Through the art of the game seminar I have had to wrestle with the distinction between “art” and “game”. Huizinga says that “beauty does not attach to play as such, play nevertheless tends to assume marked elements of beauty,”(7). Through the different styles and aesthetics of classmates, the distinction between aesthetic art and game play was heavily marked. However, by this distinction the standards for an “beautiful” game and a “fun” game also arose as more nuanced then I had previously expected. Video games must blend both visual aesthetic and the value of play to create an experience that is captivating.
In the early section of the seminar, I found myself frustrated with my artistic skill. I enjoyed hand-sketched figures but found mine to look rather unconventional and poor. My art is of the stick figure caliber with the heavy-handed stroke of an elementary school student. Trapped in the seminar room with highly-skilled artists made me feel handicapped as a game designer. While Huzinga asserts that “we cannot say that beauty is inherent in play” it became hard to find the art form that could best convey my story. The class had a wide range of art with skilled artists such as Julia hand-drawing beautiful sketches and game-play focused students like Kevin creating what appeared to be pain-staking pixel-art. Unsatisfied with what I felt was a constrained method of pixel-art, and unable to draw at a high level, I found myself balancing hand sketched art within my game and collage-type art in my other designs. It was not until I learned the value of “consistent aesthetic” that I discovered why this was such an erroneous mistake and limitation on my art.
In crafting my author page, I used a collage of real space images, with the simple purpose of creating a visually appealing page. With my character page, I instead moved to hand-drawn sketches because I wanted the character to fully embody my imagination. When told that my pages were “inconsistent” I found myself with little ground to stand on. How could I make my art consistent without having to decide between a visually pleasant page and an imaginative page? The redesign of my character page provided one option. I blended hand drawn images on top of a real image and created a movement (from the top of the page to the bottom of the page) from real images to hand-drawn. This was successful but still unsatisfactory. Was I expected to create a similar time-consuming blend for all of my pages? Watching the other artists stick with their respective forms began to give me an appreciation for consistency. When Matan juxtaposed his hand-drawn character into a real-world environment, the effect was jarring. While the character on his own is compelling, putting him in a background with a different medium made the image as a whole lacking. This then was the key to game visuals. When artists that used pixel, art stuck consistently to pixel art, the character became as compelling as they were in well-drawn games. Huizinga asserts that, “The words we use to denote the elements of play belong for the most part to aesthetics…poise, balance, contrast,”(10). Our interaction with games are grounded in sensory-perception of art. If a sound or image is jarring, our play is affected. Therefore, the skill of the art is not as important as the consistency.
Towards my later works, I decided to abandon real images entirely. Instead, I used real images as references, and at times stencils, for hand-drawn art. Even if my hand-drawn art was poor, it created an aesthetic that, if consistent, became compelling. While the characters of Bo and Doc look like the drawings of a child, if the background and setting breathes a similar tone, their aesthetic becomes the aesthetic of the surrounding world. Relative to his surroundings, Bo manages to be “cute” and contain features that the player can identify with. In games like Minecraft or Undertale, the aesthetic is not one of skill, but consistency. A player “buys-in” to the sounds and sights of the world and that is what creates a compelling narrative, not just something that is pleasant to look at. Other games such as Fallout and Heavy Rain which have visually-appealing renderings would face a similar disconnect if the interface or landscape was a different medium, such as pixelated. It is consistency of an aesthetic that adds value to play.
So much of play is about getting the human mind to engage in “the magic circle of play,”(212) and the visual, (and occasionally audio) aspects of video game design should serve that purpose. To engage the gamer and create a world in which that gamer can identify with the character’s and mission is a goal that can be enhanced by the right art mediums. Certain mediums fit better with different games, such as a puzzle game lending itself more to rigid art structures that highlight a mathematical game style or a rougher stroke making a grim tale or action-packed adventure. The “art” of the game is meant to enhance the game-play’s ability to captivate a gamer and create a positive experience. In this way perhaps approaching a game from the play aspect first as opposed to the artistic design of a character could enhance the over-all product of a game. That said, art and the medium of art can also serve to inspire the gameplay. So while art is a medium by which to tell a story, it also becomes an inspiration and parameter in which your game can be told. Being in conversation with a consistent medium of art results in a game in which the “play” aspect and the “art” aspect are of equal value and merit within a captivating game.