Art
Game design often requires as much finesses as it does brute force to get an idea to take shape. This is in addition to the work needed to make a game visually appealing. Balancing the line between the two relies on artistic interpretation. The reason is game design requires the creator to ask a difficult question: what does an experience look like? Since experiences are felt and not seen, this is impossible to replicate directly and requires imaginative use of the play space, components, and rules to provide the audience with that experience. It sometimes relies on story for more immersive game play, and sometimes on isolated skills with only a minimal context.
Art is used also to figure out how to get the game’s disparate parts to communicate to the audience. In this way, it is directly related to Steven Pinker’s assertion that “language is the drive to acquire an art” as what players are presented with is the grammar and communicative tools for the experience the designer created (unwittingly or otherwise). The process of design is a drive to present the experience in a meaningful way to allow players to derive meaning from the play space. Much of this is subconscious on the designer’s part as few people use art as the main vehicle in game design. It is worth noting that the process is not too dissimilar from performative art.
In game design, art is also the element of STEAM programming where the rules of culture and assumed associative states are relaxed. This is the area where designers and players are encouraged to examine information and ideas in new ways. The concept is best described as organized chaos as the seemingly incompatible data sets and randomization mechanics used to create the game co-mingle and fit well enough to provide the viewpoint change needed to see how the ideas dovetail more readily than otherwise believed. Thus, how you present the information and ideas is as important as how you organize/classify them. This is key to seeing how the technology used and repurposed in game play can operate.
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Learning by Design – The STEAM Model, Part 4
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Learning by Design – The STEAM Model, Part 6