How Video Game Designers Are Related To Stem

Collected Work Theory

A video game asset can be many things. On one hand, they might be several pixel-wide icons integrated into a larger graphical user interface (GUI)—not something that many would notice. On the other, a sweeping piece of orchestral music might also exist in a game's files as an asset. Let us assume that this piece becomes a fan favorite part of the game: maybe it plays during the climactic battle with the game's villain or a moving story moment. Such an asset could find relevance well beyond the game itself: it could be downloaded and listened to by fans of the game, sold as part of a soundtrack album (on vinyl special edition!), or covered by game rock or jazz bands at an event like MAGFest.

Music is just one aspect of this phenomenon: as game enthusiasts regularly pour their enthusiasm and creativity into adapting artwork, design elements, characters, narrative events, and other portions of games into new works. Commercial game studios participate in this phenomenon when they release concept art books and game soundtracks from their most popular games. These products make artists, composers, and designers highly visible to audiences through individual credits, liner notes, and interviews. These elements may even provide unique selling points for games: Studio MDHR's Cuphead²⁷ features visual art made to resemble 1930s American cartoons made with real-world art supplies—ink pens and watercolor. An older but still illustrative example are the competing versions of games based on Disney's Aladdin film for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis game consoles.^28,29 Despite the popular perception that it had inferior gameplay, the Sega Genesis version had animated characters designed by Disney's artists, giving it a greater visual impact that was even complimented by the director of the Super Nintendo game, Shinji Mikami.³⁰

That these elements of games can be enjoyed as separate works or understood as unique selling points by the games' audiences, points to an understanding, even an informal one, of assets as distinct works within a game. We can call this understanding a collected work theory of games criticism, as it describes how games are collections of distinct artworks that are juxtaposed (through game engine software and scripting) to create interactive experiences. While uncommon in the world of academic game studies, some analyses inch close to it by acknowledging the craft of how game designers compose the experiences they make, even when treating the game as individual works. In Roberto Dillon's reaction to the MDA Framework, the AGE framework, standing for "actions," "game-play," and "experience,"³¹ he uses "experience" to describe how the act of playing games makes players feel a variety of emotions. In focusing on "experience" rather than the vaguer "aesthetics," he provides a metric for addressing the elements of fine art that evoke human emotion such as a work's composition or color palette. In a later article describing a study where observers compared the emotions evoked by games and works of art, participants could describe their engagement with works in terms of both aspects that would apply to a work in general ("immersion"), but which could also apply to individual game elements ("color appreciation").³²

At first glance, collected work theory is friendlier to game enthusiasts or industry professionals, since they more closely align with how these groups describe games, than audiences unfamiliar with games. However, audio-visual elements games have historically acted as ambassadors for the games medium when enjoyed separately from the games themselves. Concerts of game music from Final Fantasy or the Legend ofZelda series, for example, are now common at concert halls and have made positive impressions with classical music enthusiasts.³³ Collected work theory is also present in some museum exhibitions of video games. This mindset is very apparent in how design museums such as the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in London show works: their 2018 exhibit Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt showed not only games but also the planning documents, designers' notebooks, office bulletin boards, and assets that went into creating them. The Akron Art Museum in Akron, Ohio, USA, likewise included works that could be said to acknowledge collected work theory in their exhibition Open World: Video Games & Contemporary Art. The works Dataset Diptych 01 and Dataset Diptych 06 by artist Alan Butler show images of the realistic homeless non-player characters from Grand Theft Auto V. The purpose of the work is to highlight the problem of homelessness by showcasing how creating a believable city in a video game requires creating a believable homeless population. The images are accompanied by works showing all of the texture image files, numbering in the dozens, used to create the characters; shown to expose the effort that goes into their creation. While the assets are shown to make a social point according to the affordances of contemporary art, the extraction of game assets shows the potential of collected work understandings of games.

Collected work theory readily provides avenues for studying games in the context of other art and media forms as one would analyze the visual art, music, and other elements of games according to discipline-specific criteria from those fields. In the case of a game like Cuphead, the game's animations and visual assets must be evaluated against the principles of animation—anticipation, appeal, timing, and so forth—as laid out by animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson.³⁴ Collected work theory also makes it easier to find aesthetic precedents for games beyond the games medium itself. The scores of several Dragon Quest games, for example, are better appreciated when one considers that among composer Koichi Sugiyama's key influences is Johan Sebastian Bach.³⁵

As with any artwork, the collected works within games can be said to singularly evoke emotional responses through color theory, the key of the music, or other aspects of their creation. This is where critics must be cautious with collected work theory and using it to analyze games according to the affordances of other forms of art. Games' interactivity may change how these assets are encountered or juxtaposed, thereby changing their meaning. In Lissitzky's Revenge (Figure 9.1a-c), a game based on Bolshevik designer El Lissitzky's 1920 poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, players can move the elements of the original poster—a red triangle, white

FIGURE 9.1 A screenshot of Lissitzky's Revenge, based on a similar artwork by designer El Lissitzky.

circle, and black and gray squares—around the screen. This creates a game where a screenshot may be taken at any time to create a new Constructivist artwork, though not with the poster's original propagandist intent unless its composition is recreated exactly by the player.³⁶

Levels as Unique Works of Game Design

The individual levels of video games fall into an unclear area: are they individual assets or holistic works of game design? Should we appreciate them through single work theory or collected work theory? Levels are not singular assets but often a collections of assets, geometry, and colliders—invisible masses that perform functions within a game engines physics system such as create barriers—arranged in such a way that they create interesting gameplay situations and emotional responses.³⁷ In this way, they are like games, and in fact, many industry observers see level design as a subfield of game design. ³⁸

Within the file systems of many game engines such as Unity though, levels are also treated as individual scene files which can be called and managed like an individual asset. Through efforts such as the GDC Level Design Workshop, World of Level Design,³⁹ the Level Design Lobby Podcast,⁴⁰and others, practicing level designers are trying to establish the field as a related, but distinct, field from game design itself with its own set of critical discourse and principles. This would seem to point to their appreciation as separate entities from the games with which they are associated.

This is where architecture can be a useful lens for understanding game levels. As with the single work theory of games criticism, a level might be understood as a singular work with a distinct effect as with the metaphor of a church used previously. Like such a church, let us say a thirteenth- century French gothic church, its individual elements can also be appreciated for the way that they contribute to the summative effect. The church's sense of lux nova, meant to create an ethereal feeling as though the occupant was encountering God, can be understood through appreciation of the church's rose windows that filter external light through colored glass to create this unique effect. These windows are themselves both individual assets within the church's structural system and contributors to the holistic experience of being inside the structure.

Levels can be seen as merely emblematic of the games of which they are an element, and indeed their design can be a useful metric for evaluating the quality of a whole game design. However, seeing them as unique works within games or even as collected works themselves which use assets to create specific effects allows us to tap into a wealth of knowledge from disciplines outside of games, notably architecture. As a field of design itself, architecture may also have things to teach practicing game designers about approaching their work as products of design. In the next section, we will explore an architectural approach to viewing design problems, and how it might be used to incorporate the knowledge of disciplines outside of games into game works.