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Full and Bright

Two smart posts over at Steve Gaynor's blog, Fullbright.

The first is his thoughts on 'storymaking'. I think it's a pretty good overview of the different levels at which the player is making his own story. I have a long comment (not approved as of this posting) that breaks down some of my own thoughts on it. If I have time, I'll write that comment up as a post here in much more detail to try and get at the heart of what I'm saying. In any case, if you're interested in the modes of player-authored story, get over there.

The second is a solid overview of FPS encounter design - in particular as relates to FEAR and FEAR 2. I have not played either of those games, but he generalizes his thoughts on FPS encounter design and offers some clearly stated rules of thumb that I think any FPS level designer should be familiar with. I don't mean to be condescending when I say that the post title is approporiate - it is the 'basics' of FPS encounter design and I don't think experienced designers will learn much, but it's short and clear and concise - so a useful reference even for the old pros, because so many people have now written books hundreds of pages long that can barely get to the points Steve makes in 4 paragraphs.

On Authorship in Games

Not that long ago, famed film critic Roger Ebert stated that games are not, and indeed, cannot be, art.

Recently, following up on a response made by author/game convergence guy Clive Barker at the Hollywood And Games Summit, Ebert clarified his claims.

Ebert's basic argument is that art requires authorship, and that games abdicate authorship to the player, and therefore cannot be art. This is certainly a compelling and useful argument, as it strikes at the nature of our medium, not at the content we so frequently produce. Ebert is clever not to bother arguing whether or not another boring old rehash of the game where you use 24 different weapons to kill 6 different types of aliens in 18 unique levels and save mankind from annihilation is art or is not. He is going for the kill, and good for him.

As a student of the ‘school’ of design that often loudly and passionately advocates abdication of as much authorship as possible to the player, I guess I need to step up and help Ebert understand what he’s trying to say and what it means.

Ebert claims that because games – or indeed, any interactive medium, abdicate authorship to some degree to the player, that this at least diminishes, and potentially destroys the capacity of an interactive work (or at least a game) to be art. He also tugs gently at the idea that it is potentially in the interaction with the work that the artistry lies, and thus any artfulness in a game or other interactive work is not innate but rather, if it exists at all, is imbued by the audience.

Ebert is wrong for two important reasons.

First, there is authorship in games, no matter how much we abdicate. The form of the authorship is different, and hard to understand, but no matter how much we try to abdicate it, it will always remain. It is undeniably there, and it is inextricable from the act of creating a game.

Second, interacting with a work does not shape the work, it ‘only’ reveals it. Therefore, while there can be an art of expression in the way someone reveals the art, this does not necessarily diminish the art in the design of the work itself.

As both Ebert and Barker acknowledge, we could debate endlessly what is and is not art, or what is and is not a valid definition of art. For the sake of argument, I will accept Ebert’s roughly stated thesis that art requires authorship. In fact, I actually agree with him. I think he just does not understand where authorship lies in games.

Here is how it works:

• I am able to express my ideas, thoughts and feelings through the design of interactive systems
• Because a game is a complete formal system, the entire possible range of outputs from those systems is determined by me
• People interact with those designed systems and receive the outputs I have determined
• People literate in the medium can reconstruct my ideas, thoughts and feelings by experiencing these outputs
• Therefore, by definition, there is an unbreakable chain between my ideas, thoughts and feelings and the player's experience – I author mechanics that yield deterministic outputs in the game dynamics that lead the player to experience the aesthetic I want them to experience (within a given tolerance)

Now – by way of clarifying this explanation as well as pre-empting some of the counter arguments, I’ll try to lay out the best and most valid ones.

The Epistemological Argument
First there is the epistemological argument – which counters by saying ‘how do you know you are able to express your thoughts and feelings in the design of interactive systems’. Believe it or not, this is the best argument, because the best rebuttal is simply to say ‘I just know it.’ You could ask ‘how do you know the sentence you are speaking is not nonsense?’. I know because I understand it. What I am expressing makes sense to me both intellectually and emotionally. If others do not understand it, it is not really a question of whether I am expressing myself, but rather one of whether I am expressing myself clearly.

Beyond the subjective epistemological edge of this argument there is a requirement that the audience be literate. Hieroglyphics can’t express anything to me, but clearly the people who wrote in them had the capacity to express themselves, and they knew it. In the end, while this is a compelling argument, it degenerates quickly to a purely epistemological one, and arguing on that front is not going to enhance anybody’s understanding of the issue of authorship in games. I’d like to think even Ebert is not interested in pursuing this argument any further.

The Argument to the Incompleteness of Authorship
The next argument is whether or not it is, in fact, true that the entire possible range of outputs from a games’ systems are really determined by me. Well, honestly, no – they are not. Games are extraordinarily complex, and there are many outputs which are not literally determined precisely by me.

If we were to conduct a sort of inverse Turing Test and put me in a room and have me attempt to return the exact same outputs (ignoring ridiculous factors such as speed and precision of calculation) to a player playing Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory as he or she would receive from an Xbox… well, I would fail to pass myself off as an Xbox running SC:CT. I did not write every line of code in the game, nor do I have a complete comprehension of that code. Therefore, the argument could be made that my authorship of the game is only approximate, or incomplete.

The rebuttal to this argument lies in a comparison to film or to music or to any other collaborative artistic creation. Is every single note of a symphony perfectly determined by the composer? Is every single photon of light that enters the retina of every single viewer of a film determined by a director. No. There is noise in these systems too – some of it comes from the collaboration of others, and some of it comes from random noise. We do not deny Ode to Joy its status as art because it is playfully manipulated by a conductor, nor because the 3rd clarinet breaks a reed. It is the same with games. The outputs are broadly determined by me and heavily formalized by a large crew of people working with me to deliver on a promised aesthetic. Sometimes we make mistakes, and there are bugs. Even mediocre art can tolerate this approximate or incomplete authorship, so I am forced to assert that games can too.

The Arguments from Noise and Nonsense
The next argument would be that audiences cannot reconstruct the meaning I intend them to by way of interacting with systems. At very least there is a legitimate challenge here in saying "maybe they could reconstruct it, but they can also construct so many random meanings or contrary meanings, or generally just bring so much noise into the experience as to dilute the meaning to the point where it is not legible."

This is an interesting point, but again, this is not unlike other works of art. People can watch Citizen Kane and fast-forward the ‘boring parts’. They can watch it in ten sittings or fall asleep during parts of it and forget what it’s about. This does not strip the film of its status. So, yes, I would concede that because (some) games offer the player so many ways to play, players might well ‘miss’ the meaning, but I don’t think the likeliness of missing the meaning should determine the artfulness of the work. There are some paintings hanging in far away back rooms of the Louvre that would likely take four hours of walking full speed non-stop to get to – this does not diminish their artfulness. If the audience does not participate with the work they may never perceive the art, but that does not mean it is not there.

And what about those nonsensical interactions? The argument here is similar to the one above, and suggests that people can interact with games in all kinds of silly ways that don’t support or develop the meaning the creator intends them to experience. That’s true. I can play GTA 3 purely as a racing game, without ever doing any of the non-racing missions. How does that support the game’s central meaning (which I take to be about freedom and consequence)? Well, the answer is, it doesn’t. But hold on… I can also use War and Peace to prop up the broken leg of my couch, or view Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans in a pitch black room and then say I don’t get the message. The point is that the audience must always interact with a work on some level (in games, this is very literalized), but their ability to interact with a work in nonsensical ways does not diminish or destroy the art.

You could say that in the Tolstoy example, the book is not being read, and in the Warhol example, the painting is not being viewed – but in my GTA example, the game is being played… and that’s the difference. I would actually simply say that is inaccurate. When you’re only playing one tiny part of GTA, you’re not really playing it at all, any more than you are reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula if you are only reading the sexy bits.

The Argument from Legitimacy
Another argument against the existence of real authorship in games is the argument about the legitimacy of the kind of authorship I am talking about. In his responses to Barker, Ebert says:

“If you can go through "every emotional journey available," doesn't that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices.”

In other words, he is questioning the nature of an authorship focused on providing a single perspective, versus an authorship that affords the player a range of perspectives.

I agree with Ebert that there is a difference in these two kinds of authorship. Romeo and Juliet is one love story. The play gives us a specific and authored understanding of what Shakespeare wants us to think about love in this specific case, between these two specific characters, in this specific set of circumstances. But Ebert is wrong to suggest that games – in affording a different kind of authorship somehow do not lead to inevitable conclusions, or that they offer a simple ‘smorgasbord’ wherein ‘every emotional journey’ is somehow possible.

In a sense, the kind of authorship in a movie or a play requires an inductive approach to understanding the meaning. If I start with the specific love of two star-cross’d teenagers in Renaissance Verona whose families despise one another, and then try to generalize what love means, I am likely to end up with a lot of useless conclusions. It’s an inductive and error-prone process to move from the specific to the general. With all of the inductive errors possible, what can I truly understand about love in general from Romeo and Juliet alone? I could reasonably induce that real love can only exist in the convoluted set of circumstances of the play where one lover drinks a sleeping potion, and the other - distraught at seeing their love 'dead' - suicides with poison, so that the first can then prove their love equal and true by also drinking poison on awakening.

Certainly that would be an absurd notion of love, and that problem with induction is fundamentally why we continue to write love stories at a breathtaking rate… because when you are providing singular examples of love, and trying to facilitate the audience feeling love, you will always have room for more examples. You can write unique and powerful love stories forever and never exhaust the infinite scope of the material ‘love’. Examples piled on examples forever will never pile up to infinity. Regardless – and for good reasons – this ‘inductive’ form of artistic expression is the kind of authorship that we see in most media (and it is wonderous).

In games, it is different. The artist does not only create the specific case of the convicted criminal suddenly set free when his prison transfer bus is ambushed… it does not only tell the story of one criminal learning about the importance of liberty and the consequences of unchecked freedom. The artist is also capable of creating an entire expressive system space that explores a potential infinity of different notions of freedom and liberty. Where most other media require the audience to induce their meaning, games afford the audience at least the possibility of deducing their meaning.

In other media, ‘supporting material’ that is coherent with the central themes of the work is pushed to the side in a B-plot… in games, this supporting material affords the artist ways to illuminate the meaning from many, many possible directions, allowing the player to explore the meaning the artist is trying to provide. Potentially, because the game designer is able to express himself in systems rather than in examples, infinities can be examined.

Now, I guess this is kind of hard to wrap your head around, but surely this is a concept Ebert can understand. Many filmmakers, from Taratino to Inarritu to Haggis and dozens more have been increasingly attempting to explore stories from multiple angles in an attempt to mimic – in a medium severely limited for this purpose – what games can do innately. If Haggis’ Best Picture winning Crash was 100 hours long, and contained 100 different interconnected plots all echoing the same themes of racial tension from different perspectives, would it suddenly lose its status as art? It probably wouldn’t be a very good movie, because 100 hours of movie is painful. In any case, no matter how long you make Crash, you will never fully explore the domain of the themes of racial tension in modern America. 100 hours is just 50x what the movie already offers, and is no closer to the infinite depth of the theme than is the existing 2 hour film.

GTA: San Andreas on the other hand – which I played for a good 100 hours or so, gave me such a world transforming view of racial tension and inequity in early 1990’s California, that I have been shaken to the core, and have been forced to re-examine a huge part of my world view.

In a response to a reader letter dated November 27, 2005 Ebert said:

"To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers."

Well, here you go. Let me state it clearly and for the record:

Taken as wholes, GTA: San Andreas is a more compelling, meaningful and important work of art than Crash.

Admittedly, not everyone will agree, and admittedly, I have a high level of literacy in reading systems. The point here is not to enter a subjective debate about what is a superior work of art, rather the point is to say that – yes – if a game is offering a smorgasbord of unrelated mechanics that are neither supporting each other nor driving toward a coherent theme, if they are not providing the player with a broad range of perspectives on a specific meaning that the creator is trying to express, then Ebert is right.

But if a game creator does have something specific he is trying to communicate, and he designs his game well, and the mechanics and dynamics are coherently supporting that aesthetic, and providing the player – more or less whatever he does (assuming it is not wilfully nonsensical) – with insight into that meaning, then yeah… it’s art.

The Argument to Migrated Authorship
The final argument that I see remaining is the one that asks ‘who is the artist here anyway?’ Ebert says:

“I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist.”

This is a much easier point to tackle simply because there is a fallacy in Ebert’s argument. He is implying that interacting with a work is the same as changing it. But this is not true. My ‘paint’ is not ‘what the player does’. My paint is ‘the rules that govern what the player can do’. The way the player expresses himself is a form of artistic expression (or a least it can be), but it is impossible for him to change the rules or even to express himself outside the domain of the rules that I have created. And it is not simply a case of saying ‘people who make paint are necessarily artists, while painters can be artists’. I do more than ‘make paint’. If all I did was 'make paint', I would concede the point in Ebert's response to his reader where he states games cannot move "beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art."

If I created ‘magic paints’ that could only be used to paint flowers that appeared highly vaginal, would I be less an artist than Georgia O’Keefe? While some painters using my paints could make crappy paintings of vaginal flowers that were not artful, and others could create beautiful masterpieces – I think it would remain clear that I was an artist for having created ‘paints that constrained the set of possible paintings achievable to those that dealt with a set of themes I had chosen’. There is a statement there - a statement about flowers and vaginas (and paint) and it is as important as any statement in any of O'Keefe's works. It may even be as important as all of the statements made in all of O'Keefe's works combined... but we don't need to get ahead of ourselves here.

The best analogy here, again, is that of a symphony. There is an art in the composing of the symphony itself – the creation of the song and the recording of the instructions for reproducing that song using a symphony orchestra. Yet, because of the comparative fuzziness of the transcription, there is often a high degree of malleability in interpretation of those instructions, and the ability to interpret those instructions well and to facilitate an orchestra to actually play the symphony is an artistic task. There are ways to do it non-artistically. Technically, a metronome and sheet music could do the job of conducting an orchestra, but we make a lot of room for conductors because in their art, they can add a tremendous amount of beauty to what is already a beautiful work.

Ebert’s fallacy extends to suggest that Ode to Joy is not a work of art once a composer conducts it, and that the conductor's art is not art for long anyway, because as soon as a musician plays it, he or she becomes the artist. The reality is, they can all be artists, and when an artfully composed work is conducted by an artful conductor, and played by artful musicians, the full perspective of the work is truly appreciable.

It is the same with a game and a player. Technically, a game could be played by a computer – many games are played by computers. While the beauty of the particular play experience might be diminished or even destroyed by doing it that way, it does not diminish or destroy the artfulness inherent to the game itself.

Such is the relationship between the designer and the player as I see it. The designer is the composer, the player is the conductor. The orchestra is the hardware and the sheet music is the software.

Conclusion
I think that about sums up my rebuttal to Mr. Ebert. When he made his first statements months ago, I was mostly just upset and insulted, but with his latest clarification of those original statements, he has not only looked more carefully at the real and relevant question, but he has opened the door to have the real nature of authorship in games described. I hope – should he happen past here and read this – he’ll finally understand the scope of the issue and admit that he’s wrong.

Hey UNESCO - What About Us?

I know that it is incredibly old school to read a newspaper while waiting for a BLT in a pub at lunchtime while out shopping, but I was in an old school kinda mood today. Flipping through the weekend 'Life' section of the Gazette, I discovered that the City was hosting 'Design Montreal's Open House', an open-doors day for some 40 Montreal design firms including those representing Landscaping and City Planning, Industrial Design, Graphic Design, Architecture, Interior Design and Fashion Design.

Apparently, on May 12th of last year, UNESCO named Montreal a 'City of Design' an honor held by only two other cities in the world - Berlin and Buenos Aires.

So needless to say, while it is very cool that the City is sponsoring this event to bring public interest and attention toward all the different forms of design, and while I'm super excited to see if I can take advantage of this and get out and see some things, I can't help but wonder two things.

First, why in the world would UNESCO not include Game Design - or at least more broadly - Interactive Design, in this list of design disciplines being recognized? When I was in Paris last year, I got to see - and interact with - a wonderful interactive installation that is in front of the UNESCO HQ and L'Ecole Militaire in Paris. They know what Interactive Design IS if they are commissioning an interactive installation of this magnitude. Surely given the strength and importance of Montreal's game design community, we deserve to be included with our fellow professional designers in this. Also, I find it surprising that someone in the field of Landscape Design, Urban Planning or Architecture would not have spoken up about the absence of Game Design given the fact that a little video game is probably single-handedly more responsible for bringing a generalized appreciation of the importance of those fields to the public at large than is any other single source.

Second, as a professional, award winning designer whose work has been experienced by millions of people, and who works for a firm employing a handful of designers who are arguably among the best  game designers on earth - a firm which has likewise won several, if not dozens of important, internationally recognized awards for design... why in the world would I have never even heard of this? Clearly part of the City's goal in hosting this 'Open House' is to increase public awareness of Montreal's importance as a cultural hub for design... but shit... it might help if the designers themselves knew about it.

The article says that the City and the Province want to establish the Open House as a yearly event. Good. So now I have another side mission, which is to get Game and Interactive Design added to the UNESCO recognition and see at least one Montreal game company in included in the Open House for next year.

With all the continual talk about media convergence in face of the sad reality that all games can ever be in relation to film is some kind of bastard step-child, shouldn't we be going out of our way to celebrate the things that make us distinct and different? Especially in Canada? Doubly so in Montreal? Game Design is - not surprisingly I hope - a design field. We should start acting like it and make sure that we are considered and recognized as such by a world of designers who are our colleagues.

Portrait of an Architect as and Old Man: Part Three

Another thing that struck me about Pollack’s The Sketches of Frank Gehry (which is now available on DVD for those interested), was a scene where Gehry recalls, years previously, having asked Pollack how he managed to deal with working in a creative field with such strong commercial constraints. Pollack’s answer (in the perspective of his film career) had been simply that you need to ‘carve out’ the little wedge of the project where you’re ‘allowed’ to be creative despite the demands of all the stakeholders trying to mitigate their risks. Gehry said that this was a piece of advice he had carried with him his entire career.

This is a good bit of rather obvious advice I suppose, and there are clear parallels to the way designers in the game industry need to find those small elements of their work in which we can truly innovate and be expressive. What was interesting to me wasn’t so much what was said, but what it got me thinking about beyond the admittedly banal initial statement.

What I started to realize is the incredible advantage we have as game designers over creators in other media (such as film or architecture). What is that advantage? The advantage is simply that we are not the only ones who haven’t really figured out very well how this new media and the industry that supports it functions.

Film has pretty much been figured out – not only from a creative perspective, but also from a business perspective. The Ishtar’s, Hudson Hawk’s and Waterworld’s of film are surprisingly rare, and this is a pretty good indicator that the business guys in Hollywood can turn X million dollars into 2X million dollars pretty consistently – maybe not on a film-by-film basis, but at least on a year-over-year basis.

Granted, architecture certainly has very different commercial constraints to deal with than either film or games, they’ve also had thousands and thousands of years to figure out how to manage the process of constructing buildings that are both financially viable to build and meaningful to the society that utilizes them.

In games it’s different.

I often lament the fact that we haven’t ‘figured out’ game design, and in large parts that’s true. But at the same time, the financial stakeholders in this industry have also not yet figured out how the business model ought to work to consistently generate profit across a small handful of titles. Within certain niches certain publishers have it mostly nailed (like EA and sports titles for example) but there are still a huge number of shots being fired in the dark, a huge number of great games completely failing to turn a profit, and a huge number of projects simply being cancelled after millions of dollars of investment.

If an architect were to try to convince his stakeholders that he was going to build a castle that floats on a cloud, the project would not get green-lighted. But I’m not so sure that’s true in games. Impossible projects seem to get the go-ahead with surprising frequency (only to crash and burn eventually), and what seem like sure-fire winners, often don’t do the numbers they’re expected to.

This probably arises from the combination of a few different factors:

• A need to innovate – simply because innovation has been a core value proposition offered by games for 30 years now.
• A lack of formalized design – even though I lament it, without formalized processes, ‘good’ game design is hard to do reproducibly, therefore, from the standpoint of a company evaluating a concept proposal, it is very hard to predict whether the game can be ‘safely’ designed.
• A rapidly changing market – referring only to the ever increasing age and the ever decreasing ‘status’ of the ‘typical’ gamer (when I was a kid, consoles were something the rich kids on the block had, now games are significantly less expensive and the age of gamers is increasing).

These three factors – and probably many others – are all contributors to the high risk factor in the game industry, and in some ways make the task of figuring out how to consistently turn a profit a much harder problem for the financial stakeholders in the industry.

What’s interesting though, is that if they can’t figure out how to do it as consistently as they do it in architecture or film, then it’s much harder for them to constrain the creators in the industry. Pollack and Gehry talk about having to carve out some tiny little wedge in which to be creative given the financial weight of a film or architecture project. Their stakeholders likely know exactly how much creative freedom can be afforded the Frank Gehry’s and Sydney Pollack’s of the world… but do the stakeholders in our industry know the same? Certainly they’re not blind, and the successful ones are successful for a reason. But it seems reasonable to me to imagine that they are only as good at figuring out how much room to leave for designers (and developers in general) to be expressive as we are at figuring out how to do what we do.

In other words, in face of all the unknowns in this industry, maybe we developers have a lot more say about how creative we can be than we maybe think we do.

If you in fact do have more freedom than you think… how would you know?

And what would you do with it?

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.

Portrait of an Architect as and Old Man: Part One

For those who know Montreal, you probably know the Cinema du Parc. It was one of Montreal’s most important repertory cinemas, and it screened everything from obscure documentaries to classic films to modern award winners. Admission was cheap, popcorn wasn’t served in torso-sized sacks and you could actually get an 8-ounce soft drink.

The Cinema du Parc is now closed - or at very least in some kind of limbo. From now on every time I go see a movie I will have to risk having my teeth shattered by infrasonic vibration blasting at me from 7.1 different directions at 110 decibels. Hurray.

Anyway, I managed to get down there on closing night to catch one final flick before they shut the doors. I saw The Sketches of Frank Gehry, a documentary about the life and work of the architect made by director Sydney Pollack. I thought it was a pretty solid film in its own right, though far from the best doc I’ve ever seen. It did, however, offer a starting number of tantalizing little ideas that got me thinking about different things.

In particular, the things it got me thinking about are these:

• How artists are often inspired by other art, and how they often see their art all around them.
• How artists working in a highly commercial field deal with that reality.
• How artists are often driven to make a lasting mark and to be remembered.
• How what we end up doing in life often seems so coincidental and in some cases, lucky.
• How computers have impacted the work of such a diverse range of artists (and how they have enabled some forms of art to exist at all)
• The difference between media-based art and artifact-based art and how the singular nature of a work of architecture often (tragically) separates the creator from his work.

Because my last post about GRAW seemed to have hit the limits of what TypePad can handle before it starts stripping out carriage returns and turning my posts into something unreadable, I’m going to put together individual posts to get down my thoughts on each of these things. Of course, that will mean everyone is going to see them all in reverse order, but so be it.