A loving criticism of the AGS community and its output

[uoou]

a

[ThreeOhFour]

I think you're pretty right, but it's gosh darned hard to think of new ways to do it. I've been trying to find out how to make post-adventure games for ages now and I keep coming back to plain old adventure games.

Love

Ben

[Anian]

Be constructive, not DEconstructive...or something.   Suggest, build, examine, if you make a breakthrough in adventure games, I am sure a lot of people will follow.

I'm also not a fan of "too retro" look in games, no matter how good the art actually is, but some of the games are just beautiful and charming and filled with that "it's a whole new world" essence.
On the other hand going too far away from a formula is not always as sweet, I mean 99.99% of games still follow some archtype of plot development or characters. Reason for this is that not only are we acostumed to it, but it's been perfected and all it needs is some tweaks and twists to make it feel new and interesting, but if you'd go and change sometihng very drastically, it'd probably wouldn't be well recieved.

It's hard to come up with something never seen before and new, but not only that, in a few years it'd be seen as something elementary and obvious, so the prize in the end is not always recieved. There's also the fact of the resources you have to put into projects, experience and talent, some people want to do that, but more people are just interested in telling a story they think other people will be fond of.

[uoou]

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[Snarky]

I don't really understand the criticism (which you're not the first to state) that making a certain kind of game is to "waste" one's talents. For almost every creator here, game making is a hobby that they do for fun, so they should make whatever they enjoy making. And a lot of players enjoy playing them, too, so it's not all for nothing.

Besides, I think you missed one insight in your analysis. Making a retro-adventure (and I insist it's retro, not classicism) game now is not just to mimic the games of the 80s and 90s. Like you said, the world has changed, and that changes the context that helps determine their meaning. This is common post-modern practice. (Don Quixote by Pierre Menard comes to mind...) Furthermore, a closer look at the games themselves will show that they are actually quite different from the classics in most important respects, length being the most obvious one.

Finally, I don't buy your version of artistic history. If you look at the other narrative arts, mainly literature and film, I don't think they've as a whole abandoned linear narrative or many aspects of modernism, and many of the highest-regarded examples (and I'm talking the stuff that wins the Nobel or the Booker) aren't really engaged with pushing the boundaries of the form. We seem to have finally accepted that not everything has to be a deconstruction, that telling a good story with true insight beautifully well is a valid form of high art. (And in the visual arts, while gallery painting may have exploded the classical tradition--thereby alienating everything but a niche audience--representational art is far from dead, dominating all multimedia, commercial and applied forms.)

Oh, one more thing: You believe in games as a serious art form, and want people to tackle that. Fine. But in any medium, the majority of works are entertainments. The artistic genius who transcends the form is, almost by definition, rare. It's healthy, and probably beneficial to the work, for creators to challenge themselves, a little. But I'm convinced if game makers (or film makers, or TV writers...) as a group took your advice, what we'd see would be an increase in pretentiousness, not quality.

As for this whole thing about focusing on the presentation, not the core; well, the presentation does matter. But more importantly, it's something that's easy to present for critique during the early stages. Gameplay and writing don't really lend themselves to forum criticism; you pretty much have to play the finished (or at least prototyped) game to comment on them. And once the game has been released, many posters are more interested in offering congratulations and praise than incisive criticism (though you do see that in some posts in the finished games threads, and in reviews). There are threads about game design, theory, puzzles, mechanics etc. and if you look at e.g. the Hardydev blog, you'll see a number of posts that discuss those things.

You see what you want to see, and you're missing much.

[Calin Leafshade]

I agree with Drew in as much as it should be the goal of game developers to push the boundaries somewhat but I feel he misses the point that people *know* they are remaking stuff.

AGS is, by and large, an exercise in nostalgia and it claims to be nothing else. Alot of AGS's built-in functionality assumes a classical perspective of the adventure game and innovation does not lend itself to ease, otherwise it wouldnt really be innovative.

[Dualnames]

Okay, first I find the first post to be nicely written if anything. I'm usually bored reading long posts in these forums, as my "Hey " and "Okay. " kind-of-posts are considered masterpieces.

Now the post is greatly written, but it is addressed mostly to close-minded individuals, that usually don't even bother to come to a post addressed to them. Therefore, as usually the initial praise, will result on a de-construction of the post and its clarification as utter crap and nonsense.

At that point, there will be two parties fighting for something entirely off-topic as the freedom of speech, and this of course will end up as a clusterf#$^.

Then again I might be wrong.

[uoou]

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[zabnat]

I'm with Snarky about not really understanding the cristicism. Also I got this strong mental image in my head about a guy who walks in the historical society meeting and tells them to look in the future and think of something new, instead of just looking in the past.

The thing I mostly didn't understand was about the comments in critics lounge. Did you mean that when someone posts a background and asks for input about the art, you should then just post "I can see from this weird looking background that your plot is excellent, so you shouldn't be worried about it looking like crap."? Also in my opinion technical stuff is important. To a certain degree. I don't want to play a game with bad art, I don't want to watch a movie with bad actors, I don't want to listen to music with bad sound quality. When the technical quality exceeds certain level, then it doesn't matter anymore.

I had much more to say, but I don't know how to put it down. My head doesn't work today, maybe I've been choked out couples of times too much.

[uoou]

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[Snarky]

It's a waste that only the remakes (to inappropriately but conveniently lump it all together) exist. The talent evident here could so easily be doing things which explore from a different angle as well and yet as far as I can see, it's lacking. It's a waste in the same sense as eating only cheeseburgers, despite them being delicious and nutritious, would be a waste of my palate.

But that's not true. Like I said, the games do not just repeat what was done in the classics. They play with tone, with presentation style, with content, with scope, with puzzle structure, and with technical aspects like the UI scheme.

Take a game like Ben There, Dan That or Time Gentlemen, Please! You can say that it's a traditional adventure game in that it uses a familiar control scheme and puzzle structure, but it's clearly not a game that could have been made in the 90s. The art style, the unique comedic voice, the mix of nostalgia, parody and subversion of the genre, and the underground sensibility is unlike anything LucasArts or Sierra would have produced. It has a distinct ambition that isn't the ambition the classic games had. (You seem to half recognize this and see it as a bad thing, that they should "seek what they sought," but it's really an example of how AGSers are making something different, not just imitating.)

Or look at the nominees for the 2010 AGS Awards. It's my impression that all the Best Game nominees (I haven't played all of them yet) renew the adventure game genre in various ways, great or small. That puts them beyond your concept of "remakes."

You misunderstood me, which is my fault for using narrative in two different senses side by side. I was saying that modernism, considered as a narrative, is irrelevant today. I'm saying this in reference to some games I see, with obvious pretensions towards high-concept (or whatever you want to call that), which are not much more than fairly clumsy rehashes of modernist ideas. If computers had existed in Paris in 1910 then we would've seen exactly these games. Knowing that they were made 100 years after that is a bit depressing.

You're going to have to give some examples. Besides, I see this as inconsistent with the rest of what you're arguing. First you bemoan the lack of artistic ambition, and then you pooh-pooh games that try because they don't live up to your standard. You can't ask for more than people's best; if that's the best and most innovative ideas people can come up with, maybe you're wrong that there's such a deep well of untapped potential.

As to linearity, you make an unfair comparison. Film and literature are inherently linear media. Of course nonlinearity can be expressed through allusion in either, but their nature is linear. Games, due to the absoluteness of agency of the viewer, are the opposite - they are inherently nonlinear and linearity has to be imposed.

Of course there's room for linear narrative based games. But they aren't and should not be all there is.

Adventure games are to a large extent about elaborate, detailed, scripted (as opposed to emergent) narratives. Creating non-linear yet satisfying narratives of this kind is possible (take Heavy Rain as an example), but extremely time-consuming and expensive. It is not a reasonable expectation from a freeware game community, and IMO not an avenue that plays to its strengths.

If you would object that you want games that aren't elaborate, scripted (and hence mainly linear) narratives, well, then you're simply in the wrong community. There are plenty of games like that being made, but they're no longer adventure games, and so can be found elsewhere on the internet.

I see you have me pegged as a pomo

Not particularly. I think a postmodernist would be more sensitive to the creative and transformational aspects of using elements from earlier works and styles, not just assume that because it runs in 320x200 it's merely regurgitating things that have all been done before.

No, I definitely want quality not pretence. I don't really see games as a 'serious art form', I don't know or care what that means. I see them as a mode of human inquiry which has plenty of avenues left to explore.

Having said that, any art should be aware of and engage with its form and each medium must at some point become self-aware in order to develop.

See, those two statements read to me like an utter contradiction.

Yeah of course the majority of most form is the lightweight and the throwaway and all that. But I'd say that that stuff is generally produced in conditions where the medium is secondary to some other concern - money, politics, whatever. I would hope and imagine that the people here love games (whether adventure games specifically or games in general) and making games. Stuff made with love is rarely lightweight and throwaway.

But nor is folk art, whether oral traditions or wood carvings, known for being transgressive or deeply experimental. They generally work within an established, only gradually evolving form, which imposes a certain discipline while being broad enough to allow a wide variety of expression, and considerable artistic originality.

And the two are intrinsicly linked - the formal is often discussed without any question as to function, which is indicative of a problematic disconection between the two.

Depends on how you see it. A lot of the critiques and advice on background art has to do with being aware of how technique affects function. For instance the discussions of composition and how to bring focus to certain elements in the scene, in order to guide a player. Or color theory, or the arguments about good and bad ways to break rules of perspective. If you look at the background blitz voting system and except the "idea" category, two of the categories directly address the use of the image in a game (atmosphere and composition/functionality), while the two others are more about how well done it is as an artwork.

I disagree that the substantive stuff is more difficult to discuss than the superficial stuff. At least not prohibitively so. [...] I read this place often enough and enjoy the threads about visual stuff. I don't see much about the other stuff, as I say. Yeah, you see what you choose to see of what's actually there. I'm not saying there's none, I'm saying it seems a bit overbalanced.

It's easy enough to discuss game design, theory, mechanics and structure in the abstract (and those discussions do take place, I count five threads on the first page of the Adventure-related talk board), but it's almost hopeless to offer specific critique of an idea, because so much depends on the execution. You can critique a background or a sprite because you can see it, you can critique music because you can hear it. You can only critique a game if you can play it. I suppose people could post their scripts for people to read, but honestly, who wants to read through twenty pages of notes for "My First Gaem"?

It would be great if more creators prototyped their games (testing the core gameplay, say) and posted them for critique in the Critics Lounge. The problem is doing it without giving too much of the game away. And by the time they've got it implemented to a playable state, I think most creators feel like they're nearly finished and it's too late to go back and change many of the fundamentals.

[Igor Hardy]

It's inspiring to see a call for greater emphasis on experimentation every once in a while. It's great that you would like to see more innovation, Drew, and many of us would like that too. I definitely try new things in my own games whenever possible.

However, I don't understand your criticism of traditional storytelling and linear gameplay (not to mention every game is linear at its very core). I think you might have an idealized vision of how games (and works of art) are created. Innovations, experiments, as well as non-linearity can not (and should not) happen in a void, for their own sake - innovations and multiple choices get introduced to achieve certain fairly concrete goals. In case of disciplines like fiction, film or adventure games the most general goals are usually to tell a specific story, to express some kind of feeling, or create a convincing illusion. Simple, basic and human goals. Not vague and abstract things like "We need to be modern and artistic!" or "We need to create a game that evokes now!" because at best that leads to creating some dada and "notgames", but usually projects like that never even get off the ground.

[Ilyich]

I have a lot to say on the subject, lots of things to disagree with, quite a few to agree with, too, but it'll be quite hard for me to write that much in English, so I'll just point out some of the things that bothered me in this well thought out, and, in a way - sweet post.

You talk about visuals as a technical part, and about story and ideas therein as "content" that matters. Well, I consider visual art, as well as music, to be more interesting, complex and pure forms of art than literature. They are indispensable for creating a unique, singular experience from a mixed media project, be it a movie, an opera or a game.

Super Mario colour pallette alone, beign instantly recognizable and quite weird, creates a whole new visual space for the player to immerse himself in, and thus evokes many new emotions that are hard-to-impossible to find anywhere else.  Pixel art is a valid and relatively new genre of visual art and should not be taken lightly. I feel that interesting and innovative use of visual design is highly underused and underrated.

As for what goes on in the Critics Lounge - well, most of us have some experience in thinking and writing. We are taught those things from an early age and do them on a daily basis, so there's much less need to go through the basics. Not many, however, can draw a table, so that it looks like a table. Rules of linear perspective are still very much alive and kicking if what you want is to create a good visual representation of a real object.

And I think that all this "wallowing in retro spirit" stuff is caused not only by nostalgia, but partly because we, gamers, feel that the whole pixel-art/adventure thing haven't been properly done yet, it didn't reach it's full strength and was abandoned by the industry way to quickly. We feel that there's still much artistic potential in those blocky semi-abstract shapes and in the passive, observational type of gameplay. Or, maybe, that's just me.

Okay, I seem to have started to ramble a bit, and it's way too preachy, so I'll cut the rest of it short:

- Games are mostly entertainment. Entertainment can become art if it's done well enough. (The Simpsons are way more culturally significant than a Ming Vase or a Penderecki symphony)
- Games are hard to make. Especially for one person. Especially complicated, never-done-before kind of games.
- Non-linearity of games seems to create loads of opportunities for new forms of artisticic expression, but so far, not many have been found.
- The overall quantity of games of reasonable quality from this community, although surprisingly great and lovely, is insufficient to make such  broad observations and wish for more.
- How about a more constructive and in-depth thread on actual possibilities and ideas for experimentation within the medium? (not a dare, but a suggestion - let's discuss the subject itself, and not why it's not discussed and implemented in ags-games).

[uoou]

a

[Scavenger]

Allow me to give a counterpoint. I'm an artist, not a writer, and so the art is most important to me.

The second thing is: You're all too concerned with technique. This relates in part to the above - I think it's caused by the above. This need to create meticulous pixel art this-and-that. But it goes further - the number of posts I see where someone says something like "it's nice, but the perspective is wrong" or "it's nice but the proportions are wrong" and "here's a tutorial on how to do it right".

Which is fine if it's balanced by as much concern about the actual game. About the mechanics and logic and reality you are creating. About the nature of games - what they are and what they can be. The stuff which actually makes the game a game rather than a meticulously drawn presentation. But it's not - I see virtually no discussions like this.

There seems to be an absolute adherence to a really quite staid, pedestrian and regressive approach to the formal aspects of artistic practise. Linear perspective was something the visual arts flirted with for 400 years of its 30000 of existence, and then quickly discarded. Proportion is something to play with - to meaningfully exaggerate and distort, not a rulebook. But this is beside the point.

Stop right there! What foolishness is this? The reasons we use the rules of linear perspective, proportion, colour theory, and other "pedestrian techniques" is because we need to master them before we can play with the form.

How can we break the rules if we don't know them? Breaking the rules has to be deliberate. Breaking the rules when you don't know what rules you're breaking.... that's incompetence, not being avant-garde. If it doesn't work, if it looks wrong, then it must be fixed. Then, once you know the groundwork, the foundations, then you can build up. Art is as much of a discipline as writing. You gotta be internally consistent.

Don't you dare pretend that the rules don't matter. Doing that is appealing to mediocrity.

The point is that I'd rather have a literary masterpiece written in dirt on tree bark than, say, a Dan Brown book printed on paper so smooth I want to rub my face in it, in a typeface so exquisite that seeing a single letter causes me to explode in ecstasy and bound in leather made from the skin of cloned velociraptors. It's the goddamn content that matters. It's what's inside. Of course, polish is always nice but that should really come last. It should be the least concern. The primary concern should be making games which make me think in ways I've never thought of before or make me feel things I didn't know I could feel or ... whatever it is you want to do.

Games are little universes. Every game you make is a separate universe with its own rules and logic and reality which you get to shape and dictate. It's a logical space in which you can say anything it is possible to say, you can arrange reality in any way you like. You could be asking questions about the nature of reality or what it means to be human or trying to evoke a feeling so fleeting it doesn't even have a name and instead you're worrying about whether a couple of lines converge in the same place? Really?

Oh, great. "The writing is so much more important than the art!". Way to make my kind's contribution null and void. Graphical Adventure Games are primarily a visual medium. It isn't IF. Worlds are created through the visual medium just as well as the written one. Without good art, the effect is limited. Again, if we don't know the rules, we can't break them. Saying that the visual elements are pointless, that we could just write up a new universe with crappy MSPaint art and flicky, warpy animation (or none at all) and it would be preferable to a beautiful game is a pretention I cannot stand. You seem to not get the importance of art in games. And writing is just as hard as art.

How can we engage in a dialogue, how can we invent a new universe to blow people's minds if we can't even craft a simple, enjoyable game? This talent doesn't sprout overnight. It has to be built up from the building blocks. We make simple games to practice. Think about it: The average member of the AGS community can't have made more than 1-3 games. We are not master craftsmen, or philosophers. We're amateurs experimenting with something we too are trying to understand. If the games industry has failed to make more than a handful of games that can be considered true art, made by professionals, what chance do we have?

I believe games are THE cultural form of the 21st century. The one that matters. This place has such an amazing concentration of talent and obviously has the will to make games. You have this tool and you have absolute creative freedom - you should be pushing the form forwards. You should be exploring and defining what a game can be, what a virtual world can mean. You should be engaging ina  dialogue which has a meaning and relevence now not wallowing in a discussion from 20+ years ago, vomitting it up and chewing it over again and calling it retro. Retro comments and critiques and reshapes. Remaking this stuff isn't retro, it's classicism and classicism is artistic death. More than that, it's accepting and revelling in being irrelevant.

We do what we find fun. Not what we think should be a new -ism. Philosophical masturbation isn't my bag - Entertainment is. Maybe we like the look and feel of games from that era, and want to experience more? I sure think games moved on technologically before they were ready.

Even the games which get lauded as pushing things forwards tend to be nothing more than, at best, early modernism presented as a linear narrative. A narrative that was discarded by every other medium almost 100 years ago.

Really? Well! I'm sorry for not being so educated as to know exactly what you're going on about there - it just comes across as pretentious and haughty. But I'm pretty sure modernism has never fully left the other mediums.  Being hooked on these wordisms is surely unhealthy. So long as the story comes across, it shouldn't matter what techiques you use to tell the story. Just like art: It needs rules to adhere to, otherwise it's not very good.

I think it's kind of a duty, if you have the talent and the will and the ability and desire, to make something which affects people now you as much as these games obviously did back then. To think about and understand what form that must take today and at least try to make it.

Yeah, I'll try to make an entertaining game. Like the games before entertained me.

I'm a bit offended that it comes across that you want games to be this lofty ideal, and that individuals who aren't english lit. majors should write them. But they should always play with and build on the rules of narrative!

BUT WOE BETIDE if ART gets the same treatment. Can't be allowed to build on previous knowledge there. "Stop being so anal about whether the art looks good. But the storytelling, oh, I'll be so anal about that."

What exactly is it you want? We're trying our best here, and you're dismissing our efforts so offhand. Remakes are good practice to get better at making games (they show you how to make a game - just like artists followed their masters in the old days).

Pixel art is a beautiful medium, and quicker than doing full animation at ridiculous x ludicrous pixels. It's just that much more economical. And we practice things.... to get better. You don't think someone's ultimate ambition is to remake the same game forever?

Let's be realistic here. People make the games they want to play. They want to entertain people. They want to make something beautiful or funny or silly or engaging.

Would you rather play a game based on a silly, fun thing?

Or Tracy Emin's My Bed?

I know what I would want. I must be a philistine.

[Khris]

Wrong forum.

j/k

Let me start by saying I disagree with pretty much everything you said in your initial post.
zabnat and Snarky addressed it well so I'll leave it at that.

The second thing is: You're all too concerned with technique. This relates in part to the above - I think it's caused by the above. This need to create meticulous pixel art this-and-that. But it goes further - the number of posts I see where someone says something like "it's nice, but the perspective is wrong" or "it's nice but the proportions are wrong" and "here's a tutorial on how to do it right".
[...]
The point is that I'd rather have a literary masterpiece written in dirt on tree bark than, say, a Dan Brown book printed on paper so smooth I want to rub my face in it, in a typeface so exquisite that seeing a single letter causes me to explode in ecstasy and bound in leather made from the skin of cloned velociraptors.

This I have to address though.
While I agree, I'd rather have a literary masterpiece written with a pen on paper. Teaching people a few basic rules about perspective and proportion is as easy and quickly done as giving the dirt smeared guy holding the bark a stack of paper and a pen.
It will also greatly improve bad art. Bad art & wrong perspective is horrible to look at, bad art with good perspective is still bad art but not that bad.

[uoou]

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[uoou]

a

[Snarky]

I certainly accept that those games make very minor adjustments to the formula. And that's great, they are a thing. Not at all the thing I'm talking about but certainly a valuable thing.

I'm not talking about formal tweaks. I'm not talking about anything formal, actually. But I'm aslo (to prevent any further 'misunderstanding') not diminishing that as a pursuit. But it's already there, so I have no need to ask for it to happen. Which is why I am not. And am, rather, asking for something else to happen. Which is the thing I am describing. Which is none of those things.

Besides, I see this as inconsistent with the rest of what you're arguing. First you bemoan the lack of artistic ambition, and then you pooh-pooh games that try because they don't live up to your standard

I think you're being a bit disingenuous. Cohesion matters. I could write a novel with a random word generator and call it a subversion of the form, but it would just be a shit novel.

I'm not asking for something randomly different for the sake of being different.

I'm really not anti-'remakes'. I'm just pro other stuff and think there's not enough of it (and believe it would feed on itself and go somewhere interesting). I'm not anti-adventure game though I love it when people make stuff which is not adventure games in AGS. I'm really not anti 320xwhatever.

I'm just particularly interested in stuff which deals with what virtual worlds are/can be and think that can be particularly eloquently explored in a simple/constrained environment (with inhereted expectations and forms - I think they help as something to work both with and against) like AGS. That's what I'm personally interested in, not my view of 'all there should be' or whatever. Maybe, as you say, I'm just in the wrong place. I hope not, I've grown quite attached to some of the people.

Mmmm... I'm a bit disappointed in that response. I thought you believed that AGS games were stuck in recreating 90s adventure games over and over, and any original or creative development would be welcome, but it turns out you're only really interested in one direction of evolution, the one you like.

What you're really asking is for people to make more games that appeal to your tastes, rather than to other people's (say, their own) tastes.

Your reasons against emergence (for example) clash with your exmaples of 'innovation' stated earlier: make them shorter (for example). Or otherwise find a way. Or sit there saying it's impossible if you like. I'd like to talk about it at least though.

A procedurally generated adventure would be interestingly emergent. Quite probably a bad game, though it depends, but certainly an interesting one. I don't really buy the time thing, a procedural, nonlinear, emergent adventure could well take less time to make than a linear one, depending on complexity. And there's collaboration. And I've seen how much time people put into these things anyway.

Wouldn't be playing to the strengths of a classic adventure, for sure. It would have other strengths, it would be something else.

I meant that IMO, this is not a promising avenue of development for adventure games, and not one that plays to the strengths of hobby creators or the AGS community.

Part of why I don't believe in procedurally generated stories is that people have been trying to do them for literally the last thirty or forty years, and efforts to date have been very disappointing. Take Façade, for example. Years of work to create a narrative that goes on for perhaps 15 minutes, and you bump up against the limits and shortcomings almost immediately. In my opinion, that makes the level of immersion far lower than in a well-written scripted, mostly-linear game.

You might also be interested in the games by Deirdra Kiai (Squinky), which push the limits of non-linearity. Personally I think they're far less satisfying as games than they must be as experiments, but they have their fans.

Thanks, hadn't looked there much. That's the sort of thing I'm looking for.

Almost all the discussion about gameplay, ideas etc. go on the Adventure-related Talk board, so if you don't check there you're going to get a very skewed impression of what's debated and not. Again I'd like to mention the Hardydev blog, which posts longer essays about specific aspects of adventure game design. And the discussion brought to mind a list of articles about adventure game puzzle design that I put together a few years ago, which might inspire some ideas about what's possible within the constraints of the genre, or at least give a better idea of what those constraints are.

[Igor Hardy]

Again I'd like to mention the Hardydev blog, which posts longer essays about specific aspects of adventure game design.

Thanks for the HardyDev recommendations. Nice to hear it can come to mind while discussing design.

[Kweepa]

I see where you're coming from. You don't seem to have a good idea how to get where you want to go. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but you don't seem too eager to discuss it.

Games which express an awareness of their form and a desire to play with and explore that. Machinarium would be a very light example. Or what VVVVVV did with platformers.

I wouldn't call either of these games deconstructions. Machinarium is a simple puzzle game with some very annoying traditional puzzles. Looks nice though.
VVVVVV is explicitly platform-game-classical. It just adds a new mechanic and tries to explore what you can do, gameplay-wise, with it. Exactly what Nintendo would do.
Here are some games that experiment and stretch: What Linus Bruckman Sees When His Eyes Are Closed, Eternally Us, Richard Longhurst And The Box That Ate Time.

Do we have to learn Byzantine perspective, for example, before being allowed to draw without it?

Duh. Perspective (and proportion, shading, etc) are taught to allow the artist to represent the real world to whatever level of accuracy they require. It's not about being allowed to draw without it, but rather the opposite. Byzantine perspective is not part of that.

Linear perspective is really just one approach. Using it is fine, if you actually want it. But seeing it as the only way or even the default is lazy.

!
Seeing it as the default is sanity. It's the result of the renaissance, the acceptance of observation as the key to science and truth.

But that's a different discussion, because most of the time the recipient of the perspective/proportion/shading/colour advice here on the forums appreciates it and was implicitly (or explicitly) seeking it.

[uoou]

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[Chicky]

Aww man, two page CL post and no pictures D:

[Scavenger]

I'll answer this one, since I know of it.

I think that 'can't break the rules till you know them' thing is an oft-repeated-in-art-schools fallacy (or probably more accurately an oversimplification).

There must be rules - there must be a cohesive conceptual structure to what you're doing with space and all that - but it needn't be any particular set of rules. What about the 30k years of art before linear perspective was (re)discovered? Is that just shit? Or the folk art which never adopted it?

Do we have to learn Byzantine perspective, for example, before being allowed to draw without it?

Linear perspective is really just one approach. Using it is fine, if you actually want it. But seeing it as the only way or even the default is lazy.

(same appies to all the other stuff, colour, proportion etc., I'm just using perspective to illustrate)

Byzantine perspective is a trick, it isn't how our eyes see things. I don't see how learning that before learning anything else helps in the slightest.

Linear perspective is a good way to approximate what our eyes really see. It gives a sense of space and form. You learn how to make things realistic before you learn anything else. Just like you learn how to write a convincing character before you write an alien.

You learn how light and shadow works before you can twist that around.

You learn how proportion works so you can caricature.

I mean, you could apply it to science. "Atoms! Pah! What an assumption! Atoms only came in the last 100 years, and now they're probability waves! And they might not even exist! Let's ignore it entirely and focus on the four classical elements, which were around a lot longer! Not to mention radiation. Can't even see that. It's all fire! Fire and air! Let's not assume that science has made progress in accuracy. We can do whatever we want."

Do you know anything about the production of art?

It isn't some nebulous "You can dream anything!" thing right off the bat, nor has it ever been. You still got to know how everything works before you can articulate those dreams.

[uoou]

a

[Calin Leafshade]

playing a game like this would certainly be interesting

http://vimeo.com/12518619

[uoou]

a

[Igor Hardy]

playing a game like this would certainly be interesting

http://vimeo.com/12518619

Meh, that's just exactly like usual. Only reversed.

This one on the other hand, would make a great adventure game:

http://vimeo.com/2602084

[LRH]

I've actually read this entire thread, I'm proud of myself.

Anyways--

I'd like to make another point, if I could. I agree with Snarky when it comes to producing something that reflect your own tastes. Making games, at least for me, is not my primary form of expressing myself. I make games because I think it's fun to make them, not because I'm looking to do something new and profound in this medium. I do not consider it a waste, because I enjoy the process and enjoy sharing the finished product with people.

To this day, my favorite production of my own was my deluxe version of the first AGS game I had ever made. It was fairly poorly received in terms of gameplay, since everyone thought the the puzzles were too outlandish. That's not really important though. I love it for what it is, and, while the quality isn't all there, I was thrilled with how much it marked my improvement in my use of AGS, and how well the atmosphere expressed the emotions. All the while, as far as adventure games go, it's as standard as it gets.

[theo]

[Knox]

I just created a new avant-garde game. Count all the "e"'s in this post and think about cabbage. Now dont tell anyone and go eat some cantaloupe while wearing nothing but a helmet made of butter and non-sense.

Critique.

[Khris]

Yes. You've learned one system. Now, before you can make an informed choice rather than telling everyone to use linear perspective and renaissance ideas of proportion and colour theory and so on for everything regardless of how apposite it may or may not be, you need to go an learn about all the other choices before you can make an informed decision. I'm glad you understand now.

Linear perspective is how the human eye sees the world. So unless you're using some artsy collage style or 2D or whatever, linear perspective is the default everything eventually comes down to.

And obviously, precisely because of that, backgrounds where it is obvious the creator didn't follow perspective rules (yes, rules) look so horribly off.

Here's a prime example (sorry barefoot):

Look at the height of doors.
And the carpet looks like a hole in the floor.

That's an easy fix which will improve the background greatly. Are we supposed not to mention that in the one place that's exactly about fixing errors like that?


Also, please enlighten us about all the other systems of proportion, color theory and perspective. (You sound almost like an evolution denier demanding equal time for alternatives.)

[Babar]

I kinda see uoou's point, and that background is a perfect example of it

I quite LIKE how it looks
And how barefoot's backgrounds in the game s/he is making look. They may be "perspectively wrong", but at least they're all consistently wrong in the same way , and gives a very interesting effect. I hope it won't be changed.


I've seen many AGS games with great background art, great music, great "writing", but they were as stale and boring for me as it could get, and so formulaic, you could even see the "twists" from a mile off. And the problem is, as uoou says, the actual "concept" behind the game, the "idea" itself, receives the least attention, so even at the production stage, when all that exists is a short story blurb (that is perhaps slightly interesting), some very pretty graphics, and maybe a song or two, these games are lauded for being the next greatest thing that is approaching.

Sure, everyone makes games as a hobby, to enjoy themselves and have some fun, and they make the kind of game that they like to make, so I'm not sure exactly what can be done to "fix" it, but I guess a little discussion couldn't hurt.

[Scavenger]

Yeah, barefoot's backgrounds indicate precisely what the Critic's Lounge tries to help. He attempted linear perspective, but didn't have the technique down. It isn't some kind of outsider art.

Also, please enlighten us about all the other systems of proportion, color theory and perspective. (You sound almost like an evolution denier demanding equal time for alternatives.)

I have a few.

Byzantine or Inverse, where the vanishing point is at the bottom, focal point leads outward.
Divine perspective, where the biggest things are the most important.
Mensa perspective, where the most intellectually stimulating things are the biggest.
Krisfaluscian perspective, where the grossest or funniest things are the biggest.
Perverse perspective, where the sexiest things are the biggest.
Communist perspective, where every object is equally sized.
Pessimists perspective, where the mistakes are biggest.

[mode7]

I read the initial post and a few of the follow ups. I was prepared to write a lengthy follow up but then I thought to myself:
I could join this conversation bout if the AGS community was on the right track to create the great artistic revelation of the 21st century

OR

I could just use the time to work on this game

[Ponch]

Squinky's a chick?!?!  :o

(Also, some other things were said in this thread that were probably of some importance. Mostly by Scavenger. <3)

[SpacePirateCaine]

As one of the more vocal evangelists of linear perspective in the critiques that I've offered in the Critic's lounge in the past, I would like to put forth a few comments on background design. Generally speaking, the largest representative sampling of backgrounds in this forum are made with the intent of using it in the traditional sense, in context of adventure games. To provide a large walkable area and space with props that are interactive and relatively believable in scale and shape with the character sprites.

If someone asked for critique on a background for an isometric game, or a top-down view, or a flat or even neo-cubist image, I would offer criticism and advice that are relevant to the style that they put forth. If the artist intends for an image to look off-kilter but vaguely follow the rules of linear perspective, I would take that into account. The point is just that a lot of the artists here are trying to develop a set of tools with which to work.

I deeply respect your point that people should be free to experiment - I love when people do - but I am also a large proponent of building a versatile toolkit and having the knowledge necessary to build an image in the manner which you prefer using the tried-and-true methods that artists of bygone days who are far greater than we. Do I think that people must adhere to the laws of linear perspective because I say so? Not in the slightest. But when someone shows me an image with grossly disproportionate furniture and asks me why it looks wrong, I will give them a lesson in how to achieve results using a simple and easy-to-apply method.

Now, I recognize that this conversation isn't about the art, so I apologize for my digression.

In regards to what I believe to be a misconception that everyone is just "remaking" old games, I would like to interject that although there have been some very well-done remakes, such as the King's Quest and Quest For Glory remakes, the largest portion of games here are original, even if using methods you may find antiquated.

Ultimately, this is a community of people drawn together by a love of games that offered a specific narrative interspersed with puzzles that need to be overcome in order to advance (and in the ideal case tied directly into) the narrative. We love telling stories, and often have a very specific story in our head, but don't wish to present it as a passive experience. By making it interactive but linear (or only partially branching), it allows us to weave a more specific path and experience for our players. It's interactive storytelling, and I think that the majority of the community are most interested in telling a story in this way, though a few of us are truly interested in innovating and playing with AGS in order to make new kinds of experiences.

Are you looking for changes to the standard methods of interaction, like Lucasarts did with Curse of Monkey Island's Verb Coin or Grim Fandango's ten-key setup? Or are you looking more for a break from narrative and looking for sandbox games made in the AGS engine? I'm a little foggy on exactly what you're looking for and would love some examples.

I have released two games using AGS, both of which are non-traditional in some ways, but still fit into the adventure game mold. I have toyed with simplifying methods of interaction by implementing a two-button, menu-free interface in one of my projects, as well as a dialogue-less narrative, but these are simply design decisions and do not change the fact that it is a linear narrative. Kuma Story (The game referenced above) is a very limited story about a bear making a present for his girlfriend then helping her bake a cake. It is task-based and lays out the tasks in such a manner that the player will naturally progress to the end of the narrative. Does this fit the mold of innovation that you are talking about?

I'd like to know more concisely what it is that you're proposing. Perhaps you could give an example of a game that you would like to make? Even better, you could make one yourself (Even a prototype)! I'm glad that you're opening this discussion, but it would be great if you could direct the flow a bit so we aren't all arguing different points.

[Dualnames]

I like how I'm right within the same bloody day.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=42862.msg568768#msg568768

There in case you missed my genius post. And this of course will completely disregarded or torn apart as no one likes to be predictable and since I have a post count to raise so that my children will feed, I shall post this utter nonsense post.

Please flame.

[SpacePirateCaine]

I love you, Dualnames.

[Igor Hardy]

Squinky's a chick?!?!  :o

(Also, some other things were said in this thread that were probably of some importance. Mostly by Scavenger. <3)

There's another Squinky whose name is TheInquisitveStranger in these forums.

[Ponch]

There's another Squinky whose name is TheInquisitveStranger in these forums.

Ah, I was thinking of the eye patch guy who is Tom Selleck's love child. Thanks for clearing that up. Now if only someone could explain to me what the rest of this thread is about.

[Baron]

Scanned the thread, although I read through most of the first page.

   I think I agree with Snarky most, especially his characterization of AGS game development as folk art.  I deeply appreciate uoou's admiration for my skills, talents and potential as a forum member, but I don't see the AGS community as the Moulin Rouge c. 1900.  While not quite wood carving, the fact that we fans are creating games that the "artistic establishment" wouldn't make for us inevitably leads to imitative, derivative and even kitchy game styles.  And there's nothing wrong with any of that, in my opinion, because these games are fun to make, fun to play, and fun to be around (meaning the sense of community I feel here). 

     Just like other folk art communities, I doubt many developers spend a lot of time overtly contemplating the advancement of the genre (Scavenger's "philosophical masturbation" aptly characterizes the attitude of the common man).  Unlike high art or literature, whose tone is more set by the elite avant-garde who might intentionally set out to "break the mold", the folk arts have a greater tendency to evolve organically.  If a new concept plays well, then it will be incorporated into ever more games (and thus frustratingly cease to be novel and cutting edge...).  Uoou's concession that a few exemplary games have pushed the envelope a little bit is evidence that the process is a slow one, but I think he misses the cumulative result in the big picture. Adventure games have indeed evolved since the 1980s - "key in door" puzzles, walking mazes, intentional walking deads and "what word was the developer thinking of" (text based interface) are either extinct or on their way out, while social commentary, deeper story telling and the episodic format are all now in vogue.

     I think the OP should be tweaked and reposted in collage, knitting and scale-model railway forums as an amusing study in the universalism of hobbyists response to not being cutting edge enough.

[uoou]

a

[uoou]

a

[Dualnames]

I love you, Dualnames.

Awwww

I'm still looking up the topic when reading this, and then going back two pages to see if I accidentally clicked on another topic really

[Khris]

The point is, to automatically default to linear perspective and all those other conditioned rules is, to me at least, worse than not using them at all - not even being aware of them.

That's exactly the point. Looking at backgrounds of people who aren't aware of them makes me wish they were, not cheer their ignorance.

If I look at the critics lounge backgrounds I see a great variety of different styles. Correcting perspective flaws won't destroy their unique look at all.

That's kinda beside the point though. Linear perspective is of course pretty good at what it does, it mimics how a lens (be it in a camera or in our eye) projects an image onto a 2d plane. It's not natural or automatic, though, it's a learnt system which we understand because we are exposed to so much photography and television and are (clearly) conditioned into thinking it is the 'natural' way to represent 3d space on a 2d plane. Which of course it's not - if it was it wouldn't have taken us 30000 years of drawing to come up with.

BULLSHIT.
Take an Edding, walk to your nearest window and trace the lines of the houses outside without moving your head. Bam, linear perspective.
People have been projecting the real world on 2D planes for 30000 years, so how is that not natural or automatic? You say yourself that linear perspective mimics how our eye does its job, HOW WE SEE THE WORLD. So again, how is that not natural?
Also, how is 30000 years an argument? People have been around for much longer, and still more than half the world fucks up their lives due to completely unwarranted superstition.

[Calin Leafshade]

i think uoou is talking about the conceptual nature of the way humans *see* things.

He admits that linear perspective is a good analog of how a "lens (be it in a camera or in our eye) projects an image onto a 2d plane" but our brain interprets those signals with different emphases depending on our situation, making something more or less important/visible than others.

Also, this *is* learned behaviour. Babies have exactly the same visual clues as adults but they find it much harder to judge distance and size based on perspective clues.

[theo]

I realize I might come off as being overly diplomatic but I believe everyone posting here is right in their own beautiful little way. No matter what your opinion, this truly is an interesting discussion to follow.

I hope this doesn't turn into a flame war - it has a lot more potential than that. Try not to get over-heated, everyone. Please continue.

[ThreeOhFour]

I don't want to argue against proper artistic practices, and I think vanishing points are a fantastic way of coming to terms with how to draw straight things in a way that represents how we see the world.

But I find them super boring. I never use them, and doubt I ever will. The world around us isn't made up of perfectly straight walls, roads, floors or power lines. There are curves, bumps, dents - this, for me, is the stuff that makes a background really come to life. People build things wonky accidentally sometimes, because builders aren't perfect, or are lazy, or the ground shifts over time, or parts of buildings wear out and sag etc.

In fact, I have developed what I guess I'd call "Adventure game perspective" - where I draw my backgrounds to avoid character scaling so the pretty pixels don't get messed up. When you look carefully, you can sometimes see I've drawn a door further back that the player can also use much bigger than it should be when you consider the distance away that it is. This is so when the player walks up to it, they don't look enormous. It's totally wrong from a technical level, yet on a design level nobody has ever complained to me about it .

So yes, vanishing points are a great way of establishing a foundation for how things work. But you should be able judge it fairly well by eye, really, if you sit back and look at your image once you've sketched out a rough version of it. I personally feel that composition and functionality as a game asset/location take priority over whether all the lines are straight, and will continue (for now, at least ) to do all my backgrounds content in the knowledge that the perspective lines don't converge at a single point.

[Khris]

So yes, vanishing points are a great way of establishing a foundation for how things work. But you should be able judge it fairly well by eye, really, if you sit back and look at your image once you've sketched out a rough version of it. I personally feel that composition and functionality as a game asset/location take priority over whether all the lines are straight, and will continue (for now, at least ) to do all my backgrounds content in the knowledge that the perspective lines don't converge at a single point.

Which is perfectly fine, as long as you are indeed able to judge it by eye (which you undoubtedly are).
Usually, establishing a proper perspective is suggested to people who have actually tried that and failed.

To put what I've said earlier in perspective, here are two examples of game art I think is absolutely great, without a single converging pair of lines:

   

So I'm all for an innovative way of picturing things. But I have no doubt that both Mr. Hammill and Ali understand perspective and could draw according to its rules.

It is simply a tool, much like a graphics program that supports layers, that greatly helps with producing aesthetic graphics.

[Pinback]

I think we make adventure game backgrounds for AGS games in a formulaic method not only because it fits how we imagine the world our game is set in, but also from a production standpoint.

I never push the camera down onto the floor to get a worms eye view of things, nor do I ever make BG's from a birds eye view-simply because it would require a hell of a lot more sprite work just so I can experiment or spice things up. 
For my latest game, Primordia, I work in almost any perspective you can think of; one, two and three point perspectives, isometric and dimetric projections, mixes of any of the above, and half of the time I work with a kind of natural perspective off the top of my head, to make the picture visually interesting and create the kind of painting I prefer to look at- but it can be a real bitch when it comes time to make it actually work as a game.
My point is, while making an adventure you can take a more experimental approach to creating the assets, but it can be hit and miss as to whether it'll actually work properly in game, and even if it does work well it can affect how you create everything else in the game, drawing out production time interminably and generally being a pain in the ass later.

But if we're talking about the games themselves, at the end of the day I guess I just appreciate both schools of thought. Taking a traditional approach and putting a new spin on things can create just as much of a masterpiece as ignoring the rules completely and and creating a purely original product.
I also believe that the process of creating games is just as, if not more important than the product itself anyway. Enjoying the creative journey, learning and discovering what one is capable doing should be of paramount importance I think.
Would I like to see more people push the envelope? Sure, but not at the expense of not having any decent size playable adventure games around that scratch my itch for having relatively predictable genre/setting/story I can feel comfortable with and sink my teeth into.

It's like, sure; I love Twin Peaks, but I also love Star Trek.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I agree with many of the points raised here by Khris and Snarky, and I even understand and empathize with Ben's approach (which I have done myself).  There is a good consensus that knowing the rules in order to know how to break them is the way to go, which I fully agree with.  If I didn't know proper perspective then many of my backgrounds would suffer because I didn't 'understand' how perspective works and how items appear when projected onto a 2D plane.  Because I understand these rules (and because Lucasartists and Ben and Khris and many others understand them) they are able to diverge from strict adherence to those rules and create off-balance or strange landscapes that still somehow appeal to our inner sense of 'rightness' or accuracy.  Playing DoTT, for example, I never found myself questioning the geometry of the rooms in spite of the doors having extreme angles and such, merely because within the framework of that game everything else was designed to match that approach, making it look 'right'.  This is key, I think, in any 'style' that diverges from strict perspective laws:  whatever approach you take, the whole of the piece should conform to whatever rules you have set it to.  An easy way of proving this visually is to draw a rectangular room in perspective and then to begin drawing doors along the walls stretching towards the screen at random and without attention or care to perspective; the result will be terrible, but if you design the entire room around a specific method then, like Ben's artwork, the consistency of the design wins out over the need for perfect symmetry/perspective.

I think this is a good topic of discussion but please keep it civil.  I'm not directing that at anyone in particular, just generally, as I've seen a few angry looking responses here and there and there's just no cause for it.  If you can't agree civilly to something then agree to disagree and leave it there, otherwise, provide a good argument and evidence to support your view without being disrespectful or overly blunt.

Thanks!

[Nikolas]

AGS is... a tool right? A tool we all love and all the games I've played and taken part in (from AGS), have a blue cup somewhere, which shows the dedication to the creator (ergo god?) and the community and everything else.

That said, I can't really think for a single moment that there is any talent at waste here, when anyone is free of using any other tool available: You don't want to be limited to what AGS can/can't do? Move further ahead.

Of course this is coming from someone who deals with classical music, which appears to be the epitome of OUTDATED art, but anyhow...

[Snarky]

To follow up on the side-discussion:

He admits that linear perspective is a good analog of how a "lens (be it in a camera or in our eye) projects an image onto a 2d plane" but our brain interprets those signals with different emphases depending on our situation, making something more or less important/visible than others.

Linear perspective is realistic and accurate in the sense that (at least from a distance, so that depth cues like binocular parallax and focus depth aren't effective), from a particular vantage point, without moving, a person cannot tell the difference between a real, static, scene and a perfectly executed 2D picture of that scene. This is why matte paintings in movies work, for example. No other method can make that claim for any situation. (Parallel projection can be seen as an edge-case of linear perspective for things that are extremely remote, such as when seen through a telescope or from a satellite camera. Just set all the vanishing points to be infinitely distant, so parallel lines converge at infinity.)

So to the extent that a 2D picture can portray the real world the way we see it, linear perspective is as good as it gets, and is not in any way "arbitrary." Of course departures from realism can often be defended on psychovisual, symbolic, stylistic and artistic grounds, but it's simply wrong to say that linear perspective is just one of many "equally valid" ways to realistically depict the world.

Also, this *is* learned behaviour. Babies have exactly the same visual clues as adults but they find it much harder to judge distance and size based on perspective clues.

Learned behavior implies a degree of arbitrariness. But there are many things a baby cannot do that are nevertheless instinctual and in some sense "innate": much of our development as we grow is programmed into us. Of course, it is very likely that our visual system has been designed to be trained by the stimuli it experiences. The question is rather whether the different stimuli a person may be exposed to leads to significant differences in the way 2D images are parsed among normal adolescents and adults.

Generally, it appears that people across the world "see" in the same way, with only minor cultural differences. For example, they are equally prone to most optical illusions. I have seen one report that a certain tribe who had not been exposed to images or photos before had a hard time seeing what they depicted, but the results were not very robust, and it's unclear to what extent they simply could not comprehend what they were seeing (cars, skyscapers etc.).

To put what I've said earlier in perspective, here are two examples of game art I think is absolutely great, without a single converging pair of lines:

At least one of the roofs in the screen from Gesundheit! (above-left of the cactus near the bottom of the screen) consists of more-or-less converging lines, and in general I think the buildings do roughly follow linear perspective or parallel projection. It's a great example of how perspective is not incompatible with stylization. Also, I'm pretty sure (going from memory) that while the buildings in Nelly Cootalot may all be seen face-on, there is normal scaling where things get smaller as they get further away, again according to the linear perspective rules.

So I would certainly argue that linear perspective is an essential skill for realistic drawing--not necessarily knowing the rules of construction and vanishing points and all that, but being able to determine roughly how shapes and spaces should look in a perspective drawing. But at the same time I don't agree (and we had this argument recently) that an artist has to master the rules before breaking them. In fact, I would propose that playing with the rules and learning when and how they can be broken (including listening when people tell you you're doing it wrong and your "wacky" perspective just looks shit) is an essential part of learning them.

[Khris]

At least one of the roofs in the screen from Gesundheit! (above-left of the cactus near the bottom of the screen) consists of more-or-less converging lines, and in general I think the buildings do roughly follow linear perspective or parallel projection. It's a great example of how perspective is not incompatible with stylization. Also, I'm pretty sure (going from memory) that while the buildings in Nelly Cootalot may all be seen face-on, there is normal scaling where things get smaller as they get further away, again according to the linear perspective rules.

That's all true of course.
However I got the impression that uoou thinks we want to turn every background into something fresh out of Google SketchUp and that's what I wanted to argue against.

[loominous]

Having taken the long "learn the rules" route, I've come to appreciate the fresh naive outlook of people unfamiliar with them. In many ways, I find that: 'You musn't know the rules, if you want to break them' to be equally true. (It's like listening to a language; once you know it, you can't objectively hear how it sounds anymore)

So when I hear people categorically declare that the first thing to do as a beginner artist is sit down and learn the rules, it strikes me both as a dull and crude welcoming to the supposedly free and imaginative world of art, as well as a way of killing this untainted perspective.

Or to continue a train of thought from a previous poster:

Bad art & wrong perspective is horrible to look at, bad art with good perspective is still bad art but not that bad

.. while Good art with Bad perspective is still good art.

[Monsieur OUXX]

Good art with Bad perspective is still good art.

I think that's a good perspective on good art with bad perspective.

[Moresco]

But the choice should be made intelligently not automatically.

Are you saying that you're more intelligent than 99% of the world?  I made the choice to learn linear perspective based on intelligence.  You see, I wanted drawings to look realistic!  I saw that linear perspective drawings DO look realistic! Oh shit?! guess what? I decided to learn linear perspective and now I'm HAPPY!

Seriously, I can't take you seriously.  Some of the things you say are so out there, you might want to sit down with someone and talk out your problems. =/