The magical remainder

There is a principal that’s been floating around for 100 years now called ‘Pareto’s Principal’. Well to be fair it wasn’t generalized until Dr. Joseph Juran called it the ‘vital few and the trivial (but useful?) many’. It’s the principal that tells us that the most important 20% of the project take 80% of the time. This work often falls at the very beginning and very end of the project. Knowing that it exists is one thing but it doesn’t help us until we know what the content of this extra 20% actually is.

Anyone who’s even started working on a game can tell you what the first 10% is, it’s that zone you get in when you’re doing all that wonderful new engine work and the ‘cool’ code is flying off the keyboard. Many people don’t have any problem with this first 10%, in fact some people only ever work on this first 10%. Jumping from one 10% done project to another. Where most other personal projects fail is the middle ‘trivial many’. Where most of the rest fail is in this last 10%, the mystical portion what I will will call the ‘magical remainder’.

This magical remainder is the part that few games get right. It’s in the art of the game, a polish on the thing you can’t quite put your finger on. When all the motion, color, music and code all come to play together on one screen. Anyone who’s worked on a commercial game will know the portion of the project where it all falls together and all doubt is removed.. it’s actually a real game. This falls into a category of work that’s often labeled as artistic vision. Artistic vision is what’s missing from your latest knock-off AAA title. It seperates the classics from the flops, the men from they boys, the wheat from the.. yeah you get the idea. Unfortunately just plain hard work can’t always help you cross this bridge but it sure can help.

Art Games are a complex product that require multiple disciplines and a lot of unconventional building material, namely: art. If you look at them from a pure engineering perspective they have an aluring magical quality that sucks in anyone who can write ‘Hello, World’. I wonder what the percentage of CS students that are studying computer programming because they have more than a passing interest in video games?

I’m no stranger to this concept, my first program in 2nd grade was a ‘video game’ that consisted of PRINT, GETCHAR and GOTO to create a massive text based choose-your-own-adventure. That was all fine and dandy of course but to create a real game.. and I mean that by a game that other people actually will want to play there needs to be art. The person playing the game doesn’t care what the code looks like, nobody cares about your fancy entity manager when they’re saying, “What time is it? Oh I have time for just one more turn!”. The code is secondary to the art. The code only matters when it is serving an artistic purpose.

Art in interactive software can take many forms from vivid interactive storytelling to procedural video effects. From varied and animated 3d/2d art and architecture to strong music composition and sound layering. It’s something that is hard to budget for and I think if you try to hard you’re going to lose the essence of it. It takes time to create good art and many times there are a lot of tweaks and adjustments to be made before the best form of a piece finally emerges. And art is what seperates all the crappy knock-offs from the truly legendary creations. I find a certain unrecognized wisdom in the noob posting on the indie game forms about how, “My game don’t have no artz cuz is teh hard, I don’t haev any arts or 3dimentional models jors maybe if someone cool helpz m3 iwe can make a new elite MMO!111”.

People often wonder, “Why do I remember these classic games so fondly when they looked like crap?!”’. Others will answer, “Because you were young and dumb and didn’t know any better”. I disagree. Regardless of what medium a game is created in artistic devotion and vision can succeed in creating something that trancends the purely mechanical aspects of the machine. Take for instance ‘Super Mario Bros’. The artistic devotion that was required to get Mario’s ‘air-time’ to exactly the right hundredth of a second (add the link where Miyamoto quoted this magical number). The artistic vision required to punish that hardware to pump those pixels just so and create animations that worked just right. All of these minute gameplay and visual details being sculpted in assembly. Not to mention the perfect scoring being meticulously crafted in hex. It makes me want to cry ;)

The key ingredient of course here is Art. And applying the talent, devotion and will to stick to an aesthetic goal where the outcome is not fame or riches but beauty.