Puerto Rico and The Fountainhead

My wife and I got back from Puerto Rico a few days ago. It was a fun trip, very relaxing, and much needed. Basically the only thing I did while in the Caribbean was sit by the pool and read (with some eating, drinking, and snorkeling thrown in).

In my pre-trip search for a book to read, I stumbled on an old copy of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand that I got from my father several years ago. It's hard to say what drew me to it, not knowing much about Rand or her books, except that I had never read it, and everybody says it's a classic. I'll forego a full review, but I will say that it started out really well, with interesting, complex, and often surprising characters. Unfortunately the story quickly took a back seat to a lot of preaching about the eternal struggle between society and the individual.

Any Ayn Rand critics who happen to be reading this, don't worry. I haven't turned into a raging Objectivist. Nevertheless, Rand's perspective (it's not hard to make a connection between the author's ideas and those of Howard Roark, the protagonist) did strike a chord with me. The notion of the self as humankind's quintessential trait and most valuable asset is hard to refute -- self-awareness being what separates us from the the animals, etc. But more than that, her portrayal of mass media and its influence on unthinking hordes of people was eerily reminiscent of today's reality TV culture.

The Banner (a newspaper in the book) used sex, violence, and gossip the same way CSI uses the shiny object effect ("it's...so...pretty") to draw millions of viewers, and ridiculous editorials in the book's fictional newspaper affected public opinion like today's 24-hour news stations, both of which spew nonsense because they know people just want to be told what to think. There's even a character who bears a healthy resemblance to Jerry Bruckheimer or Rupert Murdoch -- a media mogul who made his fortune by appealing to the lowest common denominator.

So what does any of this have to do with game development? Directly, nothing. But it's easy to make the same arguments about the money-grubbing and lack of originality in the video game industry as Rand made about architecture in The Fountainhead. Ultimately, I wonder if there's anything truly original to be gained from big studios whose collective goal is to rehash past success as quickly as possible. Rand places all her hope in lone, single-minded, and frequently outcast geniuses (Copernicus, Galileo, DaVinci) to move the human race toward a greater future.

Will some indie game developer take the industry in a whole new direction? With the ballooning budgets and shrinking quality of most games today (and art in general), it seems the indie scene is the only place left to look.

Game grammar and the structure of creativity

After a short delay since my last post, I thought I would launch into something super heavy: the structure of creativity. Now, before you flick your cursor toward the back button, let me give a little context.

The context
A couple attempts have emerged recently to define a grammar for games, a structured way of describing or diagramming game design that can help us understand what makes successful games work and (we hope) improve the overall quality of our gaming experiences.

• One is from Daniel Cook, who wrote an article in July on the Chemistry of Game Design. Cook's system focuses on "skill chains" as a way to understand the structure and distinct elements of a game.
• The second grammar model is from Raph Koster, who is helming the Metaplace project. Koster's version of game grammar, touched on in roundabout fashion in this Gamasutra interview, attempts to be more detailed than Cook's as a way to describe the elements of gameplay. I'm guessing Koster's game grammar ideas are a huge part of his design for easy-to-create games in Metaplace.
  

Yeah, games have structure. So what?
These two articles point toward an idea I've been noodling for a while: maybe grammar should be considered in a broader way.

Game design is, to me, a unique art form. (To be safe, let's go with a little "a" in "art" for the moment, as in anything artificial or man-made.) Its uniqueness doesn't come from any single trait; rather, games represent the combination of more creative enterprises than any other form of entertainment. Drawing, painting, animation, music, writing, story telling, interaction design, even programming, all converge in modern games.

Each element of game design, and game design itself, has its own structure. Text is divided into paragraphs and sentences. Music contains movements, verses, chord progressions, and phrases. Visual art deals with texture, colors and composition.

So, regardless of the output, all creative processes will have certain things in common:

• A set of tools for creative expression (paint brushes, instruments, paper, software)
• An appeal to the senses (any art form is ultimately about stimulating some combination of the human senses)
  
• A top-down hierarchy of meaningful units (for a novel it might go like this: book > chapter > paragraph > sentence > word > syllable)
• A bottom-up set of rules for combining smaller units into larger ones
  

Obviously each one of these elements could be explored in great detail, but together they form a sort of grammatical structure for creativity (a superstructure even?) that could be applied to any number of disciplines. For any "multi-disciplinary" creative endeavor, success depends on reconciling the grammars of multiple art forms into one coherent whole.

Grammar, creativity, and games
Is all this blathering too general to be useful? Possibly. Big-budget games and movies are usually created by decentralized teams of hyper-specialized artisans. But Art with a capital "A" these days rarely comes from the corporate machine. For games to grow as Fine Art, small groups of people speaking dramatically different creative languages will have to focus their attention on creating a product that embraces this broad structure of creativity to deliver something meaningful.

The stuff of innovation

Independent Gaming posted a link yesterday to a panel discussion about innovation in games. The panel took place during the Independent Games Summit at this year's Game Developer's Conference (GDC), which happened back in March.

There was a distinct counter-cultural feel to the discussion, even to the point that all the panelists expressed a distaste for the pursuit of innovation (which of course happened to be the subject of the panel). Ok, that last sentence wasn't entirely fair -- I think the panelists' complaint was against innovation as an end in itself. Innovation for innovation's sake leads to gimmickry, so the feeling went, and gimmicks never lead to compelling or enduring art.

Yes, the "A" word. It didn't surprise me that artistic expression was a major subject of discussion. Two of the panelists in particular felt that games should be viewed through the same hyper-individualistic lens as writing, (indy) film making, painting or any other form of individual/small group expression. To these people, games are about the game designer, not the player.

This position ignores the vital question of entertainment. Any public expression (artistic or otherwise) is meaningless without an audience. Readers, viewers, and players contribute to the meaning of an expression by the act of participating and interpreting. Without participation, expression is moot. Participation in games by definition requires the potential for entertainment. For me the appeal of video games as art lies in the fact that the audience can now play an active role. Artists no longer need to dish out meaning and/or entertainment; they can facilitate it.

Unfortunately, high art in games is still just an academic dream. Even recent attempts at forcing players to make difficult moral decisions (see Bioshock) seem superficial at best. Maybe the issue is some incompatibility between gameplay and story. Maybe it's just the youth of video games as a medium. Either way, when you really get down to it, the exploration of these ideas is the reason I'm creating a game. It's not so much a way to express myself as a way to communicate with someone else about something both fun and meaningful.