[game_edu] Are games art?

[Erin Hoffman]

Very bogged down, so apologies for the brevity of this response, but I
think it's important to counterpoint Crawford...

He's an intelligent person, and much of what he's saying in the
introduction is likewise intelligent, if a bit wordy -- but as for the
whole conclusion, especially the part that you quoted, Beth... he has
been far too far away from the games industry for far too many years
to be making those kinds of grandiose statements with any kind of
authority. He suffers from intense bitterness surrounding his dramatic
exit from the industry and still seems to be looking for reasons to
stay away, and then publishing those reasons.

I think the key with Crawford is to listen to him where he has
expertise (game design from over fifteen years ago) and let the rest
wash. In terms of what the industry is doing today and how you measure
the success of a current project, he simply has no data on which to
base his assumptions, which have been the same since 1995 when he
first declared "games are dead" -- ten years before Shadow of the
Colossus, Katamari Damacy, and Portal, just to name a few. 1995 was
the release year of one of my favorite games of all time, and truly a
work of art (Ecco the Dolphin: Tides of Time). So I think while his
previous achievements should be held separate and studied, we have
reason to question his modern declarations, and the perceived personal
injury from which they source. It would be a shame if future students
were scared off by this kind of thing.

In my opinion the industry is a better place for newcomers now than it
was in '99 when I started, and it was better then than it was in the
years before that. There are puts and takes, of course -- higher
volume, higher attention -- but in the aggregate I think it's easier
to break in now than it has been in years past, and easier to sort
through the crummy companies for the ones that take pride in their
work and in their workforce. Students should have no illusions that it
isn't a difficult industry, but it isn't what Crawford describes,
either.

--Erin

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 4:15 PM, Beth Aileen Dillon
<beth.a.dillon at gmail.com> wrote:

> I thought someone here might want to debate on this topic! Chris Crawford

> recently responded to 'Are games art?' on Notes on Game Dev. I'd love to get

> everyone else's take on this matter, especially given Crawford's general

> view on industry. "In other computing industries, the size of a program is

> measured by the number of lines of code; in the games industry, it is

> measured by the number of newbies you burn out during the project."

>

> Are we educating students to send them off to burn out or is there a hope to

> foster creative input?

>

> See http://gamedev.sessions.edu/special/art/ for posting comments.

>

> - Beth

>

> --

> Beth Aileen Dillon

> PhD Student, Simon Fraser University

> School of Interactive Arts and Technology

> Research Assistant, Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace

> http://www.bethadillon.com

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