do this by designing projects that challenge students to answer theoretical questions with software:
- teach game history by having them make retro games in GraphicsGale and Construct
- teach architectural space organization in the Unreal Engine
- reinforce things like proportion and composition in Photoshop concept art courses.
- So already, these opportunities can lead us down a variety of paths of looking more deeply into games, past their mechanics…
- Because as many practicing game developers will tell you, games are NOT self-contained productions that consist only of interactivity.
- Anyone who has ever gone from consumer to creator will tell you that when they’ve tried to make even simple games, elements that they took for granted suddenly seemed very big and impressive.
- Sure, interactivity is one of the things that make games unique, but if fans can understand that games have component parts worthy of study and celebration, why can’t we who study games professionally?
- I know that for me and many of my students, the artistic aspects of games are what excited us, stuck with us over the years, and inspired us to make games our careers.
- And if given a chance I think that meaningful collaboration with the arts may be the next great way to make and study games.
- Thank you