I think if there’s one idea I’d seek to dismantle, it’s the idea that there’s a single correct way to do something. I believe that this approach creates problems for two reasons: First, similarity of approach tends to lead to similarity of outcome, which is fine if one is, say, building a bridge, but less desirable if one is creating art – and even when building bridges, there might always be a better bridge to build. Second, the belief that there is a single correct approach tends to lead to the belief that we know what that approach is – which leads to situations like a doctor being blacklisted for daring to observe that doctors who washed their hands between handling corpses and performing childbirths tended to lose fewer patients.
This is not to degrade the value of institutional knowledge, just to suggest that it doesn’t comprise the bounds of possible knowledge. We like to conceive of knowledge as a placid pool with new facts dripping in bit by bit, and slowly making the pool grow, but it is more of a boiling stew – every time you drop in a new knowledge potato it creates a splash and displaces some knowledge gravy all over you epistemological stove-top. In the sciences, each dollop of knowledge gravy has someone’s career built on it, so such new potatoes are often resisted by luminaries in those fields – despite this opposition being contrary to the very pursuit of science. Or perhaps this never happens, I don’t know, I’m not a scientist, maybe it’s fine.
Anyway, the arts are different in regarding different techniques and styles as not being in direct competition with one another but in broadening the available range of artistic expression – or, at least, that’s the institutional perspective. Individual artists, meanwhile, frequently sneer at styles and techniques as being amateurish, debased, or obvious – presumably in comparison to their own.
Then we come to game development, which has somehow become worse than arts or sciences in terms of prescriptive approach, inheriting the worst traits from both parents. AAA games – that is, games with multi-million development and marketing budgets – have in particular trended towards a style somehow both gaudy and monochromatic. Many critics and consumers mocked games of a decade past for being excessively brown and uninteresting, all in the name of realism – but I don’t see the current trend of dreary gray wet-looking surfaces with occasional bursts of hyper-saturated light and glowing particles (which somehow don’t affect any cast shadows) as an improvement. Regardless, this is what the forces that drive consumer demand have determined ‘good graphics’ looks like – akin to Michael Bay’s Transformers, all numbing greebled detail with no greater meaning.
Naturally indie games have their own version of what good graphics are – colorful, crisp, high contrast at a stable 60 frames a second. These constraints leave a lot more room for expression, but still cuts out developers who don’t possess the time, skill, budget, or executive function to achieve those results. There is more permissiveness for having ‘bad’ graphics in indie than in AAA – after all, for a AAA game to be visually unimpressive is to betray its very reason to exist – but the range of visual expression deemed ‘good’ is still restrictively narrow.
My primary interest is in expanding the range of what can be expressed – in ideas, in art, in science, in games, in personalities. Any time I see a unified conception of what quality and correctness looks like begin to set in, like a menu burned into an old TV screen, I get itchy. I’m not necessarily dissatisfied by the art or technology we have, but imagine what we have yet to imagine! There’s so many possibilities, and we’ve barely touched on the vast scope of what could be.
Go break some rules. Go make something that looks like shit, that’s awkward and idiotic and juvenile, that’s completely dysfunctional, that’s insulting and worthless. It might turn out to be great. What would the point of art even be if we knew what it looked like before we saw it?