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The Digital Eye: Mistaking Technology for Art

In this months Digital Eye, guest columnist Jay Dee Alley the art director at Blue Fang Games plays the game of discerning art from mere technology.

Image courtesy of Deron Yamada. © 2004 DYA367.

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There are a couple of things that you should know about me. The first is that I have neckties that are older than most of you reading this. I started making my living as an artist back when the Earth was cooling and using felt tipped markers constituted a health hazard. The other thing you should know is that I think we are about to get it wrong. We have been seduced by our own success and, much to my dismay, we are perilously close to beginning to mistake technology for art.

As game developers advance to the next generation of gaming platforms, many of the gaming issues that have challenged our ability to create visually interesting and compelling game experiences have been mitigated if not eliminated. Advances in hardware technology and the development of robust toolsets have certainly provided the opportunity for artists to expand our craft in dramatic ways across a broad spectrum of content. Regrettably, I believe we have failed to keep pace with the development of technology. We have not delivered the creative vision to leverage those new toolsets to create compelling new forms of visual experience for our customers.

Why is That?

Unfortunately, the game development community finds itself confronted with an ever more competitive market place that provides little, if any, room for real innovation or risk taking. Projects are often driven by the publishers need to build a portfolio that will, they hope, provide the best return on their investment. It is an understandable position when their investment is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, certainly a rarified environment by anybodys standards.

That absence of creative risk-taking has led to an industry wide reliance on iterative product, usually driven by a brand or intellectual property, in the hopes that the built-in audience appeal will allow the interactive content to draft on the original contents success. In short, we create lots of the stuff that has made lots of money, not a bad business strategy but certainly not one that invites innovation. How many games about men in tights with swords and shields or alien-killing space Marines can you create before you come to the conclusion that the one arena you can innovate in is the technology? And that, my friends, is where we begin to go wrong.

Jay Dee Alley.

Let me explain. I believe that it is safe to assume that most of you have been to an animated film festival where the filmmaker made a willful choice to reveal the artifice of the art form just to make a point about great storytelling and the craft of animation. Perhaps they used hand-registered 5x8 blue-lined index cards and a ballpoint pen to create their film. At 24 frames a second the screen is filled with dancing blue horizontal lines that leave no doubt in your mind about how the work was accomplished and yet the moment the artistry of the craft seduces you and allows you to take that leap of poetic faith with the film maker they disappear. In that one transcendent moment you have been swept up in the artists vision and surrendered to the experience, no longer an observer, but a participant in the exchange of ideas. It is a breathtaking act of bravado that never fails to impress when done successfully. The magic is not in the technology, but in the uniquely creative expression of an idea.

Back to Basics

Given the understandable lack of innovation in our business, we have more and more come to rely on individuals who are technologically talented. They have made a significant time investment in developing the appropriate skill sets to utilize very complicated toolsets and, more importantly, their compensation is directly tied to their technical skill and experience. The result is a new generation of artists who are proficient with game development toolsets, but may have few of the traditional skills associated with artists working in other media such as dance, sculpture, painting, literature, poetry, music, film, television or theater.

If we are to continue to develop in a meaningful way that will allow us to explore the limits of our medium, we need to go back to the basics. We need to take a look at the skill sets and education of our art directors and visual designers as well as our production artists. Developers should be encouraging artists to take a step back, to build a richer art background steeped in traditional values and techniques in order to develop the talent and expertise needed to bring a full range of artistry to the development process. It is one thing to call yourself an artist, it is quite another to possess the skills, vision and understanding of traditional techniques and art history to truly become one. We clearly have much work to do.

Into the Future

Lest you think me a surly curmudgeon clearly capable of an old mans conceit when he senses the world passing him by, let me offer up a real vision of what may be if we apply ourselves to the notion that it is our responsibility to nurture and develop this amazing medium we labor in together.

Kevin Salatino, curator, prints and drawings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is serving as the lead ITO Juror at E3 this year. His remarks in his recent article, The Fine Art Perspective are worth sharing. There is simply too much talent in the video game world to dismiss so cavalierly the seriousness of the work its many gifted artist produce In fact, the constant cross-pollination between the entertainment world and the art world cannot be ignored I predict that, as more and more artistic talent is absorbed into the game world, the cross flow from discipline to discipline, from fine to applied art and vice versa, will become ever more invasive and imperceptible, and that a hybrid art form will evolve stranger than any hybrid race populating todays videogames. Call it life influencing art, or games influencing art, or games influencing life, or art influencing games. Or better yet, why not just call it art?

Why not indeed? It is a lofty and admirable goal for all of us who call ourselves artists to aspire to.

Jay Dee Alley brings 20 years of experience in creative art and media content development. He is the art director for Blue Fang Games, located in Boston, Massachusetts. He joined Blue Fang Games from Microsoft® Games Studio in July 2005 after serving as the creative director for the Xbox® Entertainment Network.

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