What I'm looking for in art.
Aug. 8th, 2025 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerI remember seeing a game which looked amazing. The whole world was destructible, there were thousands of different combinations of things to find in it, and they'd put a ton of effort in to making it a fun experience.
I played it for a couple of hours, and got bored of it, because it turns out that that isn't enough for me. Because what they'd made was also a Rogue-Like. Which is to say that it completely resets back to the start when you die, and that start randomly creates the world that you play through.
And I don't want to play through a whole different world each time, where everything is different to the last time I played. What I want for a solo game is for someone to lovingly craft a world, and then for me to learn that world inside out as I try to beat the various challenges in it*.
A few months agodanieldwilliam sent me this link to a Neal Stephenson essay. And while I didn't agree with him about everything, the idea of "microdecisions" has stuck with me. That what makes art art isn't the idea (although good ideas are important) it's all of the ways that that idea was reified into the finished work.
A key quote:
Since the entire point of art is to allow an audience to experience densely packed human-made microdecisions—which is, at root, a way of connecting humans to other humans—the kinds of “art”-making AI systems we are seeing today are confined to the lowest tier of the grid and can never produce anything more interesting than, at best, a slab of marble pulled out of the quarry. You can stare at the patterns in the marble all you want. They are undoubtedly complicated. You might even find them beautiful. But you’ll never see anything human there, unless it’s your own reflection in the machine-polished surface.
And if that works for you - if staring at the swirling polished surfaces is what makes you happy, then I'm delighted for you. I've certainly been very entertained by generated patterns myself in the past. And I can totally be distracted by it for short periods of time. But when I'm looking for something actually *engaging* then right now it doesn't work for me. I need something human** in there.
Another example of this - movies. The more that special effects became good enough that movies could show me *anything* the more I wanted things with *character* in them. Things where you could tell that someone (or some group of someones) had really wanted to get something out of their brains so that other people could see the world the way they see it. I was discussing withswampers the other day that we really appreciated the movies that A24 are putting out, because even when they're a bit of a mess they're a really interesting mess that someone had obviously cared about. The trailer for Eternity looks like it would absolutely annoy me in parts, but it would do so because I'd be experiencing someone's thoughts about the world, and I might learn something about them, and maybe also about me for engaging with it.
*Multiplayer games are different. When I played a ton of Minecraft with Julie I was happy for her to set the direction of what to make, and then I'd treat that as my challenge. But sandboxes with no set challenge don't interest me. And I have played a chunk of games like Slay The Spire or Balatro or Dead Cells . But even then I'd play for enough to get the hang of it and then stop, usually without actually beating it, because "Go back to the beginning and beat that for the 500th time so that you can spend 10 seconds losing the end before starting again" isn't much fun for me. Even with Hades, which does a great job of giving you a meta-story around each run that grows as you replay, I got all the way to fight Hades, lost near-instantly, and the thought of replaying the entire game for 20 minutes just to lose to him again filled me with exhaustion and I haven't been back since. If Noita had a "save" function and a set of specifically designed levels that were fun and were definitely beatable *and* a random world generator you could use once you'd played those levels then I'd probably have invested a lot of time in it.
**I am not against the idea that eventually AIs will achieve consciousness and attempt to impart something to us through the medium of art. And that would interest me. I just don't think that the generators we're currently investing in are that.
I played it for a couple of hours, and got bored of it, because it turns out that that isn't enough for me. Because what they'd made was also a Rogue-Like. Which is to say that it completely resets back to the start when you die, and that start randomly creates the world that you play through.
And I don't want to play through a whole different world each time, where everything is different to the last time I played. What I want for a solo game is for someone to lovingly craft a world, and then for me to learn that world inside out as I try to beat the various challenges in it*.
A few months ago
danieldwilliam sent me this link to a Neal Stephenson essay. And while I didn't agree with him about everything, the idea of "microdecisions" has stuck with me. That what makes art art isn't the idea (although good ideas are important) it's all of the ways that that idea was reified into the finished work.A key quote:
Since the entire point of art is to allow an audience to experience densely packed human-made microdecisions—which is, at root, a way of connecting humans to other humans—the kinds of “art”-making AI systems we are seeing today are confined to the lowest tier of the grid and can never produce anything more interesting than, at best, a slab of marble pulled out of the quarry. You can stare at the patterns in the marble all you want. They are undoubtedly complicated. You might even find them beautiful. But you’ll never see anything human there, unless it’s your own reflection in the machine-polished surface.
And if that works for you - if staring at the swirling polished surfaces is what makes you happy, then I'm delighted for you. I've certainly been very entertained by generated patterns myself in the past. And I can totally be distracted by it for short periods of time. But when I'm looking for something actually *engaging* then right now it doesn't work for me. I need something human** in there.
Another example of this - movies. The more that special effects became good enough that movies could show me *anything* the more I wanted things with *character* in them. Things where you could tell that someone (or some group of someones) had really wanted to get something out of their brains so that other people could see the world the way they see it. I was discussing with
swampers the other day that we really appreciated the movies that A24 are putting out, because even when they're a bit of a mess they're a really interesting mess that someone had obviously cared about. The trailer for Eternity looks like it would absolutely annoy me in parts, but it would do so because I'd be experiencing someone's thoughts about the world, and I might learn something about them, and maybe also about me for engaging with it.*Multiplayer games are different. When I played a ton of Minecraft with Julie I was happy for her to set the direction of what to make, and then I'd treat that as my challenge. But sandboxes with no set challenge don't interest me. And I have played a chunk of games like Slay The Spire or Balatro or Dead Cells . But even then I'd play for enough to get the hang of it and then stop, usually without actually beating it, because "Go back to the beginning and beat that for the 500th time so that you can spend 10 seconds losing the end before starting again" isn't much fun for me. Even with Hades, which does a great job of giving you a meta-story around each run that grows as you replay, I got all the way to fight Hades, lost near-instantly, and the thought of replaying the entire game for 20 minutes just to lose to him again filled me with exhaustion and I haven't been back since. If Noita had a "save" function and a set of specifically designed levels that were fun and were definitely beatable *and* a random world generator you could use once you'd played those levels then I'd probably have invested a lot of time in it.
**I am not against the idea that eventually AIs will achieve consciousness and attempt to impart something to us through the medium of art. And that would interest me. I just don't think that the generators we're currently investing in are that.
