Artistic Opulence Coming to Games Industry?

*note* Long time lurker, first time poster. *note*

The most recent developer diary for Assassin's Creed just got posted and it's got yet another example of something that I've seen more and more in popular media: artistic masturbation. Congruently, Ubisoft's stock is reported to be down by almost a dollar. If these two bits of information seem disconnected, read on.

Take the Lord of the Rings as an example from the movie business. That movie had daggers with inlays of actual gold. Actual gold. Most of these creations were never on screen, and those that were did not get close enough to the camera to be distinguishable for a hunk of plastic coated with metallic paint. And yet, they decided to go with the hand-carved dagger with the illegal ivory hilt inlaid with silver and gold. The craftsmanship that goes into such a thing makes it a work of art regardless of the thoughts of designers at a movie studio. The artists on that film designed cascading floral patterns for the Elvish things, sharp right angles for the Dwarvish things, etc., and filled literally hours of extra-features content by explaining the significance of all of it. WETA Workshop spent literally tens of millions on making sure every prop was ready to be inspected by a Middle Earth Historian. (God help me, such a person probably exists.)

The argument in favor of such opulence is that while you might not ever see the elaborate scarification on the leather sheathe, the one that depicts the story of the rise and fall of some King from the character's distant lineage, you'd know if it wasn't there. They seem to claim that there is an aura of authenticity that will seep into the cellulose of the film, lying devilishly in wait until its screening, then radiate into your eyes, filling you with a deep sense of how "real" the film is. You might not ever see the five hundred thousand dollars that went into etching the tree of life into the true-steel blade of every minion-toted broadsword, but you'll feel the difference.

Right.

Games have historically been the domain of tech too primitive, and teams to small and too starvingly poor to have been party to such practices. Who, while running into the limitations of DirectX 5, would think of modeling something that no player would ever see? Who, when thankful simply for the ability to make games for a living, would tell dozens of highly paid individuals to work on designing something so subtly that it will never spark a single neuron of genuine player recognition? Nobody.

But games are big business, now. Teams are enormous, development cycles are long, and budgets are growing exponentially. The twenty million dollar game would have been unthinkable just five or six years ago, yet today it is completely acceptable for a low-risk franchise. And as teams become larger, and technology becomes more accommodating, it's perhaps only human nature that the need and ability to stand out from the crowd manifests as overzealous pushing of one's own development niche.

Altair is an eagle. Alright. They pointed the tip of his hood, and flared his cape, and now he's an eagle. Fine. Now, if Jade Raymond had not pointed that out, would anyone have noticed? Even the name Altair is a reference to birds, and flying. Then again, we all know what Darth Vader means, and people were still surprised by that bombshell. The fact is that almost nobody notices these touches, and for those that do – is their experience enriched by the knowledge? There is a trend here, one which leans away from storytelling and pursuit of simply visual beauty, and toward the nebulous thinger of abstract feeling. While nobody will see that Altair is an eagle, we will undoubtedly feel the impact of their choice in the general atmosphere exuded by the character. Just as the addition of a largely invisible whetstone to Aragorn's sheathe will add to my enjoyment of their fantasy action film. Of course.

But Ubisoft is certainly not alone. Probably the biggest leader in this shift to Hollywood-level artistic indulgence is Bungie. Arguably no company has claimed the creation of so much back-story, while putting so little into the actual product. Granted, much of this has gone into the official novelizations. But also? A lot of it hasn't. This tendency to point to some minuscule architectural detail as indicative of the larger cultural preferences of the designer race certainly doesn't come from the utilitarian roots of game development. It comes from the new school, who have never known anything but the indulgence of a booming domestic market.

And this comes at the same time as cries from the outfield that the rising cost of game development will kill design innovation, destroy the hardcore game, or perhaps scuttle the industry as a whole. The length of development cycles rise, only to be lowered by some new shattering of the all-time team size record. The industry has not yet figured itself out.

Of course, making Altair an eagle is not the real problem. If Ubi employees had not spent time tapering the front of that hood, the game would have cost an identical amount of money to make. But the overall philosophy seems odd, given the climate in bureaucrat land - trim the fat, streamline the process, focus on what's important. In this market, even the biggest companies sometimes struggle to turn a profit; perhaps if the industry wants to continue complaining about increased development costs, it should abstain from the inefficiency of Hollywood opulence.

Until our industry has the security that comes from centuries' worth of experience, the meaningless self-indulgence will be more than simply a waste of time – it will be a waste of money. Altair may be an eagle, but Ubi is down a dollar.

HeroLeander wrote:

Of course, making Altair an eagle is not the real problem.

IMAGE(http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1393/736156994_4c9aadc0c2_m.jpg)

I don't know, he doesn't look very aerodynamic.

HeroLeander wrote:

artistic masturbation.

Is that like interpretive dance or something

As for your point, I suppose it's all a question of attention to detail. Without Tolkeins attention to detail, LOTR would have just been a book. But the details allowed it to grow into a generation spanning franchise.

Perhaps a game with the same level of love and attention could grow into the same, spawning books, films, etc. for years to come.

So...giving thought to backstory and establishing visual motifs and themes is bad? I'm sorry, but that's just rubbish. The cost of writing and concept art is miniscule compared to content creation.

Oh noes, people aren't creating games entirely based on spreadsheets. The horror.

EDIT: And to boot, the LOTR - Altair comparison is entirely specious. Using actual gold when it could be faked more cheaply is equivalent trying to establishing a visual motif that fits with the character? EVERY f*ckING COSTUME DESIGNER IN HOLLYWOOD DOES THIS. OH NO, SOMEONE GOT ART IN MY f*ckING SPREADSHEETS SOMEONE CRY ME A RIVER

EDIT2: I am tried, cranky and one bottle into a very sh*tty wine, so I am being overly harsh here. Sorry about the whole curb-stomping thing on your very first post, but I can't honestly see how you'd find artistic opulence in video games. If anything, it's the other way around.

Well-written commentary, Leander.

The feeling I get is that this hidden "opulence" is going to be used only as a gimmick to try to generate sales. It won't work. Attention to detail is one thing; details that serve no purpose is quite another.

I won't argue about the LotR thing; I think however there is great pressure to "get it right", whatever is done. (And yes, there are--were--full-time Tolkien experts; there was one on the team for Sierra's original attempt at a Middle Earth MMORPG.)

I'm personally very happy with the concept that the designers and craftsmen are putting love and attention to detail into their creations. The level of emotional investment that drove someone to put actual real gold into that dagger would have detracted from the feel of the movies. Whilst the dagger itself isn't important, one of the reasons I think the LOTR movies were so successful was the love that the creators had for it. Many of the thousands of people involved with the film bled themselves dry for it, presumably because they cared deeply for what they were creating.

I remember reading about how Valve created a very complex backstory for Half-Life 2, but put very little of it explicitly in the game. The backstory is there in graffiti, in empty playgrounds, in newspaper cuttings, in the art design of the world. I'd argue that you take very little of it in consciously, but I think it makes the difference between a game you play once and a game you play lots of times. You aren't playing it again simply because you may have missed a bit of art design, of course, but the details combine to create a compelling atmosphere that stands up to repeated experiences.

I think you can tell the difference between something created by someone really emotionally invested in its creation, and something created by a bureaucrat obsessed with trimming the fat and streamlining the process.

H.P. Lovesauce wrote:

The feeling I get is that this hidden "opulence" is going to be used only as a gimmick to try to generate sales. It won't work. Attention to detail is one thing; details that serve no purpose is quite another.

How would you generate sales from "assassin costume draws inspiration from birds of prey" or "very detailed backstory but hidden grants cohesiveness to alien architecture", if I may ask? Successful or no, this is the sort of details that are exactly the very opposite of purposelessness.

The need for a backstory to be written even if it's not going to appear in the final piece is one of those things that writers, filmakers, and game designers can argue about forever. If people think it helps them make better work then I can't complain about it.

The only time it bothers me is when artists/writers insist on including backstory in the piece even when it isn't necessary to the story. I didn't need three movies to explain how Vader got to be Vader, for example. That was handled very efficiently in one line of dialog in the original Star Wars.

I think we're seeing a swing that will eventually right itself closer to a more natural equilibrium. (Not without incident!) Development studios, producers, and distributors are heady with thoughts of the money in the gaming industry, even though most will never see any of it. This kind of mad cash is still fairly recent in the industry and I think eventually things will settle down a bit when studios' crazy development costs lead to more and more financial failures. Not every game can be a smashing success.

I am inclined to agree with the hypno-toad, but I am not sure why.

DudleySmith wrote:

I remember reading about how Valve created a very complex backstory for Half-Life 2, but put very little of it explicitly in the game. The backstory is there in graffiti, in empty playgrounds, in newspaper cuttings, in the art design of the world. I'd argue that you take very little of it in consciously, but I think it makes the difference between a game you play once and a game you play lots of times. You aren't playing it again simply because you may have missed a bit of art design, of course, but the details combine to create a compelling atmosphere that stands up to repeated experiences.

Interestingly enough, I got the same kind of mental kick reading Leander's post as this. It's forming itself into an article as we speak.

What bothers me a lot more about latest game development trends then occassional artistic opulence is the "special" content. Content that you need to work for above and beyond just paying for the game. Unlockable content, inaccessible areas until for whatever reason, etc. If I paid for the game same as everybody else, I want to have access to all the content that everybody else has access to, without having to jump through whatever hoops. I'm primarily looking at you WoW! There is so much content that is just plain inaccessible to people who "have a life" above and beyond WoW. I've seen MC and BWL (once). No other 40 man raid. I've been to Kara once and clearly have no chance in hell of ever hitting the new 20 mans. Yet I'm paying for it all. Just so that the creme de la creme of the playerbase can have their special fun.

Implying that the Lord of the Rings filims would've been just as good if they'd gone with the production values of "Willow" instead makes me a sad pirate kitty.

When I advise my students to create a backstory for their characters, it is so they understand the character better. Same goes for environments. If you can't answer a simple question like "Why is he wearing that particular material" then you are not in synch with the character you are creating and are prone to add on details for the sake of adding details. By creating a rich background, you allow the artists and anyone involved to pull from that when working on characters or environments.

It's pretty common in film and games both. I would go so far to say that it makes the difference between a "Final Fantasy" and a "Magna Carta" where the style is aped from other places.

So while I can understand your thoughts, I don't know if it's really a problem. In the case of LOTR, there is extra money being spent, but in games it is simply part of a well thought out design process that should be done anyways.

So my question to you is "Are you upset at this because of the money? Or are you upset because you don't have access to all this extra content?"

Farscry wrote:

Implying that the Lord of the Rings filims would've been just as good if they'd gone with the production values of "Willow" instead makes me a sad pirate kitty. :(

Willow wasn't a fake little person, though. There was a total air of authenticity.

Sephirotic wrote:

So my question to you is "Are you upset at this because of the money? Or are you upset because you don't have access to all this extra content?"

At the very least, if there's anything lacking in terms of gameplay, writing, or QA, it strikes me as a failure to prioritize.

Baggz wrote:

As for your point, I suppose it's all a question of attention to detail. Without Tolkeins attention to detail, LOTR would have just been a book. But the details allowed it to grow into a generation spanning franchise.

Details in written material are a completely different beast. If I work my ass off to make sure that the buckles on Sam's backpack have precisely the right amount of tarnish, two people in the world will know -- me, and the guy that I show it off to. If I write about the tarnish level of those buckles in my book, everyone who reads my book will know. Huge difference. I think Leander's talking about excess, not attention.

An interesting and very good argument. Unfortunately i disagree because i don't think that we are quite at the point you think we're at in the development of games. Too few designers/developers actually create and stick to the world they are making - it's only just starting to show through in the larger budget games and even then there's the more than vague hint at directness that has permeated gaming since its conception.

Up until this point, most games have focussed on gameplay (even if the game sucked) and the ones that focussed on story or the world have either flopped (perhaps to critical acclaim or not) or been well-known and widely acclaimed. I believe that we're heading into a renaissance of gaming tradition with strong gameplay dynamics grounded in the knowledge of 30 years of game's design and a strong artistic movement in the game design process, aided by technology of the consoles (because the PC market just isn't big enough to drive the large-scale adoption of these artistic values) and realisation that we can rival film and books for depth.

I suppose you could compare it most directly to art revolutions - where the mechanical knowledge gained from previous artists has been applied to a certain design philosophy. Art changes from merely drawing a world to creating a new one by interpreting/reinterpreting.

Actually, we notice quite a lot more detail than we think. Usually we just can not really verbalize what it is we just saw, but those graffiti and golden daggers *are* noted somewhere in our brain. It`s like color and shape coding - cinematographers do it in movies all the time. You dont come out of movie saying: "I felt so touched in the end because the final frame was tinted in that and that color and shadows were forming such and such shapes. You just say "damn, what a touching movie". Yet, those tints and shapes DID influence you, it`s just the way our brains are wired to respond to different visual, sound and contextual stimuli.

There`s always point of diminishing returns, of course, but thats another discussion and varies from case to case.

Alien Love Gardener wrote:
H.P. Lovesauce wrote:

The feeling I get is that this hidden "opulence" is going to be used only as a gimmick to try to generate sales. It won't work. Attention to detail is one thing; details that serve no purpose is quite another.

How would you generate sales from "assassin costume draws inspiration from birds of prey" or "very detailed backstory but hidden grants cohesiveness to alien architecture", if I may ask? Successful or no, this is the sort of details that are exactly the very opposite of purposelessness.

Well, how do you learn about those things? Through PR hype. Call it a Leander fakeout: you invest a tiny amount of resources into "cool feature X that few people care about", then crow about it publicly. Fans may well make positive inferences about how cool, attentive to detail, or respectful of the source material you are. Building faith in a brand is an intangible, but I believe it drives sales.

Just my belief about how this sort of thing is used. You may well disagree. I won't rebut any more; you've been a very grumpy Finn today, and I don't want to add to it.

Most wrote:

Actually, we notice quite a lot more detail than we think. Usually we just can not really verbalize what it is we just saw, but those graffiti and golden daggers *are* noted somewhere in our brain. It`s like color and shape coding - cinematographers do it in movies all the time. You dont come out of movie saying: "I felt so touched in the end because the final frame was tinted in that and that color and shadows were forming such and such shapes. You just say "damn, what a touching movie". Yet, those tints and shapes DID influence you, it`s just the way our brains are wired to respond to different visual, sound and contextual stimuli.

There`s always point of diminishing returns, of course, but thats another discussion and varies from case to case.

But if the acting or dialogue is horrible, the lighting isn't going to help much.

wordsmythe wrote:

But if the acting or dialogue is horrible, the lighting isn't going to help much.

There isn`t really discussion about it, is there? No one says that golden daggers are make or break LotR feature. But both games and movies are complex beasts, consisting of number of elements. LotR actually isnt much of a good example. Those guys had to work their butts off to ensure that so fussy fans as Tolkien-crowd were pleased. Wheather or those damn daggers helped but we can at least agree that they mostly succeeded in that.

Most wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:

But if the acting or dialogue is horrible, the lighting isn't going to help much.

There isn`t really discussion about it, is there? No one says that golden daggers are make or break LotR feature. But both games and movies are complex beasts, consisting of number of elements. LotR actually isnt much of a good example. Those guys had to work their butts off to ensure that so fussy fans as Tolkien-crowd were pleased. Wheather or those damn daggers helped but we can at least agree that they mostly succeeded in that.

But unlike in movies and some books, games seem to focus on the visual details to the detriment of what I personally consider to be more important aspects, such as writing.

That may be one of the best first posts I've ever seen from a new forum member. Great work and very thought provoking.

This will be the Thread of the Week on this Wednesday's podcast.

Certis wrote:

That may be one of the best first posts I've ever seen from a new forum member. Great work and very thought provoking.

This will be the Thread of the Week on this Wednesday's podcast.

Now you went and gave it away! It's supposed to be a surprise!

Arguably no company has claimed the creation of so much back-story, while putting so little into the actual product. Granted, much of this has gone into the official novelizations. But also? A lot of it hasn't. This tendency to point to some minuscule architectural detail as indicative of the larger cultural preferences of the designer race certainly doesn't come from the utilitarian roots of game development.

Actually a lot of that architecture is rooted in the utilitarian roots of game development. The common shapes and styles of the Forerunner are adapted from the tiling textures used in Bungie's previous games. Originally those designs were picked because they tiled well on a floor, but when you pluck one out and make it the overall shape of a ten story, alien structure it still looks nice. You don't ever have to reinvent the wheel, but it can be damn fun.

I don't always agree with some of Ubisoft's decisions, but I do hope they continue to reward the "artistic opulence" that results in meticulously crafted, believable worlds for me to fart around in.

I don't always agree with some of Ubisoft's decisions, but I do hope they continue to reward the "artistic opulence" that results in meticulously crafted, believable worlds for me to fart around in.

That pretty much sums up my thoughts. If I wasn't just surfacing from a week "off the grid" I'd probably say more, but I for one am glad for all the artistic opulance that game/movie/whatever producers want to put into their creations.

I wouldn't confuse artist effort with artistic opulence, though. I think by definition, if something adds to the experience, it doesn't qualify as what he's talking about. Note the use of the word "masturbation" at the beginning. Masturbation doesn't accomplish anything. Well, not much. I mean... some, but, uh... what was my point?

zeroKFE wrote:
I don't always agree with some of Ubisoft's decisions, but I do hope they continue to reward the "artistic opulence" that results in meticulously crafted, believable worlds for me to fart around in.

That pretty much sums up my thoughts. If I wasn't just surfacing from a week "off the grid" I'd probably say more, but I for one am glad for all the artistic opulance that game/movie/whatever producers want to put into their creations.

The point is that opulence by definition doesn't add to the experience and you can't notice it. So you can't really be glad for what's not there. Attention to detail is something else.

And I think the LOTR example is pretty solid, but this example for Assassin's Creed isn't. For it to be excessive and unnoticed it'd have to be generating art assets for something they know will never actually end up in the game. Or doing tiny glyphs on a ridiculously sized texture then shrinking it down to 5 pixels on the screen. And I just don't see alot of that.

Writing and backstory is different because it's so insanely cheap compared to the rest of the game. If you can spend $1k writing some extra backstory that saves artists down the line from being confused and wasting effort to the tune of $100k, it's worth it financially.

PyromanFO wrote:

For it to be excessive and unnoticed it'd have to be generating art assets for something they know will never actually end up in the game.

You mean like "Hot Coffee" assets in GTA?

If you are a bureaucrat in a creative, knowledge-driven industry and try to trim the creative, knowledgeable people's outlets away, you'll soon find yourself out of a job because these people were your most important resource.