Chasing realism is a trap.
This might be true of art in general, but it’s video game graphics that keep reminding me of it. Chasing realism is an expensive luxury. Unless realism is a core part of whatever you’re trying to make, it’s probably not worth fixating on it. That’s because…
Continue readingMy World Seed creation process has slowed down. The hard part isn’t the words, though.
The hard part is finding artists. Locations keep coming to me, but without art I’m reluctant to publish the Seeds. I know I have good written content, but the art really helps. It convinces me that I’m offering something more than my own words (the value of which I’m far too ready to dismiss).
Sorry, I was wrong about the hard part. The hard part is having a contract I’m willing to use with artists. I’m sure I can find artists via several different channels, if I reached out through those. I have a short list of places to put calls for art, after all. But I don’t want to reach out without a written contract.
I might be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Unfortunately, from the horror stories I’ve heard I’m also confident that having a bad contract can and will come back to bite me.
My first two World Seeds have art made by people with whom I have some kind of personal relationship; either I know the artist myself, or they’re within my immediate circle. There’s some basis for mutual trust. There’s some history of collaboration with myself or with someone else I know.
Without that, I don’t want to move forward on a wing and a prayer. Is that a mistake? Maybe. It certainly feels like one. It feels like I’m sitting on my hands and doing nothing, even though I keep adding to my collection of location descriptions to use in the future. I’ve posted forty nine of those so far to Patreon, and have thirty one more finished first drafts waiting in the wings (eighty in total). I average a little over a new one every week, more or less.
I have a few leads on contracts and contract advice, and expect to receive those reference materials in the near future… but there isn’t a clear timeline for that beyond “soon.”
Maybe, then, the right choice is to put together art-free versions and sell them for less. At least if I do that I’ll be moving finished products out the door, things that will require a minimum of additional work to fill with art once I have a contract ready. Doing that would allow me to publish an art-free Seed within a couple weeks, and another one within a couple months.
That isn’t what I’d dreamed of for this project—I’d thought about selling art-free Seeds while first developing this project, but incorporating visual art was always the goal. Sadly, that’s not where I am right now. If I want to make visible progress, it’s time to change course and ship something while I wait for the contracts and visual art to catch up.
Expect to see those art-free versions come out soon. In the meantime, if you want to see the currently available World Seeds, check out my stuff on DriveThruRPG.com.
This series of thoughts arose as I started composing a review for Even Though I Knew The End, a book by C.L. Polk coming out this November. I’m really enjoying it so far, I might talk about it more here. The review will be on GeeklyInc.
These thoughts have almost nothing to do with that book.
The genre fiction conversations I grew up hearing, and the ones I’ve usually seen bandied about in pop culture, approach genre fiction the way mercantilists approach markets. By this logic, genre fiction is a zero-sum game of capitalistic bloodsport. Any pieces of art inside the same niche must beat each other to pulp as they fight for limited market share and cultural value, to the exclusion of any other piece of art. This is a perversely Highlander-ish perspective in a world built from layers upon historical layers of art, influence, and nuance.
From an artistic perspective, from the perspective of someone who loves genre fiction, this zero-sum game is a lie. Every new piece of genre fiction isn’t slipping in others’ blood as it bludgeons the opposition in a mercantilist cage match. Instead, it’s adding another layer to the geological strata of our culture and our art.
Art builds on art builds on art, in a continuous dialectic. Genre fiction responds to the pressures and inspirations of culture and life, and it grows out of the art (and other influences) which feeds its artist. Genre fiction isn’t inherently locked in a murderous struggle with itself, because every new piece broadens our experience and our palette—and various pieces may coexist despite their dissonance.
Two (maybe obvious) caveats:
The artists, their ideological perspectives, and the ideologies espoused in their art may all be in conflict with each other. Some points of view aren’t hospitable to the existence of others. I’m just saying that their art isn’t inherently in conflict outside of its ideological disagreements.
And I’m not trying to belittle the marketing departments who struggle to win that aforementioned market share for their companies’ projects. They’re working within the constraints of their system, the constraints of our current publishing industry, and I’m not offering alternatives to that system here. Beyond that, as long as we’re in a capitalist system there is pressure to fight for the audience’s time and attention—artists need to be paid for their art, so they can support themselves. I’m simply saying that the art exists outside the market free-for-all as well.
Back to my geological metaphor for the dialectic…
I like the image of geological strata of culture because it gives me concrete imagery with which to talk about synchronic and diachronic perspectives. In this the synchronic is a snapshot in time across a broad area, a landscape painting or topographical map, while the diachronic is a deeper dive tracing one particular vein of (l)ore as it changes over time, an excavation of one location tracing its history back through time layer by layer. The synchronic speaks to a broad simultaneous state of the cultural experience, giving precedence to the most recent and the most impactful influences at the specified time. But the diachronic reveals how a genre emerges from its precursors, how it differentiates itself and grows, and how it diverges from and interweaves with other pieces of the creative cultural landscape.
I also like this image because it gives the lie to the idea of genre canon. There is no past piece of genre fiction which is mandatory reading, only pieces which give diachronic context for current art. It may be useful to know about the presence of those old stories, ossified to the point of cultural bedrock, but they should be read in context as the product of their own cultural landscape rather than as essential cultural truths.
With that in mind, I find it easier to listen carefully when someone says “you must read this.” Do they mean “I require that you read this before I consider you part of my group”? Or do they mean “this will give you important context for these other pieces of culture”? If it’s the first they’re probably being an asshole. If it’s the second, maybe they’re offering a route into the diachronic cultural depths.
And because of all this, I love asking people about what else they’re reading (or watching) that is similar to other books they’ve mentioned, and what else they’ve enjoyed in general. No one person is broadly read enough to give a full synchronic view, and so each individual snapshot gives me a better understanding of the genre landscape overall. Trying to make my own map from all the different pieces is like a game for me, and sometimes I’m fortunate enough to learn of stories taking their genres in totally new directions.
Speaking of which…
Even Though I Knew The End is so beautifully aligned with noir (so far, I’m not done reading it yet) that it doesn’t feel like it changes anything about its genre. Except… so much noir is almost comedically devoted to male protagonists and period-piece toxic masculinity, and this story—despite all its love of the trappings and conventions of noir—isn’t that. It feels reminiscent of Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw in that way. I love it. Something about how it approaches noir genre fiction from a queer woman’s perspective feels revolutionary, a little like how the first season of Jessica Jones felt years ago (though less gut-wrenching so far). It is a beautiful diachronic gift, so like and yet so unlike its own genre. I haven’t finished it yet, but I expect I’ll recommend it as soon as I do.
You can find the first two World Seeds here. If you read and enjoy these World Seeds, please leave a positive review. That would mean a lot to me.
My goal, as I said a little while back, is to continue producing these Seeds for the foreseeable future. If you’d like to see the process in action, learn about how I’ve repeatedly edited out half—or even two-thirds—of the words in a piece, or see the art as it moves from concept to completion, you can do that at Whimsy’s Throne.
There’s still more to do, of course. I want to find another artist to work with next—if you make art, and would be willing to make something like what you can see in those Seeds for $400, let me know. I also want to have more legible covers for the DriveThruRPG store, which will require some tinkering.
And I’m trying to figure out where in the World Seeds (and how) to add a reference to Ginny Di’s video about advice she struggled with as a novice GM. I want these World Seeds to be as accessible as possible, to engage people in as many ways as possible (hence having both art and words). And while I can’t address the audio-preferred crowd very well in my pdfs, I can share videos that fill that gap. And I think her video has a usefully different approach to a lot of the advice my World Seeds give or imply.
It’s not advice that veteran storytellers are likely to need, but these World Seeds are supposed to be accessible to storytellers of all skill levels (ideally without feeling pedantic and overbearing). And while you could (and likely would) reach her conclusion by reading lots of material from The Alexandrian (like this, or this), I think she does a good job of saying it fairly concisely… and in a way that some GMs might understand more readily. I don’t know whether I want to expand World Seeds into a broader “RPG education” tool, or whether I want to do that in some other format, but I keep finding tidbits to add because I want these World Seeds to be a complete package for people at any level of comfort and confidence with storytelling.
Next week I might miss a post, as I’ll be traveling. I’ll be back before too long though. You should see me here again the week after.
I’ve made a DriveThruRPG storefront for my World Seeds project (see Whimsy’s Throne for details). I’ll link to that after I’ve uploaded my first Seeds. I knew this step was coming, once I had another finished Seed ready for publication. And now I’m dealing with the intricacies of posting content on DriveThruRPG while trying to figure out how to optimize the PDFs I’ve made for general distribution. I don’t want to publish content that immediately breaks when a stranger tries to open it, after all.
Unfortunately for me, I also don’t want to optimize my published content such that the art turns fuzzy and indistinct. This might be an issue.
My next steps are to upload the two World Seeds I have thus far. I’m making one available for free, and one for cash. Then I need to find another artist I like working with. Meanwhile, I’ll keep chugging along: writing more rough location descriptions and expanding existing descriptions into full-fledged Seeds.
My goal with this project has always been to produce a bunch of these things. And I want them to have notably distinct art styles for each Seed, for the most part. If I can have different artists bringing distinct styles (or experimenting with styles that are new to them), that’s perfect. I’m happy to do repeat work with artists, of course—I’ve really enjoyed collaborating with the artists I’ve worked with so far. I look forward to working with them again—I just don’t want the Seeds to be tied to only one style. The more variations, the merrier.
My hope is that I can have a varied body of artwork and styles reminiscent of the huge variety that was present in early 90’s Magic: the Gathering art. That’s what I grew up with. And while some of it was bad, I loved the way I could find so many totally novel art styles in the same game. During the 00’s MtG homogenized their style significantly, allowing some variation between sets but building a unified “house style.” While I can see how that makes sense for a company managing such a large quantity of content (and a company concerned with consistency in its artistic brand), I feel like MtG lost something when they stopped having such significant variation in artistic style from one card to the next. The individuality and experimentation faded away.
Given that I’m trying to build a product that engages people on as many levels as I can, and which appeals to as broad a group as possible, I feel like changing up art from one Seed to the next is my best option. If someone hates one art style, maybe they’ll love a different one and pick up that Seed. The dream would be for people to love and use every World Seed, but I’ll absolutely settle for catching people’s eye with a few different options.
I liked this movie, but had some complicated feelings about it.
On the one hand:
Soul is, in my opinion, a higher quality movie than many other current American movies. I enjoyed it, and yes, it did make me cry a bit. Soul also does a better job of including non-white people, and specifically black people, than most previous Pixar movies. The same is true of Soul in comparison to animated movies in general, beyond Pixar. As such, it represents an improvement on the current state of American movies both in terms of representation and in terms of other elements of artistic quality. Basically, yes, Pixar continues to know how to make good movies.
On the other hand:
Doing a better job of including non-white people, and specifically black people, than most previous Pixar movies? That’s a comically low bar. The same holds for most movies in general. It honestly isn’t hard to expand the portrayal of black characters beyond being poor, criminal, or poor and criminal… and yet American film and TV continues to stagnate there (with a few notable exceptions). So while Soul does improve on this front—and I’m glad that it does!—I’m reluctant to give Soul too much credit beyond acknowledging and being glad that Pixar is moving in the right direction.
Perhaps more importantly, there are a number of critiques of the movie—predominantly from people of color—about how people of color show up in the movie. These critiques include but are not limited to the discomfort and weirdness around *SPOILERS* putting a white woman’s voice in a black character’s body for a decent chunk of the film, or having the black character be disembodied for much of the runtime *END SPOILERS*. While my opinion on this front really doesn’t matter, these critiques seem fair to me.
Where does that leave Soul?
I enjoyed watching it. I think it’s a good movie. I would have liked to tweak the end a smidge to hone a theme that I think was present but not quite fully realized… but that’s okay. I also think those issues mentioned above are real and present, and the critiques I read (or which were read to me) around the time Soul came out make sense.
If we lived in a world where there was not such a poverty of representation for black people in movies, animated or otherwise, I think none of these critiques would be especially trenchant. If we lived in that world, Soul would simply be a good movie with touching observations about what it means to be a human, to be alive. As part of a larger constellation of abundant and varied representations of black people, Soul would be great.
We’re not in that world, not yet. We have a long way to go. Soul is a step in the right direction, but it’s not perfect. We have to keep moving.
A side note… I have to remind myself sometimes that it’s okay to make mistakes, and it’s okay to make art that isn’t perfect, or doesn’t match the ideal in my mind. And, when I screw up, I have to remember that anyone who walks is going to fall on their ass sometimes. I must keep my art sufficiently removed from my self that I can accept criticism of it (and can critique it myself) without throwing myself into debilitating self-doubt, anxiety, and depression. And then, of course, I have to try again.
Some of my patience for Pixar and Soul comes from the fact that I literally don’t have skin in the game. But some of it comes from wanting people to make art, and knowing that that means accepting some missteps along the way (as long as people are willing to learn from them, unlike J.K. Rowling’s transphobia for example).
Will Pixar learn to do better? Will they continue trying to do better? I don’t know. But I hope they do. And they can improve things by doing more of what they already do, and what they’ve already started to do.
Pixar is really good at making meaningful stories that I have treasured for years. I’d like them to keep doing that, and I’d like to think that they’re good enough, skillful enough, and have their hearts in the right place enough to help relieve that poverty of representation I mentioned before. Pixar can’t do it on their own, but they (and many other folks) can make life different. Better.
I look forward to it.
This brings me back to my terribleminds flash fiction habit. This week, our prompt was to use a character someone had created last week and write up to 2000 words about them. By my count, I’ve got 1847 below the fold. The character I used is inspired by the post here, by Pleasant Street. I say inspired because, while I use features of the character Pleasant Street created, I largely do away with the setting that they made to go along with her… not because I didn’t like it (I did), but because my ideas took me in a different direction. I hope that you like it, and I especially hope that Pleasant Street is able to appreciate it. Enjoy.
This update is totally last minute, born of a recognition that I forgot to make my usual post today. In fact, by my clock, I’m already four minutes too late. I did spend a goodly portion of my day traveling, but… yeah.
Fortunately, I have some awesome news to share. Do you remember the time that I mentioned wanting to write a Tintin flowchart (way back in January)? I just shared the underlying aim, of writing a new era’s Tintin comics, with one of my friends. They responded by spending fifteen minutes drawing a picture of female Tintin with Snowy, striding along in her trench coat. It looked really good. They were really excited and want to talk with me about this project. So now I’m really excited too. Hell, I just busted out a big goofy smile for no particular reason. No, not true, it’s for a very particular reason; this project is something that someone else wants to work on with me!
I’m not writing this to tell you that you should expect something soon. I’m writing this to tell you that some day, maybe a few years from now, I’ll have another post to tell you about how awesome this thing I’m working on is, and how anxious I am about making it worth your time. But I think that maybe, just maybe, I’ll be telling you that because I have some good old Tintin-esque glorious adventure for you to feast your eyes on. I’m really excited about this.
As the title says, games are art. I begin with this because I have gone through multiple false starts in getting this argument going. While I believe most other gamers would agree with me, making this topic seem rather pointless, I have also noticed that a good deal of the rest of the world still does not acknowledge games as an artistic medium. The debate over the artistic merit of games was quite loud years ago when Roger Ebert declared, “Games can never be art.” and since it has quieted down. Unfortunately I think the quiet only really occurred because the only people speaking were gamers. Well, that’s still going to be true today, but perhaps I can at least outline my argument well enough that if a non-gamer comes across it they can begin to understand what this medium means to us.
To begin I think it would actually be valuable for everyone to first watch Kellee Santiago’s TED Talk to which Ebert’s article responds to, and then to read Ebert’s article.
Fistful of Wits 