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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.

always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns

Rented Walk the Line last night, and thought it was pretty good though not great. The bad part comes from the fact that it's a biopic and it struggles with the inherent problems of that format. Plot and rising action don't tend to neatly map to any life, and in biopics, these things tend to be either obviously forced or mostly absent. I think - given the choice - I would prefer 'mostly absent' which is what this film offers. They let the actors carry it and focus on the inner drama.

Joaquin Phoenix is very good, and it just blows my mind that he sang all those songs that well. I'm a big Johnny Cash fan, and he left some big black shoes to fill. It wasn't one of those cases where I could no longer picture Cash himself in my head afterward as the actor had so assumed the role that he overwrote the space in my brain devoted the original. But then I don't really miss the real Morrison... I would pluck out my own eyes if I lost my data on Johnny. The strength of his performance for me lies in the fact that I think he's often wrong, fallible, weak and human. His pathetic attempts to please his father are tragic and moving when a lesser actor would have gone for more indignation and self-righteousness - which would be sucky and lame because that's the father's domain.

Reese Witherspoon also did an awesome (and Oscar worthy) job - though I really think there was only one scene from her that floored me - the wonderful, sad, and funny scene in the bus before the final show in Ontario. Not that she wasn't great in the rest of her scenes - just that 'the rest' were few and her drama was not the drama that moved the film - in a sense she plays the antagonist, as she is the one who sets the bar that Johnny has to rise to. Such is the dilemma of women actors in Hollywood I guess - where for every 20 films about a man's journey you get one about a woman. Sucks. Looking at the list of Best Actresses over the years, the Academy does seem to tend to give the award to a woman in a leading role in a film about a woman - so this time I guess it's twice the achievement for Miss Witherspoon to win it in a film about a man.

Also strong in the film was Robert Patrick in a small supporting role as Johnny's pop. The depth of the compelling father-son conflict would crumble if he wasn't holding up his end of the bargain. He does the 'self-righteous disapproving father' bit so well my knuckles were white. I'd rather go up against his blob of homocidal nanites than have to deal with pleasing him as a father.