Seeing the Magic Circle

I wrote a while back about the question of originality in games, and about the extent to which it is a result of cross-cultural travel (from the Japanese to North American markets, and possibly vice-versa).

Katamari Damacy, which I talked about in that earlier post, was original in every respect, so it was easy to overlook the particularity of its visual originality. With many console and computer games, critics (both academic and popular) may focus on visual originality to some extent. Virtual worlds criticism, on the other hand, is so focused on non-visual questions of architecture and system that this aspect of the experience of play is often glossed over.

Sure, we talk a lot about the interface, and about issues of perspective. First-person or isometric, everyone agrees, makes a big difference in the way that players in a persistent-world identify with their characters.

But in the great hubbub of the original debates about the success of World of Warcraft, I think its visual originality tended to be de-emphasized by many commenters. Certainly those who wanted to argue that WoW succeeded because of its formal systematization of MMOG play (its quest system, its levelling curve, and so on) didn't have much of a sustained interest in how it looked, and how its visual elements  and the overall aesthetic of the gameworld reinforced the immersive experience of gameplay. Those who saw WoW's success as a linear consequence of the money spent on its design, or of Blizzard's prior market image, took a similar position. Among players, there tended to be a split early on between those who saw the cartoonish, exaggerated visuals of WoW as disappointing in comparison to the technologically-demanding realism of EQ2 and those who were at least satisfied or even more pointedly devoted with WoW's visual scheme.

This is all coming back to me with great force tonight as a result of a session of playing the new Playstation 2 game Okami. Stripped down to its gameplay structures, it's not wildly original in the manner of Katamari Damacy. You have health points, power-ups, the usual jazz. But not only are those gameplay elements situated within a very interesting narrative and characterization, they're nested inside a visual design that is pretty much unlike any game I've played before, a game that draws deeply on  Japanese visual traditions and is often breathtakingly beautiful as a result. When it is beautiful in this fashion, it is not so in the standard mimetic or realistic mode of many computer games (say, Oblivion), but in a completely different kind of visual aesthetic.

Playing Okami made me think, "Have I ever played a MMORPG that even had a hint of this kind of visual creativity to it? That matched the world it was building to the visual toolkit  it used to represent it?" World of Warcraft is the only example I can think of that even gets slightly close. For any other, you might say, "Well, those graphics are nice", or admire touches: swaying grasslands on a planet in Star Wars: Galaxies, the look of space in EVE.

It makes me wonder, yet again, whether the consistent emphasis in virtual world criticism on systems and architectures of gameplay, on virtual sociality and economy, or on questions questions of identity between players and their avatars, don't leave out some important dimensions of why some worlds grab hold of players and others do not, about what we feel and think as we play.

Comments

[Matt Mihaly]

1.

(Just gotta say that I got Okami yesterday, and returned slapped it back in its return envelope 25 minutes later. The visual style made me dizzy unless I was standing still, pretty though it was.)

Our in-development graphical MUD/MMORPG completely eschews a "realistic" look primarily because so many other MMORPGs go for a "realistic", cookie-cutter look. Warhammer, Conan, Vanguard, LoTR, tons of much-lower-budget (like ours) MMORPGs. I completely fail to understand the logic behind this decision. I actually wonder if the designers sat down and MADE a decision or if they just assumed they'd be aiming for "realism."

I mean, there are lots of advantages to defining your own style, and making that style not "realism." When something is "realistic" people judge it much more harshly because it's attempting to imitate, precisely, what they are familiar with. It can only fail to imitate that precisely. Artists often like it because super high-poly, detail-laden, "realistic" models show off well in ones portfolio.

We actually attempted a more "realistic" style when we began, and realized that it just looked crappy compared to a stylized look. To be fair, that's likely because our our poly budgets are low, and "realistic" is tough to do with low poly budgets.

Incidentally, besides WoW, you might check out Rose Online for a less "realistic" 3d MMORPG.

--matt

[Peter S.]

2.

This question is reminiscent of the discussion of artificial simulation that... I can't find right now. Has a graph showing how people get more attracted to a...thing... as it approaches realistic depiction, then less attracted after a threshold where it seems zombie-ish, then more attracted as it gains the final realism to make it truly realistic.

Seems like a smart move to not try to emulate the real world while we're in the zombie stage and to stay in the happy cartoony stage.

Must Find Article!

[Mike Sellers]

3.

I believe you're talking about Mori's Uncanny Valley. A lot of this is hypothesis, not even theory yet, and yet it seems to hold up in a lot of situations. Then again, some seemingly more realistic elements work well in games (e.g. Medal of Honor, or anything with Speedtree), though others come off as rather flat and lifeless (I've written before about how to my eye the simpler but intentional World of Warcraft style is graphically more effective than say, EQII or Vanguard, both of which are more "realistic"). OTOH, the game "Bad Day LA" appears to have gone for a not human-realistic Tintin-esque cartoon graphical style (perhaps following Scott McCloud's advice that this would make the characters more broadly appealing), with results that place it deep in the repulsive part of the Uncanny Valley (from the excoriating reviews, this game had many other problems besides this risky move).

To Tim's final point, I agree -- we spend far too much time focused on more quantifiable things perhaps because they are quantifiable. Game design is scary. In MMOs we know how to set up guilds and combat and mana points and races and classes... but much beyond that you quickly get into unknown territory that can be difficult. As for low-graphics/high-creativity games, consider for example the elegance of the browser-based game flOw. Minimal graphics, simple yet deeper-than-it looks gameplay, and no 3D anywhere. I wish more MMOs were as enjoyable.

[Lurker]

4.

@ Peter S.

I think you must be referring to the phenomenon named the "Uncanny Valley":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

[Matt Mihaly]

5.

Mike, what is the deal with Flow exactly? I tried it for a few minutes and just got bored running around pointlessly eating up things in space. The music was nice, but beyond that, what am I missing?

--matt

[Peter S.]

6.

Thanks for having better retention than me.

I think that Ubisoft's strategy of dozens of MMORPGs will yield some useful information on Game Design's importance.

[Mike Sellers]

7.

Matt, there's a lot of self-discovery play there -- deeper and deeper levels you can go down (and back up) via an essentially invisible but intuit-able UI, different things to eat with different effects, and different things to run from or attack with various strategies. I think it's what Nicole Lazzaro would call 'easy fun' and definitely has a light flow component after a while (contrast to the high-attention/intense flow state of games like Tetris). For a very simple game there's a lot to it (sort of the inverse of mainline MMO gameplay ;) ).

[Bruce Baugh]

8.

Timothy: I see this as part of the legacy of programmer culture. Setting aside the urge to play pop psychologist with terms like Asperger's syndrome, since I'd only make a hash of it, I note that when I was growing up around Caltech and JPL programmers, a sort of secular gnosticism was very common. The more abstracted an idea, the better, in many cases, and essences were far more welcome than the complicated messy details of the flesh. That's changed a lot since then - many more programmers are likely to be great cooks, talented musicians, and the like. But even now, few of them are likely to have any systematic grounding in the visual arts' history and language; there's a lot of scattershot autodidacticism out there, not much serious method, and still the idea that the idea is somehow really more fundamentally interesting and valuable than its specific implementation in images and sounds.

The situation really is hugely improved from a couple decades ago - my first reaction to this post was a much grimmer sort of thing until I realized, hey, I'm drawing on impressions formed in the '70s, let me double-check those against actual recent experiences. The more I thought about it, the more positive examples came to mind of contemporary programmers who aren't fleeing the flesh at all. The next step is likely to be the missing method; it just may take a while.

[magicback (Frank)]

9.

I think there are a lot of different cognitive mapping going on. We are anchored by our reference points (what has come before), and too much of a transition away from our reference points hinders our appreciation and acceptance.

As for the success of the visual style of WOW, I believe the natural and smooth transition from the visuals of Warcraft III to WoW assisted in its appreciation and acceptance.

The takeway for me is that the transition towards realistic visuals has to be smooth. For example, the visuals on Polar Express or Final Fantsay didn't really work while the visuals on Shrek or Ice Age did. It has to work at the subconscious level. Minor defects will break the illusion, the magic circle.

So in the case of Lord of the Ring (the moviews), the effort and money put into the costume, location, visuals and so forth was worth every penny. It sucks you into the world of Middle Earth.

Many do not have the budget to replicate the detail used in LoTR, but as WoW did and proved effective, many can provide a smooth and consistent visual transition.

Okami is visually too different, LocoRoco is familiar, Katamari is also familiar, and Electroplankton and flOw has a familiar and consistent style. But for MMORPGs, we should explore the visual mastery shown in Myst and most recently in the Shadow of the Colossus.

Frank

[greglas]

10.

I'm with Bruce -- I think you can explain this by looking to MMO design culture in particular, which has a tendency toward 1) coding dispositions (which -- forgive my pop psych babble -- don't always map to intuitive and visual form of intelligence) as well as 2) a fetish for realism that is understandable given the history of what VWs have tried to accomplish.

Tie that into the need for 3) massive funding to get a visually lush MMOG off the ground, and then factor in 4) the fact that most MMOG funders are going to be risk-averse and also not inclined to appreciate stylistic innovation. With all that, you get the current situation where most of the visually "new" stuff you'll see are either from cross-cultural imports or an artisan shop like Blizzard that can afford, due to its brand strength and reputation, to take a different path.

[Das Tentakel]

11.

Personally, I think saying that WoW’s visual style helps the game’s immersiveness and is thus one of the game’s selling points is not correct, even grossly wrong. Many players and reviewers have remarked that what Blizzard has done is creating a visually beautiful world, but I wager few of them – unless they are either very young or used to be fanatical Warcraft III players – would have thought so at the outset. Unless, of course, they are people who have avidly followed the whole pre-launch hyping process so cleverly drummed up by Blizzard, in which case they would have “learned” to appreciate the game’s visual artistry. In short, it is a style players and would-be players had to learn to get used to, before fully appreciating it.

In fact, certainly in the beginning, the American-cartoony look of the game (colour palette, exaggerated features of houses and certain character models similar to American cartoons) seems to have worked against the game’s acceptance among mature gamers; many of my gaming friends (experienced roleplayers and fantasy lovers all) resolutely refused to play WoW because they thought the graphics absolutely non-immersive. I would go so far as saying that to many, possibly even the overwhelming majority of adult gamers, WoW’s visual style was an entry barrier. It certainly was to me; I only slowly changed opinion when I had seen many screenshots and watched many movies. I was only fully “converted” once my avatars had been in Stormwind, Ironforge and Ashenvale. Of course, to very young players the reverse probably applies, but I have the impression that the adult gamers form a much larger proportion of WoW players than the sub-teen crowd. Certainly, games like Fable or Psychonauts were NOT runaway successes, despite being both good games AND having beautiful but stylised graphics. Conversely, Oblivion with graphics that were considerably superior in terms of realism (and I happen to think art direction as well) to EQ II sold over 1.7 million during its first month or so of sales. Akatosh knows how many it has sold by now…

Most people, especially adults who’ve had their portion of fantasy in novels, illustrations, movies and so forth (or who have a considerable “visual library” of the historical imagery that is ultimately the basis for fantasy art) have a reasonably good, if still somewhat vague idea how a fantasy setting should look like; also, that when it’s meant for adults it “ought” to look either “realistic” or “stylised and artistic” and if it’s for kids it “ought” to look “cartoony”. However, as several have noticed, games like EQII are not realistic; rather, they fail to reach a level of realism that is sufficiently advanced to be believable. “Uncanny Valley” is just one part of it; colour palette (“ green and brown, meh.”), tree design, forest layout, architecture, city layout, arms, armour and clothing …all these things may or may not showcase the “failure at believable realism” at the visual level that plagues EQII and many other games (mmorpg’s and otherwise).
Ironically, many parts of WoW were much better at this than EQII; I yet have to see a forest in EQII that looks and feels as “forestlike” as Ashenvale or Elwynn Forest . On the other hand, all the smaller settlements in Azeroth are far too small and feature always the same kind of buildings – which is extremely immersion-destroying and clear evidence that, no, not everything in WoW exudes “polish”. Combined with the lack of variety in clothing, armour and character models, this is one of the aspects of WoW where the game bites itself in the ass because of its visuals.

[Michael Chui]

12.

Once upon a time, I attempted to extol the virtues of puretext to a friend. Said friend responded with, "I need graphics. I don't care if they're stupid little stick figures; there have to be graphics." I still don't understand him, and I wonder if his outlook is paralleled by any significant groups of people.

On a less related note, I want to throw out a caution. It's not an accusation, nor is it aimed at anyone in particular, but it IS a red flag that went up for me as I read down this thread. Be careful about making an artist/programmer division. Very careful. Bruce Baugh's comment is a good point on the subject. We already have an industry vs. academia problem; we don't need another such problem.

[Thomas Malaby]

13.

@Michael: About the text vs. graphics -- thinking about that always reminds me of the Julian so powerfully conveys the way that text MUDs appealed to those marked by high amounts of textual competence. For them, text was the most powerful mode for making and expressing and imagining. For those people, of course, nothing more seems necessary, because, in a way, nothing more *is* necessary.

[greglas]

14.

Michael> Be careful about making an artist/programmer division

Well, it's out there.

I recall, about twenty years ago, bringing my Mac into my high school for a demonstration of the new potentials of computer graphics. This was so odd that the vice-principal was called in to see it. I also recall, about ten years ago, the visual arts MFA program I was in, where many of the instructors would make off-hand disparaging remarks about computers and the "computer graphics" students (who were wigging out over Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator) were sequestered in their own room (with about 3 computers) on a different floor from the true studios. Regarding how groups of computer programmers I know have approached art in somewhat unusual ways -- I could go on.

But I know today we're in a different world, where many of the 20-something artists have grown up in an imaginative world of crafting by GUIs rather than oils and vine charcoal -- I can see this clearly. Still, I think it will take a few more years before their sensibility is the mainstream.

[Dave Rickey]

15.

Artists and programmers think differently, generally speaking. A programmer, in general, is used to chunking things into logical arrangements to a much higher degree than the average, while artists tend towards the reverse, to obsess over the arrangement of details.

I've seen both extremes when seeing how the two will go about designing a UI. A programmer doesn't care about how his UI is arranged visually, and not much about its logical arrangement (more precisely, he wants a *strictly* logical arrangement that corresponds to the underlying code). An artist wants it to be intuitive and visually appealing, even if that means that functionality must be dropped to fit the aesthetic.

--Dave

[Timothy Burke]

16.

Das: I don't think it's so much that World of Warcraft is "beautiful" visually, as it is that the visual schema of it is internally consistent and matches the mood and feel of the narratives and elements of the game, that the whole of the game is larger than the sum of its parts. Many other MMOGs, the visuals don't necessarily mesh: they're generic, or detailed in ways that stand apart from the gameplay or mood or narrative.

I bring up Okami to make this point not just because the game is beautiful to look at, but because its visuals so strongly reinforce a total expressive package.

[Bart Stewart]

17.

"Functional" and "aesthetic" sum up the mindset of the typical programmer and artist (respectively) pretty well, I think. It's not just a choice; it's a worldview, and it influences everything.

Which is why it's critical that the lead designer or creative director be someone who, either through temperament or experience, lives in both worlds. Particularly for a product with a long maintenance cycle like a virtual world, the functional consistency of the code (its features) is as crucial as the aesthetic consistency of the art (its style) for making a uniquely memorable product.

The greatest consumer products always seem to come from a team led by one person who communicates a coherent vision for both the verbs and nouns (the functionality) and the adverbs and adjectives (the visual style)....

[Andy Havens]

18.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned here yet is that a chief reason that WoW's chunkier, slightly cartoonier graphics work very well is that WoW's mythos is somewhat cartoonier and funnier. It is a bit more like a comic book and less like a Tolkien novel. More like an animated kids' serial TV show, and less like a dark, gloomy, Germanic/Norse tale. The graphics don't just "work," they "work with" a number of other elements; the writing, the history of the game, the humor, the (attempted and successful) broad appeal, etc.

Which is also where "functional" and "aesthetic," "designer" and "programmer" come together. Yes, they're different. I've got three art directors on my staff -- designers -- one of whom knows a bit of code. And a fourth who is going back to school to learn hard-core Java, AJAX, etc. Because there is such an amazing demand for people who can truly do both. Why? Because there is a fabulous place where *art* and *craft* meet, and when they do... yowza.

An architect can design an amazing looking building that will fall down in a stiff breeze. Good art, bad craft. A carpenter can build a house that will withstand a hurricane, but look like ass. Good craft, bad art. The melding of the two is what makes for truly great design.

So the *art* of the graphics in WoW, or in any game, can be seen as a function of not just how good they are in a vacuum... but how well they serve their purpose. Would the graphics of WoW work in a WWII genre MMO game? Blech. I think not. You get the point.

[Timothy Burke]

19.

That's pretty much one of the things I was thinking about, Andy: the cartoonish softness of WoW's graphics suit the humor and softness of much of the game.

[greglas]

20.

Maybe I'm just quibbling, but WoW seems "cartoonish" and "soft" in the sense that the style has a penchant for mass, lower detail, bold colors, and chiaroscuro. But there's a lot of that stuff in the work of NC Wyeth and I wouldn't call him cartoonish at all.

Soft is probably a good word. But rather than say cartoonish, I might say that WoW's visual style has vitality. And btw, I didn't want to bring it up, but we've talked about it here before: I think the avatars don't really work well in WoW. Maybe cartoonish is the right word for them.

[lewy]

21.

Single player games are making rapid strides towards answering the question "Can video games be art?". The pace of innovation now is probably comparable to the work of innovators like D. W. Griffith in the world of film. By contrast MMOG's lag behind. Is it even possible for multiplayer games to be artistically fulfilling in the same sense as something like "Okami" or "Shadow of the Colossus"?

As for the artist/programmer division, last year I saw a talk given by Dave Thomas at a software conference. At the end he put up a few slides of a jet fighter, the new Raptor I think. He asked the question, is this engineering or is it art? Its lines are sleek and aerodynamic, but also beautiful. Function and form are not exclusive with aesthetics.

Are visual artists still essential for games? After playing "Okami" for five minutes I would answer that with a definite yes. But games most closely resemble film in the artistic pantheon. A movie director may not have any basis in costume design, or scoring, or set design. He's not the director of photography, and he probably has only a minimal involvement at best in the editing process. All of those individuals, with non-overlapping areas of expertise, combine to create a sum which is greater than its parts and all of them are essential.

[Das Tentakel]

22.

Quote:

“One thing that hasn't been mentioned here yet is that a chief reason that WoW's chunkier, slightly cartoonier graphics work very well is that WoW's mythos is somewhat cartoonier and funnier. It is a bit more like a comic book and less like a Tolkien novel. More like an animated kids' serial TV show, and less like a dark, gloomy, Germanic/Norse tale.”

Actually, Andy, have you really taken a good look at WoW’s background story? The history of Azeroth? It’s pretty darn gloomy, if you ask me. Mass destruction, genocide, environmental destruction…

Just as for many people there is (an initial) “disconnect” between WoW’s visual style and how they think a (Tolkienian/western/pseudo-medieval) fantasy world should look like, so there’s a disconnect between the extremely gloomy Warcraft world and the rather bright and cheery graphics. Then again, some zones in WoW do look fairly gloomy – here, graphics, music and background story mesh in creating the appropriate mood. It’s not that the WoW visual style fits the world as described in its “lore”; rather, it’s the graphics that allows the (not always very subtle or sophisticated) humour to somehow fit in with the world. Also, WoW’s style, as well as its humour, are a direct evolution of the graphics of the three Warcraft games. Ironically, as the series progressed, the lore became more complex and quite grim and gloomy, meaning that the potential “disconnect” between visual style and world became greater and greater.

Then why does it work?

Well…

First, I suspect a lot of the WoW players, especially the initial waves, were people who were ex-Warcraft players, and who were already used to the Warcraft penchant for mixing a grim and gloomy background with cheery graphics and silly humour.
Second, a lot of people who entered the game where just kids – people whose “sense of style” is highly influenced by cartoons, and probably don’t get too much of the Warcraft background story anyway.
Third, a lot of players – adult or not – probably don’t care about story anyway. Many may not even “dig” fantasy. To them, the visuals would be, well, bright ‘n cheery.
Fourth, a lot of (potential) players who may have had something like a “immersion & suspension of disbelief” fascist attitude, like me, had seen a lot of screenshots and movies and had come to appreciate the style, despite an established preference for more “realistic/believable” graphics. Once you get used to the Warcraft visual style, you can definitely experience a “Sense of Wonder” in WoW. Well, until you start noticing the ropes and pulleys behind the cardboard scenery, that is . But that’s a perennial problem with computer games…

This is not to detract from the artistry of WoW’s artists. I think that as a team and as a “total package” they did a damn fine job and I prefer it to the likes of EQ, EQII and what I’ve seen of Vanguard any day. But I don’t think the Blizzard visual approach (apart from the dedication to spend the time and resources “to get the game right”) is a recipe that will naturally lead to success. In the end, I think they were extremely lucky that Warcraft was an established brand and its visual style an equally established, “iconic” look, while at the same time there was no competitor who did the game part just as right AND had “believably realistic” graphics done right. Related to this, while the oft-mentioned “soft hardware requirements” certainly helped WoW’s success, I am not so sure it was THAT much of a factor. Really good, hardware-hungry games typically sell well by themselves AND push hardware sales (new PC’s and new graphics cards), even though many players may complain about them. It does influence sales, of course. But it would have meant the difference between getting filthy rich and getting extremely filthy rich…

[Bruce Baugh]

23.

Among the older players I usually hang out with - folks who range from 30 up to 50 or so - the less realistic art style is actually a selling point. Many of us have personal uncanny valleys that don't always sync up with those of younger players, and the would-be realism of (say) Everquest simply isn't as appealing - it looks pervasively off somehow. The less realistic style is a positive advantage in our engagement with the world.

This isn't to deny that it works just the opposite way for others, since one of those others is a very good friend of mine.

I have a semi-formed theory to the effect that barriers between ways of thinking about the world get broken down when a new generation of practitioners is willing to step back and say "This is what I do, but it's not all I am." Early hacker culture had its weaknesses as well as strengths because for the people who came together to make it, that was part of celebrating their shared identity. Things that were vices in the world at large were assets to their work and play, and things that should have been vices for them too got a free pass sometimes. I knew guys at Caltech who kept artistic sides under wraps for fear of not fitting in with people they otherwise had a lot in common with.

Later programmers were more willing to say "hacking is what I do, and I love it, but it's not all that I am," and combine it with other apsects of culture. Some of them blazed relatively direct connections (Eric Raymond's profile of hacker culture as an appendix in the New Hacker's Dictionary is fascinating reading on that subject), and some of them simply insisted that ther was room for more than one driving impulse in their lives. So there are hackers who play music, musicians who also hack code, and people for whom music and hacking are two parts of any of several different wholes. Likewise with coding and art, and a bunch of other things. (Still waiting for hacking and historiography to emerge as a viable dyad, but that's another subject.)

Very often, the frontiers get blazed by people for whom verbalization isn't their best thing. But then along come people for whom wordsmithing is part of the fun, and we see new standards and new criteria emerging. It's just all very lumpy along the way.

[Andy Havens]

24.

Lewy asked: "Is it even possible for multiplayer games to be artistically fulfilling in the same sense as something like "Okami" or "Shadow of the Colossus"?"

Hell, yes. And more so, because we aren't restricted to one hand on the brush. We haven't even scratched the surface. Over on Raph Koster's blog, I've been ranting about how the new and, I assume (though I've not played) horrible "Virtual Laguna Beach" game from MTV is a good thing for the industry, because we are still in the growth phase of the VW/MMO space. At this point in time, any new ideas, tries, audiences, concpets, art, etc. is going to help grow the pie, the number of players, the investments, the features, etc. etc. etc. I can't see a thing wrong with as many different types of VWs and MMOs hitting the streets as possible.

And one way (I hope) that creative publishers, designers and programmers will take the genre is to allow players to explore spaces that are artistically different, metaphorically/visually non-linear, and beautiful in ways that affect game play, not just impact us in a "wow, neat mountain" or "cool spray of arterial blood" sort of way.

How? Well, I ain't a designer. But couldn't you have a game where certain types of visual effects are only possible when various numbers of players do various things together? And then, it could affect the environment as well? Permanently? As if to say, "The Clan of Red-Ink Was Here." Games where non-humanoid or even non-static avatars that look more like parts of the UI interact together to accomplish group, architectural goals. We will build our tower together from the bodies of our enemies' fallen drones...

VW as canvas. VW as clay. VW as seas of flux filled with iron rods and magnets and Legos and schools of fish with spot welder eyes. VW where the environment is people, and the players are pets. Or germs. Or fae. Or ghosts. VW planets built of nano where you start, at level one, the size of a molecule and have to grow yourself to compete at "bigger" levels. You can't be nerfed or ganked by level 20 players, because they're so big they can't grip you. You're dust to them.

I can't wait. All our 2.0 stuff is still very 1.0 in terms of true creativity. Very linear. Very last-media grafted onto this media.

Question: what can we do with MMOs/VWs that can NOT be done in single player video-games? And don't say "Big-ass guild and 40-person party raids." You can code that experience with NPCs. The stuff in SL is new; user created content. But it's still pretty much "player mimics publisher." What could you truly put out there in a massively-multiplayer setting that is truly unique to the genre? What can 10,000 players do together than 1 can't do by herself on a better engine?

By comparison, the Wikipedia is truly "massively multiplayer" compared to Britanica. I ain't sayin' it's better or worse, but you can't have a 1.3 million article encyclopedia without it being an MME.

What beauty can 10,000 or 100,000 or 1 million people create that is impossible for 1? Can a virtual world host a new kind of collaborative art form that would enable us to work together to sculpt (paint, draw, write, bloob, whatever) something beautiful and new?

From another recent post... we want *P*L*A*Y* and sometimes we get *W*O*R*K*... but can we ever design a game that becomes *A*R*T*? Not that has art embedded in it, but that breeds it?

[greglas]

25.

Bruce --

Thanks a bunch for the pointer to the Jargon file. I'm doing some work now on hacker culture and I hadn't spotted that yet.

[Michael Chui]

26.

but can we ever design a game that becomes *A*R*T*? Not that has art embedded in it, but that breeds it?

Yes, you
can

Though how to do it in a MMORPG setting?

We could, I don't know... include an Entertainer class? =P

[Michael Chui]

27.

Bah, that was terrible. Those "two links" is actually three links, only you can't tell because such things are arcane.

[Andy Havens]

28.

@Michael: First, thanks for the pointer at Patrick's site. That's now RSS'd in my reader. Nice stuff.

But all those are examples of art that's embedded in a game. I use the game to "do" art -- sandcastles, hairstyles, racers, etc. The game itself isn't the art.

It's the difference between the idea of the concert hall and the orchestra itself, or any other musical group. You and I (and Fran... we need Fran and her xylophone, eh?) can take our instruments just about anywhere and make music. We can have a concert in the concert hall, sure. In the same way, we can build sandcastles at the beach or design hairstyles at a salon in RL. You and Fran and I can also take our instruments to the park and play the same tunes there. Or we can go to my kid's school cafeteria and jam for the little un's. But we're not creating new "art." We're doing the same art in different locations. It's not "new media." It's a new venue for existing media.

Same with doing music in a VW. That's fine. And it's exciting. And new venues are important, and in the early stages of media, as I've ranted here before, what you usually see is the efforts from previous media translated into the new realms as completely and linearly as possible. We read newspaper editorial on radio. We take radio shows and air 'em on TV.

Again... It's OK. But at some point, somebody gets really clever and 3D and realizes that the potential for TV is not just "radio with pictures." That movies aren't just a way to record what happens on a theatre stage. That it's a different media, not just a different venue.

That's just starting to happen in VW's and MMO's, and it hasn't really, really happened much yet, IMO.

Some of what goes on in SL is close. When I heard about how the guy who invented Tringo then sold (or licensed, I forget) the boxes and other people then set up parlors... I went, "Yeah... that's VW specific." That could NOT have happend in a game where you didn't have user contributed content. It's a small difference, but it's there.

From an *A*R*T* standpoint, let's think about it. Group art occurs when many people contribute something to an entire effort. What kinds of things could be possible if, as I said, you had 10,000 player-artists all working on a game-project at the same time? Should the finsished work-world be (eventually) static? For the enjoyment of all? Or recorded? Or should it be fluid and ongoing? The activities of the gamers themselves being "the art," as in the playing of the music by musicians. Rather than some final set of pixels or video.

I'm not exactly sure what I'm talking about. But it seems to me that that "massively multi-artist online creation events" or something could be an enitrely new form of gaming/art. What do you get when 10,000 people try to "be a poem" at the same time? Or dance a video painting?

If you build it (a fun UI with wacky colors and a techno beat and tagging and some way to flirt and talk sexy), they will come.