VIDEO GAMES AS ART – A lone Playstation 3 console stands by, waiting for the next passerby.
Like the gathering of ancient Greek elders, a diverse group of sages met to discuss the serious topic of interactive entertainment.
Well, actually a bunch of nerds talked about video games.
Following the successful Southwestern College exhibition “Pencils & Pixels,” a symposium featuring a panel of experts discussed art, film, and most importantly, video games. Professors, game developers, filmmakers and animators represented different aspects of the video game industry.
SWC Professors Micajah Truitt and Kathleen Canney Lopez served on the panel along with filmmaker Gary Bulkin, artist Tony Allard, Sony executive Arran Green, Octo Pro founders Elisa Haynes and Carlos Noguez, and Arkam LLC founders Adam Jenkins and Mark Wells.
Green was the star of the show and received the most questions from the audience and panel colleagues. He is a Senior Manager at Sony Computer Entertainment America and is in charge of managing the creative directions of multiple teams throughout California.
“There are two aspects I look for in hiring new employees,” he said. “One is technical skill, but the other is an intangible, creative nature. The challenge is finding people who are skilled but have a broad base of creativity when they are inspired. These tech skills used to be hard to obtain, but now schools are no longer the gatekeepers.”
Lopez asked Green if he was looking for gamers in particular.
“Not necessarily,” he replied. “The industry wants a plethora of different artists with different skills.”
Jenkins chimed in.
“You can’t expect to get anywhere as a jack of all trades and a master of none, but there is a bare minimum of technical knowledge in this industry.”
Green explained that most game developers got into the industry by being game testers, while Noguez explained that with social media anyone could get into the indie game industry.
“You might be good at what you do, but if you are a master of your skill,” said Wells, “you become a commodity.”
Some audience members wanted Green to answer for some of the sins of the game industry and he provided some thoughtful explanations.
“It’s a business,” he said. “You have to make games that make a lot of money to pay for the ones that won’t. Every year we need to make those blockbusters to make games like ‘Journey.’”
This creates a division in the gaming industry, there are more big-budget games designed to make money, and then little games that do not have great graphics, but might be great in every other way.
“The video game industry is clearly market-driven,” said Bulkin, “so games and movies are meant to sell to a lot of people. But in the future, niche entertainment might become more common.”
Green was also asked about bad games.
“If there is something wrong with the game, the developers already know about it,” he said. “They’re artists and they know the flaws of their game even better than the game reviewers.”
Due to the nature of the industry, some games are released before they should be, Green said.
“Art is never finished, it is only abandoned,” he said.
Truitt and Lopez represented the SWC Visual Arts Department and the Department of Computer Information Systems, respectively, though their contributions to the discussion was more as moderators who helped guide the conversation with their own questions and those from the audience.
Lopez said she is working to create a curriculum that provides creative opportunities for students and is as technologically advanced as possible so that students can compete in the market.
“One of my students has gone from Southwestern to the Arts Institute to Sony to Raven,” she said. “Another works with [Blizzard Entertainment] on the game ‘World of Warcraft.’”
Bulkin said he has been in video and film production for 20 years, and began teaching film in 2005. He gave advice on being an artist, and his experience creating shoe commercials is similar to the experience of many in competitive fields. Sometimes as an artist, one needs to sell their talent and create what others want before you can get recognition for your own work.
Tony Allard is an artist with a trans-media perspective which encompasses video, performance art, audio, writing and more exotic mediums. He shared examples of artwork made by some of his students at CSU San Marcos. Simple sketches and shading and perspective tests were the best his novice students could create, but the experimental digital drawing class was for beginners new to the field of digital art.
With tools like the iPad, Oculus Rift and the 3D printing program Tinkercad, Allard said artists could now create art impossible to have been made in the past.
“The do-it-yourself subculture makes it so that you can get into the industry however you want,” he said. “You can do things on your own terms.”
Octo Pro Productions founders Elisa Haynes and Carlos Noguez prove that it does not require a billion-dollar company to make videogames. They advocated using social media to connect with other people who want to make games
When Green was asked about the gender gap within the video game industry, it was Noguez who answered.
“While that might be an issue in some places, it hasn’t been a problem for us,” he said. “Elisa is one of the most talented members of our team, and we haven’t had any problems finding girls who want to make games.”
Arkam LLC founders Jenkins and Wells said they started off as gamers. Childhood friends, they separated to pursue their own careers and later reunited to found Arkam LLC.
Jenkins has designed several digital signs in New York’s Times Square and in 2006 he joined the production team for G4TV’s “Attack of the Show” and “X-Play.”
Before founding Arkam LLc., Wells was part of the 3dsite/Living Pictures team that created real-time animated characters for Walt Disney Imagineering and Pixar.
“Turtle Talk with Crush” was the first of its kind, but Wells went on to use the same digital puppetry to make “Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor” and “Stitch’s Encounter.”
Their body of work is primarily in developing graphics for game expos and tech shows, including an interactive visual display for Google I/O After Hours Party that allowed the guests to customize the graphics that went with the music.
Wells explained that the advancement in interactive entertainment technology is not only useful for the videogame industry, but the new tools will continue to change how we experience entertainment.
“We need to take inspiration for everything,” said Wells, “not just art and tech skills.”
As the event neared its end, the audience clamored to have their questions answered. People wanted to know about the intricacies of the art world and videogame industry, or the panel’s opinions on various topics, but there just was not enough time.
