The Ignorant Dogmatist

Over at Ice Water Games, Kevin Maxon provides another glorious rebuttal to my firestarter. Here’s an extract:

In some sense, ignorance might be an appropriate word for what I’m advocating: for creators to intentionally ignore with greater diligence the pressures to be similar, to follow fashion or money or power, pressures to use objective, scientific methods of art production. And similarly, I think part of what I’m advocating for could be called dogmatism: for creators to hold firm in their values and goals in order to create works that are more distinct, more filled with themselves, more honest and interesting and worth talking about.

Please rush over to his blog to read the entirety of The Ignorant Dogmatist right away!

The original firestarter makes one of its targets the kind of self-focussed indie game design method Kevin defends here. Yet I cannot do anything but respect Kevin’s commitment to exploring his own creative vision in games. For me, what Kevin is doing is making what I call artgames, and the moment you’re committed to art you are no longer practicing a commercial craft. You’ve gone down a marvellous rabbit hole, one where money may be tight but that worthwhile things get made. Almost everything I’ve thought worthwhile in games in the past five years has been an artgame… This is largely what I choose to play these days.

Why sell out artists in The Craft of Game Design Cannot Be Measured By Any Metric, then? When I look at Kevin’s output, which includes Eidolon and The Absence of Is, I see someone pursuing their vision for its own sake, which is the mark of an artist – a way of life I greatly respect, not least because it now feels closed to me. But when I look at the indie market, I see people pursuing a similar kind of self-focussed process and making yet more-of-the-same violent, repetitive ordinariness. Such indies are, I presume, trying to make a living – and they’re doing it badly. It was these indies I wanted to lambast.

If my piece in any way discourages someone from accepting the role of the starving artist, with all that entails, I apologise unreservedly. Art is one of the greatest ways to add value to life beyond money. But most indies aren’t making art. They’re masturbating into a codebase and thinking they’ll hit big doing so. Maybe I should respect that as a kind of art, but I just see it as bad commercial practice.

With my philosopher-hat on (I wear many, conflicting hats), I can only smile with an inner warmth at this line:

I think that often, the non-mechanical components of a game are more important than the mechanical ones, and so I tend to work on visuals and writing at least as early as mechanics.

I wrote Imaginary Games in part to defend this philosophy, and next week I’ll present to a hundred game academics about how games are more than their merely artefactual machinery. Kevin describes himself as willingly ‘ignorant’… his ignorance, though, is closer to the kind praised in Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster – it is a freedom from stultifying conformity. I could never oppose this, especially not when it is done in the pursuit of art. Everyone must discover who they are, sometimes over and over again… and never let someone like me tell you otherwise.

Cross posted from ihobo.com.