Portrait of an Architect as and Old Man: Part Two

In one sequence in Sydney Pollack’s The Sketches of Frank Gehry, Pollack (who frequently appears in the film himself) asks Gehry if he sees his art in other things, or is inspired by art he sees around him.

At first Gehry doesn’t seem to know what he means, and then Pollack explains that sometimes he’ll hear a song and in his mind began imagining sequences of camera movements that are inspired by the flow of the music.

Gehry proceeds to produce a print out of Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ Crowned With Thorns, and explains that he found the principal lines of the composition to be extremely engaging. Rummaging through the papers on his desk, he produces a plan diagram for what he calls ‘the Israel Project’ (by which I can only assume he means the Museum of Tolerance project, to be built in Jerusalem). He quickly traces the major compositional lines of the Bosch work, and then traces the major compositional lines of the plan of the Israel Project, which have a very similar aesthetic (the irony of that either escapes them, or their discussion of it ends up on Pollack’s cutting room floor).

The compositions are obviously different. For those who remember the Lode Runner level that was designed after the Broderbund Logo, you’ll understand why this is a good thing; simply lifting a composition from one design medium and transplanting it into another never works. But the point is that both Pollack and Gehry claimed to have often found inspiration in other works of art.

That got me thinking. In my last year of art school I was taking creative writing classes as electives, and often found myself writing fiction that was heavily influenced by the research I was doing in visual art and art history. Later, when I went on to study in Creative Writing I kept up my interest in the visual arts, and my stories often reference or allude to works of art that have inspired or moved me.

But that mostly ended when I became a designer. As a designer, I no longer find much inspiration in drawings or paintings, sculptures or songs, stories or films. It’s true that I am often inspired by stories or films – but in those cases I am inspired toward what my game’s story is about, not what its systems are about. While I would argue that the design and narrative of a game are not two separate things, the fact remains that I am not usually inspired by a story to design a system (though there is one important exception to that).

Instead, as a designer, I most frequently find my inspiration in systems, not in things. I am not inspired by a story about a tree or a painting of a tree, or even – really – by a tree as an object. But I am inspired by a tree as a manifestation of a system. When I think about what a tree is, I can begin to imagine all sorts of systems ‘inside’ it.

For example – maybe each species of tree has a ratio of surface area to mass that is a constant for that species. Clearly the leaves of trees seek to maximize surface area exposed to sun, while at the same time a tree is constantly trading off surface area to thicken and lengthen its trunk. Certainly there would be climatic and geographic variation based on access to sunlight and ground water or rain water but with those things being equal (or with those things accounted for in the constant even) I would bet that individual variation from that constant would be small.

More importantly, it doesn’t even need to be true for the idea of that system to inspire me – I can use creative license and imagine a system that stems from such a constant exists and imagine all sorts of interesting systems to design based on that idea. And even more important than that is the fact that I find these systems beautiful. A tree is just a tree. It’s as useful as an oxygen producer as it is for decoration or for firewood or construction. I don’t care about a tree. I don’t find a tree beautiful. That’s what I mean when I say I don’t find a tree as an object to be inspiring. But I do find ‘treeness’ – the underlying systems that define and distinguish trees to be inspiring, amazing, beautiful things. Even better in some sense is that I can use treeness without having to cut down a single tree. The same can’t be said for a totem pole, no matter how beautiful a work of art it might be.

Anyway I’m no botanist, and maybe the existence of such a constant is well understood or maybe it’s a load of hogwash – if any botanists in the know wander through here, feel free to chime in.

In the end, I guess I just found it really interesting that so many artists find inspiration in other art, and that I recognize that in the past I did as well. Maybe it’s something unique to game design. Maybe it is harder for us to be inspired by other works of art because no other form of art is so heavily tied to systems and so dependant upon the notion of using systems expressively. There aren’t really any other works of art out there that do that for us to draw inspiration from. I guess I would argue that architecture might come closest, and that walking through a well architected structure is in fact participation in a system. Maybe I’ll have to head to Bilbao and take a walk through Gehry’s Guggenheim and see if it inspires me.

Comments

[Patrick]

If you're trying to create systems that deal specifically with characters' social dynamics and the situations those dynamics are nested in, I've found that post-modern literature is more useful to draw from then film, since the narrative is typically much more abstracted. Film scripts have to optimize bandwith, they have to be tight and rigidly structured, post-modern literature is typically loosely structured and is a better model.

Of course, interactivity is SO different that the best inspiration comes from studying games in light of narrative theory, and narratives in light of game theory, and then you still need a blinding intuitive flash from the stars to get that push over the top.