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Artistic schools of game design

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3 comments, last by Paul Cunningham 23 years, 8 months ago
An interesting thought occured to me about how similar game design is to art. There seems to be different preferable styles of game designing amongst us. It seems very similar to the way art schools have evolved over the previous centuries. There''s realists, abstract etc and there also seems to be this sort of thing going on in game design. Maybe they should be clarified for the sake of understanding one''s sytle in game designing??? I''m not saying that people would go about saying "I''m making a abstract realism game" but rather "I think a bit of this sytle if game design would work well here". "So you're the one that designed that game are you?" *Gulp* "Umm, yeah"
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Our problem, I think, is that we''re not even that well defined after 20+ years. We''re just coming out of the cunieforms stage, so it''s a bit hard to start breaking into camps.

''Course, if you look at my ramblings in the Writing Forum, you can see the happy beginnings of an artist schism already! "Yes, I''m from the story emphasis school of thought." "Blasphemy! The design-only school is vastly superior" "Ignorant wretch!" "Blithering fool!"

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Just waiting for the mothership...
--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...
The irony here is that the first (computer) game designers seem to have gotten it right. They didn''t have cool graphics or sounds to enhance their games (as we do today), but they were fun anyway.

If I were to place myself into a school of game design; I would like to be in the "Old School" of game design.

Make it fun!

Dave "Dak Lozar"Loeser
Dave Dak Lozar Loeser
"Software Engineering is a race between the programmers, trying to make bigger and better fool-proof software, and the universe trying to make bigger fools. So far the Universe in winning."--anonymous
quote: Original post by Dak Lozar

If I were to place myself into a school of game design; I would like to be in the "Old School" of game design.

Make it fun!


Yup, if I ever muster the cash to start my own shareware gig, and someone doesn''t beat me to the title, it''s gonna be called "Old School Games" and have a link to MAME!



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Just waiting for the mothership...
--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...
Actually I think that the concept of stuff like impressionism which doesn't actually reproduce the scenes intact, but gives an impression by using more general areas of colour (... I'm not an artist), and hopes to also give emotional content to a scene.. is like game design now ! Or that we should somehow be able to learn from it.

Ie. We are trying to give the impression of characters, places, interactions etc.. without necessarily having the technology to do all of this in a realistic manner... so we marshall our technology, resources and 'artistry' to create the best impact. (give the impression that the world is living etc,.).

There are definitely some styles in evidence in games nowadays, generally the sports games tend to be more realistic.. forsaking the less realistic, but more character(ful) graphics and sound of earlier games (Sensible Soccer, Kick Off etc).. It would be good to see some more games which try to give the impression of being a player / at a match.. so that the muddy graphics give a feeling of being at a downcast match,.. maybe where the mud itself even reflects the mood and score of the players..

Edited by - Ketchaval on October 16, 2000 5:12:05 PM

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