Subject: Creativity and Art
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 10:37:40 +0100
From: "Peter J. Dobrovka" <dobrovka@t-online.de>
Organization: T-Online
Newsgroups: comp.games.development.design

Creativity: This word is recurring every day in this forum, and there are
several approaches to it's content.
IMO creativity is not quite explainable, although there should be no penalty
for the attmept. Personally I find Brandon's picture of the brain with
floating-around symbols in it which are combined to "patterns" (ideas) quite
attractive (see thread "Mystical or Methodical").

I think creativity is not a simply god-given attribute of a person. To be
creative you have to have knowledge. And if we remain at the floating
patterns: you need to have a pool of symbols and patterns. The bigger this
pool the more useful stuff will come out. So learning and knowledge is an
important pillar of creativity.

Art: I do not want to raise a hot discussion about what is art and what is
not and why etc. But I think art has degrees of quality. Considering
pictures, sculptures, architecture and performance, there is one thing in
common: we all expect the artist to do something that cannot be done by
everybody. We expect craft. So you may tear me into pieces but I don't rate
high the most "modern classics" since I see nothing which could not be done
in the same quality by any person I pick from the street, or myself, or even
my children.
Of course often it is not quite easy to judge art since we cannot know
exactly what the artist had in mind when he created what he created. In
comic strips it is easy, because you have not only one picture but many. And
if the characters look the same in every picture then the quality must be
good, while if they look somehow different we kno the artist had not enough
control about his hand.
Anyway it is far harder to make something which looks good and sophisticated
than to make somethink which looks mediocre or even bad. I think this has to
do with comparison, too. We all know what we are able to do ourselves and
what not. And when we see something which we cannot do ourselves this is
considered as 'good'.

So what does it mean for game design? Well, first for creativity: we need to
know the existing games and to discuss their strong points and even more
their weak points. This adds to our pool of symbols and patterns and we can
raise our creativity. I think knowledge in pyschology, philosophy and
literature is useful, too.

And for the art: well, what we cannot do good ourselves we should train to
become better or we should delegate the task to somebody who can.

Peter