The Cost of Art Forms

This is a relative type of general production cost.

• Poems are cheaper than Pictures
• Pictures are cheaper than Music
• Music is cheaper than Movies
• Movies are cheaper than Games

Hence games are the most expensive art form, unless we consider architecture to be an art from but I don't think architecture belongs here. I kind of tried to fit "website" in this list first, but it isn't an art form, just a technology which carry these other art forms.

Games are the most expensive in this list. There is however a component of the structure that I ignored here which games exploit to reduce the cost per minute of entertainment which is recursion. You can't effectively reduce the cost of a movie by reusing the same scene or the same music. But you can effectively extend the duration of a game by reusing the same rules with only minor variations of the underlying data.

Efficiency by Forced Iteration

This is a technique I apply on almost everything I do which has any expressive ambition. I'll call it Forced Iteration, I have not previously though of it as anything which has a name. After power-reading the stuff that Eric Reis and his crew is doing I realize it lies dangerously close to the idea of Continuous Deployment.

I have been messing around with the creation of usually unambitious artistic artifacts such as pieces of music, texts or even little experimental games. What I have realized over about twenty years of doing this is that the most effective way to improve the result is to publish it and make it available to some kind of living and breathing real audience. Even if it is only one other person in the audience this is vastly better than avoiding the publishing step.

What I do is that I first fiddle with the piece, this blog post is an example of such a piece. Then after I start losing tempo on the production of it I'll publish it. This causes me to feel a slight level of panic that I just published something which is total rubbish. The understanding that the rubbish is already out there and potentially being consumed by an end user triggers a reflex which makes me fire up a burst of energy which I spend by seeking out the worst flaws and I fix them just a few minutes after the publishing. Whew... the feeling of fixing the broken bits before anyone really saw them is actually quite good!

Now after the worst bits are fixed I will have a bit of breathing room which I use to judge the resulting piece of work more closely. This tends to spit out a new series of micro-iterations which hammer away at the lesser errors that I can see.

I am not a good writer, and I know that my English skills are quite lacking compared to what you'll see from a more engaging writer. This knowledge sets my level of ambition to be relatively low when it comes to making this blog great. Maybe someone who is smack dab in my target audience finds it comprehensible enough. Well, anyway...

The act of forcefully publishing the unfinished piece of work effectively speeds up the process of going from the idea of doing something until it meets the standards set by my level of ambition. I believe that I find this behaviour to be natural from having somewhat of a background as a live performing musician, even if it was a long time ago now. The live performing musician is in a constant state of streaming art directly to the audience. The reaction from the audience is the fuel which drives the engine of creation. And the idea that my audience will see the first iteration fuels the engine that creates the second, and so on it goes.

By using Forced Iteration this way the volume of fuel is maximized, at least for my type of engine. I know there are great artists who achieve greatness by going the other way around, but I have no idea of how they really do it, or how fast they really work.

Protons, chairs and art

Things have a tendency to be composed by other things. How things break down depends on which system you use to break it down. Music as I have previously written about can be broken down into music grammar, an example might look something like this.

Opera > Act > Instrument > Key > Bar > Note

I don’t really know anything about opera so don’t think this is correct in detail, however the point is that the full experience consist of a significant hierarchy of information regulated by some grammatical rules.

Another example of a thing which breaks down into some kind of grammar could be a chair.

Chair > Material > Structure > Molecules > Atoms

Again I don’t know anything real about physics but again the point is the same.

It appears as nothing is exempt from the property of existing within a greater whole. The chair might exist within a room, which exists within a house in a town and so forth. The value of the chair might be linked to the town in which it is and what the local trends and cultures happen to be around there. Also atoms break down into smaller particles and forces if you desire to extend the model even further.

Now I’ll try get to the point of this little post.

In the case of music you can individually analyze each level of the breakdown for value and defects. If there are too many notes in a bar of music the music is defect which will make the whole opera sound foul. If you don’t know that the cause for the foul sounding opera is the existence of too many notes in one bar for a particular instrument you might attempt to repair the problem by adjusting everything else to fit the broken piece.

Much of the game design theory which I find on the internet contains the concept of how to break down games into their hierarchies. I find many of them exciting, especially the skill atom concept by Daniel Cook at http://lostgarden.com/.

However there is something which nags at me as feeling insufficient with all the models I have seen so far. I suspect the cause is that the breakdown into a “grammatical” type of structure is limited to present only a portion of the piece. In the world of music the missing pieces might be covered by two additional components.

1 – The instruments and their properties
2 – The musician

These two properties can be seen as extending the breakdown of music into even finer components which define the properties of a note.

.. > Key > Bar > Note > character > harmonics > dynamics > phase > modulation > etc

Or you can turn it around and describe the waveform which is the end product of the Opera as math... a suitable task for a clever programmer with a big computer perhaps.

It might seem unlikely but there are several pieces of music which has its user value linked to the interaction between phase and dynamics within a single note. Two types that come to mind are electronic music and classical soloists who both expend great energy at refining these subtle parts of the product.

Now It might be about time to make an attempt at breaking down games into their relevant areas or materials. That will be another post.

Practicing Agile on Art

To practice the kinds of principle which are described by Lean I started with creating a piece of music. I like making music, it is meditative and it uses some of my usually dormant skills which when I fire them back up gives me a serious dose of pleasurable feedback chemicals in my brain. Anyhow, creating music is an example of a very well defined production system and I like making abstract generalizations from things I know well to things I know less well. On the whole I can claim to be quite an efficient music production team all on my own, something I have a hard time claiming for the art of making games. Games require so much wider skill sets to go from idea to fully implemented in the cases that I am interested in so I can’t make a micro experiment to test the concepts of Lean development on my own with the game medium, and I can’t program well enough to make anything useful.

One of the great advantages with creating music is that I have access to a relatively decent implicit iterative method which covers the full production pipeline. I can tell if the instruments are tuned poorly, if the arrangement is busted and such technicalities. I can even tell if playing the instrument in the recording is giving a result which pleases the musician. This means that I pretty much know when I am cheating the creative process by accepting less than flawless components in the production. I can also cheat and get some explicit feedback from various sources such as sending snippets to friends over the internet or check details with a spectrum analyzer etc.

I also know that the end result is the interaction between the components and that I will not really be able to know in advance if a production will be good or not. I can generally feel it growing if I keep working on something which keeps me motivated. Almost everything which I ever finish is based on a mashup of old prototype songs. This mashup process is something similar to stage gate portfolio management which defines little pieces but without the information of how the pieces should interact to deliver an impression. This is also poorly managed by me with various references in my brain and plenty of broken snippets of recordings which I usually forget about. To bring this mess of components to life as something which I can claim to be something I finished I have to work through what my limited experience would label as a large process. I don’t like using samples, when I try I tend to get bogged down in editing the samples so its more efficient for me to just go straight at making the whole arrangements and tweaking the hell out the individual instruments.

The way I make music is fundamentally iterative. The goal is a mix of creation and refinery towards reaching greatness. Greatness is a state of perfect fit, “the goose bump factor”, an implementation which creates unique emotional response of some kind. This is hard work, I am rarely motivated enough to not give up and leave the effort as a part of the busted stage gate portfolio. It happens sometimes that I keep on going and the finished results are what I can use to run production technique experiment.

Writing this I sense that I will not be able to combine the whole argument in one big post. I will have to dig at details another time if I get there but I got some direct references at this point.

1 – Make it Flawless; applies to music production. This is a well known oldskool audio engineering principle which says that: “Make quality recordings of sounds; you can not make bad sounds good by tweaking them.” You can also not effectively engineer up a poor performance or a bad melody through creative editing, you can make it better yes, but you will be much less efficient than making the recording good in the first place. Compromising these early stages of the music production is like technical debt in software development, you can use them to move fast to a certain point but you will never reach greatness unless you go back at a later point and fix it. Such late fixes are often big risks as the new recording might interfere with the whole arrangement. This often leads to cascading failure of the whole production and all you get is yet another ambitious component of the stage gate portfolio.

2 – One piece Flow; this very much applies to music production. If you fail to follow it you will fail the Make it Flawless principle and learn to accept a poor result. The trick to one piece flow is to know your production method which is much easier in the world of music than when making games, especially for me since the process of making music in my case happily operates at a loss as long as I have fun with it. In the world of music production this goes through layers of development. You will benefit greatly from having the rough shape of the arrangement in place before starting to mix, you don’t start with the mix because then you will break the idea of one piece flow and en up with all pieces. The real question here is what the “one piece” is. In music the “one piece” is a multi dimensional argument. It can be used for an instrument, section, harmony, melody, mix, arrangement, lyrics and so on. The matter is the ability to identify the pieces and to learn how to be satisfied with one particular piece. This identification has its roots as a craftsmanship based on skills, theory and vision.

3 – Maintain multiple options; this is integrated with tools pipeline. In an ideal world I would call this “the mix” which is what you do last before sending the work to the ears of an audience. I am not sure if this is because I want the reference to fit or if it fits. The idea also carries through the arrangement by the theoretical structure of music theory. There is this huge set of lore which a master musician can use to apply multiple options to any given situation. I am not a master in this sense but I had an awesome Jazz teacher who showed me a few things about which doors can be opened to toss things around in a technically “legal” manner. It has been half a life time in my world since I had those lessons but their fundamental concept remains with me still. I’ll tell you the secret right here: All that theory is just a shortcut for connecting your ears to be the judge of what is good. It is a great shortcut and it is the key to collaboration and communication about the creative process of the medium. But it is nothing which resembles strict laws and the rules are there to be broken by the creator at will.

4 – Avoid Waste. This is a tricky beast, also very relevant to music. Defining what waste is in a music production is not that straight forward. Recording random things and putting them together is generally waste, sometimes it is a process which rapidly can fill up the stage gate with concepts. The real answer to the question of what waste is depends on the vision and goals of the production. If the goal is to increase the stage gate then an ambitious mix is waste, if the goal is to deliver on a vision then aimless noodling and random recording is waste. To know how to spot waste you need to be a well practiced craftsman of music creation.

My biggest problem for my music hobby is lack of vision. I like to blame this on the extremely efficient development method which gives me an extremely agile context. The studio software allows me to change anything at any time so I never feel like I have to spend any effort at creating a vision for the work. This makes it easy to get a false sense of progress towards greatness and the lack of vision rears its ugly head as technical debt within the whole arrangement which sends everything to the stage gate relatively often.

All of this stuff is generally applicable to most things in life. The biggest problem with implementing process optimizations toward value production is a lack of common grounds for communicating these kinds of ideas. Just as it is hard to make a band play good music without a fundamental common ground in music theory it becomes hard for a game developer to make good games without a common ground in development methodology and game design theory. Lack of common ground will require blind faith which is a rare human trait and it rarely lead to good results.

A reductionist model of humankind

Anyone who read this is statistically likely to be annoyed by it. It is also not founded in any real research that I know about, just a bunch of conclusions drawn by myself through looking at things and probably cherry picking my sources.

Humans are agents in a big system based on other humans and the rest of the world they live in. The system is too large for us individuals to see how the system works even at a short distance away from where we stand. This is what makes us individual, local properties.

What makes us different on an individual level is what we know and how we think and this might appear like great differences on the surface. But in fact it stands for a tiny portion of what a person is in comparison to the position within the whole system. The definition of the individual – you come from your most immediate surroundings through life until now and your expectations on the future based on extrapolating the system in a predictable direction.

As we grow up we learn to attach blame and praise for how we operate on ourselves but this is primarily a bunch of fake social magic which our system has invented as method for success, as success for the system, not for you, through the last few thousand years. The biomechanical machinery in your brain is built to trigger on stimuli which it learns to associate with rewards or stress based on randomly testing the world to see how it operates. We spend the vast majority of this random testing on figuring out how people within the system work and what things we can do to make them exhibit useful behavioral patterns. It was quite a different result a long time ago when we roughly belonged to the same system as some kind of monkey.

Anyhow, condensed this means that we really all are just the same. We think we are very special because our own consciousness happens to sit without ourselves but we can be relatively certain that we would have been easily replaced by any other consciousness given the same circumstances as ourselves.

Given this potentially evil, if you like that type of language, argument we can probably figure out how the system operates even at a great distance. The people that are so far away that you have no chance of knowing anything about them will have done exactly the same thing as you did until right now. They have been trying to figure out how the system operates from experimenting randomly with the available local properties. Based on these local properties they have developed a personality which will be roughly the same as your own, regardless of where they are in the system.

It is very unlikely that they will be reading this text, har har, which means that you will possess a different set of data to use for interpreting the world. Which also mean they might even speak another language and associate other things as stressful or rewarding, that’s their local experience and it will have the power to shape their model of the world.

Now the responsibility of art becomes to manipulate the agents in the system towards performing actions which increase the experienced value of the whole system. Increase the full volume of the value, the average, the mean average and increase the minimum value per system component, the risk of failure and so on. The only reasonable compromise is the reduction of the individual maximum, which on a system level is waste anyway.

Target audience

Who likes a particular piece of music?

This question has a lot of answers. I would not be able to answer it in detail. All I can hope to do is to understand the piece of music and how it relates to world according to some quantifiable properties.

• What kinds of music it is similar to
  
• If it is easy or challenging to listen to
  
• If it is easy of hard to perform
  
• Maybe also what it is about

These can be broken down in little pieces. Like which things are similar to what, detailed infuences and so on. The relationship to the audience is influenced by these details. You rarely really know in advance which things have what influence. To get a satisfied audience as a musician you focus on making the music as good as possible. There are some genre dependant properties which define more or less strict rules for the audience. I usually like the extreme of improvisational jazz, as it is one of those hardcore music genres with a comareably small and devout following. It is also defined by quite rare properties with strong influence over the artform.

There are those moments when peple convert to become listeners to this type of jazz, they might make the leap based on a lot of various motivations. Not very relevant really...

When it comes to games I am quite confident that the same general principles apply that exist for music. The difference for games is from my perspective that most of the games we know are like improvisational jazz. Every game has relatively strict and strong influences which fence the player off from the experience.

A game will require the player to make that leap to become a player. The interesting question is why the player will make the leap. And how the game can make the leap as painless as possible.

When you want to push normal people to become listeners to improvisational jazz you can use a few tricks. Like making the musicians play things which are easier to listen to and follow than what they commonly do.

Limits of art?

What message is beyond art?

This question is interesting on a general level. I would not directly label myself as an artist, maybe a musician or at least having had an income from writing, recording and engineering music. Everyone who is involved in making music has at least one leg in the artistic aspect of the art form. Even the guy who connects microphones to the recording technology is developing artistic skills. Once you leave the making of music and go to the business of selling music some people quit thinking they are artists, but really they are also involved with delivering the message to an audience, which is of some relevance to the experience of listening to the music.

I would believe the same can be said about movies, books, comics, oral tradition and everything else, and… games.

I can imagine quite well how to use music to convey almost any type of message. The exact meaning will be relatively irrelevant but the topic is up for grabs. The market for music would probably not be interested in paying for an opera about riding the bus, unless it is made by someone who is generally interesting for some other reason than the particular piece of work in question.

The same can be said for games. You can make a game which conveys a message about being a tree, it is not likely that the game will accurately make the player feel like a tree but I am sure a player can be made to identify with a tree. Raph Koster says he really wants games to be able to convey the feeling of being a tree, I don’t see that as very doable. But I do see a game where you pretend to feel like a tree, or maybe get to care about what the feelings you might have as a tree.

Is there a limit to the artist?

Does it require a Mozart to make classical music, or a young male to make a first person shooter? This really becomes more of an interesting topic when you aim at some specific resonance among the audience. I don’t see this as an existing restriction unless you try to impose severe limitations on the details of the production techniques involved.

Forcing Mozart to make a death metal song would probably not be a very good way to use his talent towards meeting a demand among a certain audience. However I am quite sure that Mozart would be able to entice this audience using more of his familiar tools if he put his mind to it. Well, back in the days. The direct problem with the game industry is that most have imposed severe limitations on their production techniques.

In most cases where you aim to remove these limitations you are quite likely to also remove every other chance of success you had. Understanding the abstract principles of making art is limited to relatively few people. This is also not an easily measured skill, its harder to use a theoretical measurement to measure a game artist than it is to use a theoretical test to measure the skills of a musician. Maybe someday this will change, but games will require a heavier effort than what it took to bring music to a level of theoretical measurement of accomplishment. Lucky us the productivity of the world has increased a bit the last 500 years or so, maybe I will see this development happen.