There’s an interesting thread on the bird site today by Max Kreminski, commenting on a big huge popular game that’s coming out. The studio heads said that they wanted it to feel like it was “made by elves”.
Kreminski writes: “big entertainment companies benefit from you remaining in the dark about how stuff is made. if you don’t know how stuff is made, you can’t make stuff yourself – you can only consume stuff they make for you. that’s why they hold up “seamless” media as ideal”
I think this is a useful discussion for us to have, particularly those of us interested in interactive screen based art or video games. The aesthetic of seamlessness is in it’s nature very difficult for outlier small creators to attain. It forces aesthetics towards the middle of the bell curve and requires that your story be about something boring. For example: cowboys. It works against diversity, weirdness and the individual voice. It’s very hard to make something unique and personal with a 600 person team. When this happens we call it ‘the work of an auteur’ and usually heap accolades on it, mainly because it’s rare.
Punk in music was an attack against this. It aestheticized rawness and jagged seams (both in music and accompanying fashion) and told everyone “Here are three chords, start a band”. Many did, and it was pretty great. One of the reasons in video games we have consciously or subconsciously embraced historical low-fi aesthetics (pixels, voxels, untextured 3d, text, found art) is that it sends a clear message “This is something which is not playing the current, seamless game”. This is a valuable message and creates space for individual voices.
I interviewed game maker and teacher Bennett Foddy at GDC in March about this and we had an interesting discussion about ‘trash aesthetics’ and visual punk in this regard. Embracing a self-consciously imperfect visual aesthetic is a great way of signaling to people looking for something different. His game Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy (which is amazing and infuriating, filled with emotional highs and lows) is a great example of this. Sos Sosowski’s Mosh Pit Simulator does a similar thing in VR, privileging strange interaction over current generation visuals. It’s also great, and mind bendingly strange.
In traditional Japanese aesthetics there is a concept called Wabi-sabi. It is an embracing of the impermanent and transient nature of existence, derived from Buddhist teaching. Wabi sabi celebrates the visible fingerprints of the creator, the imperfections, speckles and roughness on a teacup which reveal random events in the glazing process. It celebrates asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty intimacy and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and process. The Wikipedia article on Wabi-sabi is actually very nice, I referenced it in writing this and I recommend you read it. Good job anonymous uncompensated authors.
What does a digital aesthetic of Wabi-sabi look like? I think this is worth exploring and discussing amongst ourselves as creators. How do we create and support an aesthetic which embraces our limitations as small creators and nurtures us as humans in the current late capitalist consumerist hell-scape? A first step is to reject seamlessness as a goal and embrace seamfulness.
