Tiny Subversions » patronage

Coda: Intuition Tries the Public Patronage Model

Darius Kazemi — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:41:00 +0000

Greg and Mike (I wrote about their Flash game funding earlier this week) are experimenting with Kickstarter to see if they can get their platform game Liferaft funded by the public. Definitely worth checking out the video, and throw them some money if you’d like to see the game made!

For those who don’t know, Kickstarter is kind of a formalized version of the patronage stuff I’ve written about in the past (indie game patronage and patronage in general). The idea is that you ask for pledges and if you reach your target pledge amount you take everyone’s money. No money changes hands until and unless the target is met.

Like Daniel Benmergui’s system, you get more benefits from donating more money. Here’s what they’re offering their different pledge levels:

$5+: get all episodes of the game plus exclusive demos and updates on development.
$15+: original soundtrack, mp3 format
$35+: original soundtrack, signed CD
$75+: poster-size print
$100+: special thanks in the credits
$250+: character named after you with a line of dialogue you’ve supplied (only 10 of these)

They just announced this and have two backers so far. 73 days to go in their drive. It’s worth checking out and I’m anxious to see if it works.

Looks Like It Works

Darius Kazemi — Sat, 09 May 2009 22:24:00 +0000

Readers of my previous post on Daniel Benmergui’s patronage experiment might be interested to know that someone donated the $1000 to customize their own ending to Daniel Benmergui’s I Wish I Were the Moon or Today I Die.

This is very, very cool.

An Example of Indie Game Patronage

Darius Kazemi — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:42:00 +0000

A while back I wrote a massive post offering my thoughts on patronage models for video game development. I noticed this morning that Daniel Benmergui’s new game, Today I Die, comes with a notice:

This game is ad-free thanks to an unusual individual.

I emailed Daniel to ask if this was a patronage situation, and he said yes, so I pressed a little further.

It seems like this is the timeline: Daniel emailed an early build of the game out to some of his trusted associates. I was on this list, and I remember playing and loving the game, and I also distinctly remember that Daniel was looking for advertisers to support the game.

Apparently one of these people liked the game and made Daniel an offer to support the game. “He wanted to see the game ad-free in a clean website,” said Daniel in an email to me. There were no other demands beyond that. The patron did offer some creative input, but he didn’t demand final say on anything. And to be fair, everyone seeing the early builds of the game had creative input; Daniel specifically asked us to critique and contribute.

“I shared the betas and alphas of the game with a sizable chunk of people,” he says. “This is another reason why I believe it’s a good idea to share your early work with people you trust… things get moving even before you release a game.”

This is an interesting precedent for a patronage model of game development, although Daniel himself isn’t sure it’s a repeatable occurance.

Which brings me to the next bit of interesting news: Daniel is pursuing a variable patronage model for his next game. This is the kind of stuff I examined in the “Patronage and the Internet” section of my article on patronage, and is very reminiscent of 20×200.

If you haven’t heard of it, 20×200 is a website that showcases the work of visual artists. They have prints available of the art, in different stages:

an 8″x10″ print for $20, in a limited edition of 200
a 17″x22″ print for $200, in a limited edition of 20
a 30″x40″ print for $2000, in a limited edition of 2

This creates scarcity, which encourages patronage. As a patron, you want a unique work of art to call your own: knowing that you own one of only two prints in the world of a particular piece is a great motivator for dropping $2k on a work of art.

Daniel is doing something very similar on his site, combining it with the model we see at Wolfgang Baur’s Open Design. He is offering Moon Stories Pack for free (a collection of all his free games plus some extra goodies), and is asking for a donation to support the creation of his next game. Depending on how much you donate, you get to put your stamp on his next game in a unique way:

Donations up to $26: congratulations, you’ve helped Daniel out!
$27-$74: you get your name in the credits along with a link of your choice. There are 19 of these available.
$75-496: you get a portrait of yourself (or whoever) in the style of the Moon Stories games. Nine available.
$497-$994: he’ll make you a custom version of one of his games, modeling the characters after anyone you choose (a great romantic gift, I might add). He will make only two of these.
$995+: you get a version of Moon or Today with an ending customized for you. There is only one of these available. [Edit: someone snagged it!]

I think this is a fascinating experiment, and I hope he publishes a post mortem of how it goes. I would love to know if anyone donates in the upper range for any of the custom work!

GDX 2009: Ian Schreiber, Duchamp, Pollock, Rohrer: Games as the Next Avant-Garde

Darius Kazemi — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:38:00 +0000

Here are my raw session notes for Ian Schreiber’s GDX talk, Duchamp, Pollock, Rohrer: Games as the Next Avant-Garde. This is my best attempt at a transcription of what he said. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine and mine alone. My comments are in square brackets.

–

Hi everyone. I’m a pro game designer who knows just enough about art history to be dangerous. This talk is about why art history knowledge is important for devs.

Can games be art? Very few people bring art history into this discussion. Many of our questions were resolved hundreds of years ago.

What I want you to take away from this is a new way of looking at games and game design from ana rtistic perspective.

I’m going to start with an example from Koster’s “A Theory of Fun”. Around turn of the 20th century, up until that point painters were trying to paint things realistically. Then the camera was invented at which point painters asked themselves: what do we do now? Impressionism was one reaction to that. Impressionism depicts repetition with variation (music and visual art). Impressionism suggested that there is an unknowable, that there are things you can’t see and you have to observe the negative space around things to understand them.

In his book, Koster asks if you can make an impressionist game, where the formal systems focus on negative space, where the rules have repetition with variation. Yes you can: it’s called minesweeper! Up until the camera, painting was thought of as a way of depicting the world or something real, your painting was a representation of something real. It was a matter of time before people started thinking about art that is its own object, non-representational, not a reflection, nothing to do with reality.

Let’s think about this in terms of games and game design. Most designers are thinking of their games as mechanics simulating reality. Some entire genres are “sims” — it’s about representing reality or a fictional reality. No one would say that Da Vinci was a great simulationist painter. But simulation is so embedded in games even things that aren’t sims are sims: football and chess are abstract simulations of war. Some game designers will research reality and document those systems from reality in their game (Civilization).

The point is we’re stuck thinking of games as simulations. Painters are capable of making completely abstract art. Can you make a game where the systems and mechanics are not representing anything? What would a game look like where you make the rules to just create systems you think are beautiful?

Pollock was famous for flinging and dripping paint instead of using brush strokes. His art is about something: it tells the story of its own creation. If you look at the canvas you can tell how he made it: what came last, first, whether it was dripped or flung. His paintings are self-documenting, you don’t need an artist’s statement to tell you how he made it.

As far as I know there’s no game like this. Supposr you had a game where you could tel by playing it how it was designed? [What about Robin's Wario Ware as design lesson?]

I’d like to take a step away and talk about game reviews and criticism. There was a critic in the 30s and 40s named Clement Greenberg who told people what was good or bad modern art. This was needed, the public didn’t know how to judge these things. Greenberg says that good paintings should provide the same experience for every viewer. Around the ’50s, modern->postmodern shift, Harold? Rosenberg disagreed with Greenburg. Art should be interactive, not passive, that it can have multiple interpretations and that’s okay. Lastly, he said it shouldn’t just give an aesthetic experience, it should carry meaning as well.

Now we have games that a lot of people are calling art (picture of Gravitation on the screen), but not a lot of game art criticism. Our reviewers are Greenberg-esque, judging games on formal elements, if it’s fun for the reviewer it’ll be fun for the player. Problem is games are interactive, everyone has a different experience, that experience carries highly personal meaning. In short, games are a postmodern artform. At the same time we review them as if they’re modern art. Ask yourself, if you write reviews, what would postmodern game crit look like? If we accept games as varied experience, how do we review and critique that? Maybe some of Rosenberg’s points can help.

In 2005, Ebert said that games were not art and could not be art. Art requires authorship, games abdicate authorship to player, and so they’re not art. To Greenberg art was about the artist and not the audience, so Ebert’s argument was about 70 yrs old. Many game devs responded, the most quoted was from Clint Hocking, who made Rosenberg’s rebuttal. Nobody called Ebert/Hocking on the fact that they were reconstructing an argument that had already been resolved in the 50s. [Really? RESOLVED?]

The argument over what is or isn’t art is much older than Greenberg/Rosenburg. We can look back in 1917 at Duchamp. He created “Fountain”, which is a urinal. He said that even though he didn’t make it, he removed it from context, signed it, named it, therefore it’s art. His contemporaries disagreed, others agreed. The art world had to figure out whether Duchamp was an artist: they decided, yes, he was. As far as artists and art historians are concerned, games are art.

Game devs think that fine artists have it in for them, but that’s actually not true. I did a literature search in contemporary art criticism journals, found that there were a lot of articles that framed games as an artistic medium. They didn’t even bother making the case for it, it was assumed as true! Found one article going back to 1995. Games have been on art crit radar for a while. Could not find an art critic who declared games to not be art. It’s in the heads of game developers. We should invite more art critics to our game design parties, eh.

I’d like to call out a few of my favorite artists and examine what their games might look like.

Salvador Dali and surrealism. Surrealism was a rejection of the rationalist movement. The world is not entirely rational or explainable, there are some thing we can never really know. If you listen carefully to my description of rationalism, it describes games: games have immutable absolute rules. It’s possible for players to understand and predict all the rules completely, and sometimes it’s necessary. Can you have a surrealist game where the rules cannot be understood by the players? Not absolute rules hidden by code, but a game with undefined or random in ways not described by the original designer. Surrealists used a bunch of game-like activities. Exquisite corpse: you draw a line on paper, someone else draws a line, round robin until you have a drawing. This isn’t technically a game, there’s no goal or end condition, more of a collaborative activity, but the basic mecfhanincs of this we’ve seen in games before (collaborative storytelling games).

Rule system of collaborative storytelling games or exquisite corpse ar not systemically surrealist, though.

Pop art and Andy Warhol. Warhol decided to exploit the broken pop culture system, calling attention to the problem of mass media. His work resonated so well with our mass culture, it became a part of it even though it mocked it. Here we have an artist telling us how stupid we’re being. What if a game developer did this? Can you make a game that celebrates the stupidity of games? That points out the stupid things endemic to that genre? Not by making fun of them but by epitomizing them.

Joseph (Boyes?) wanted to heal socity and offer spiritual guidance through his art. This is an interesting idea for game developers to explore. Can you make a game that offers spiritual guidance to its players? Well, yes, Ultima IV, over 20 years ago did this. What have we done SINCE then? What game has done as much for morality since then?

Nother artist, Cheri Levine ? who appropriates other people’s art. Richard Prince also known for appropriation (magazine ads out of context). Can you express an original idea using materials that are not original? Can you use other people’s work to express your own creative thoughts? Could you make a completely new game using the tileset and mechanics of an older game? ROM CHECK FAIL is an example. Could there be others? [Anna Anthropy covers a lot of this]

Richard Cera ? makes large sculptures from bold steel, make you feel helpless and afraid just from their scale. Makes you feel insignificant. People have petitioned to have his sculptures destroyed. Can a game do this? Shadow of the Colossus? Not so much, because Shadow is a David and Goliath story — you feel insignificant at first, but you eventually do it. [I would say Dwarf Fortress, Adventure mode especially] This is the opposite of most games, acting against the power fantasy.

The last thing I’d like to talk about is making money. Making money is part of the artistic process. Large scale projects [like the Christos] require millions of dollars of financing. How would you get people to give you money to build huge art projects? Artists make drawings, blueprints, scale models, photographs, etc. Basically design documents for these projects. Then they sell the prototypes and use that money to finance the building of the actual project. How much can you sell your game design documents for? How much would you pay to source code for early prototypes? Or models that didn’t make it into the game? What if instead of selling it after the fact, what if you sell it during production to finance the rest of the project? [Mount and Blade did this.] How would that change the face of game development?

These large scale things often need government approval, and the Christos have to convince politicians often hostile towards artists, yet they often succeed because they involve the public in their work. At a hearing, Christo said, “Like it or not, you are part of this project and this hearing is a part of the artistic process.” What would our games be like if positive public image were part of the development process? Invite the media in during development and ask the public to contribute to the process. What if we were not so secretive? Would this help us get more accepted in mass culture and mass media?

What about the patronage model of funding? [I wrote a big article about this.] Instead of selling an indie game for $20 and hope to get 2500 copies sold, what if you sold the game, source and all, to one person for $50k? [Isn't that the dev/pub arrangement a lot, particularly in casual games?]

Artists have struggled with representing the human condition and making transformative works for a lot longer than game devs have. Art history has a lot to teach us. Petri Purho’s “4m33s of Uniqueness” was based on John Cage’s “4m33s of Silence”. The idea is to listen to sounds that you normally don’t listen to amplified by the silence. Is it music if someone is not playing notes? In 4m33s of Uniqueness, there are no controls, just starting and stopping the game. But it raises the same questions that Cage’s work does. Is it even a game if there’s no play? What activities are you doing in 4m33s when you’re doing nothing? You’re thinking about the game, staring at the screen, alt-tabbing to check your email, whatever. Does this game have meaningful choices? Is one choice whether to start the game in the first place? Do you restart it immediately? Do you write a program to make sure nobody can ever win?

You don’t have to copy Cage’s ideas, but copy someone else’s!

There are not a lot of games out there that are art games, because people don’t understand art history. Take Braid for example. The game *looks* impressionistic, but its story is inspired by surrealism [and Calvino], and the game mechanics are neither. The mechanics revolve around solving consistent puzzles with unique knowable solutions, so it’s really more rationalist than surrealist! The gameplay is about movement and understanding, so maybe Italian futurism. Braid combines three different art styles in three different ways, there’s a disconnect between the art style, the story, and the mechanics from an artistic sense. This probably wasn’t intentional. It seems like it was chosen to make the game look like art to someone who doesn’t know art history. A true art game would have unified art style across all its elements.

This is great news for everyone in this room. In this room is more collective knowledge of art history than probably all practicing game designers put together [we are at an art school]. Go out there and make some games!

–

Q+A

Q: There is a difference between the subject matter of a game and the rules of the game. In surrealism, it’s about the subject matter being the rules, so what about Magic the Gathering, where the rules are the subject?

A: Yes, anything where the rules of the game write the rules, that seems surrealist. Is this the only possible surrealist game? In terms of Magic, the games rules are knowable: if you know all the cards you can map out the possibliity space.

Q: How would you critique Super Columbine Massacre RPG?

A: How do you critique games in general due to the different reactions of people? Some people thought it was brilliant, others hated it. That’s an open question.

Q: Are game designers limited by needing to make things accessible to the greater public?

A: No. [basically]

Q: Your critique of games based on these old schools. But impressionism, futurism, surrealism are dead movements. Why look at these for inspiration? They were self-contained at the time they existed, but only via history. There are elements of past schools in later schools. [This was

Jason Rohrer's question, btw.]

A: The original things that set off these movements may no longer be valid, but impressionists did express specific things in certain ways for specific reasons. I’m not saying don’t mix art movements, but I am saying that if you mix things they should be mixed meaningfully. Have a reason to mix these things. [Jason responds: "I think Jon chose those styles for a reason."]

Q: Do you think all games are art, or only some? Where do you draw the line?

A: Open question, you should read the original Greenberg/Rosenberg discussions.

[Okay my hand is falling off, I'm done taking notes!]

Patronage and Game Development

Darius Kazemi — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 18:09:00 +0000

I just came across, via John Rogers, a guy named Wolfgang Baur, who’s been doing this thing called Open Design. In his words, it’s “a series of RPG projects funded by a small group of patrons.” This is pencil and paper RPGs, by the way, not CRPGs. The whole thing got me spending the better part of today thinking about patronage, the internet, and game development.

Some History of Patronage

The patronage model is very old, and different from the sort of cultural fairy tale of “starving artist gets bailed out by rich dude, and can therefore make art.” I am no art historian, but I’ve found Marjorie Garber’s recent book Patronizing the Arts to be an excellent resource for learning about patronage. In particular, the publisher has the full text of the first chapter available at their website, and it provides an illuminating overview of the history of patronage up to and including the present day.

One very important thing to understand about patronage is that it has often been about mutual fantasy fulfillment: the artist gets to hobnob with high society, and the patron gets to feel like they are contributing to culture. Sometimes this relationship goes awry, where the artist lives well above their means for a time, or the patron attempts to hijack a work of art. As Garber writes,

A complicated and contradictory mixture of deep gratitude and powerful resentment is thus built into the dynamic of patronage. Which of these two will predominate in any given encounter between patron and protégé is never entirely predictable (Garber, 2)

Of course, when we think of old-school patronage in the arts, we often bristle. Why would an artist want to be beholden to the wishes of a patron? Shouldn’t the artist make the art they believe in, and then put the art for sale? The free market would appear to be the solution to the problem: the artist is free to create what they want, and those who like it will serve as the patrons by purchasing it. And this is indeed the solution we have today, particularly in the case of art as mass media, including video games.

Sort of. Again, Garber on the sale of art:

Transactions could be mediated by dealers or dilettantes, domestic or foreign—“but,” as Francis Haskell noted, “artists [in Baroque Italy] usually disliked the freedom of working for unknown admirers, and with a few notable exceptions exhibitions were assumed to be the last resort of the unemployed.” (Garber, 4)

Under the patronage system, artists absolutely understand their audience. They’re making a work of art for one person, or one organization. Compare this to art created for the market: you need to understand what potentially millions of people want, and under some economies of scale, particularly in the case of AAA game development, you really do need millions of people to buy your game to pull a profit! How do you create art for millions of people without appealing to the lowest common denominator?

Indeed, this was an issue in the late 18th century. By way of Garber, here is Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Third Discourse on Art:

Be as select in those you endeavour to please, as in those whom you endeavor to imitate. Without love of fame you cannot do anything excellent, but by an excessive and undistinguishing thirst after it, you will come to have vulgar views; you will degrade your style; and your taste will be entirely corrupted. It is certain that the lowest style will be the most popular, as it falls within the compass of ignorance itself; and the Vulgar will always be pleased with what is natural, in the confined and misunderstood sense of the word. . . . I MENTION this, because our Exhibitions, while they produce such admirable effects, by nourishing emulation and calling our genius, have also a mischievous tendency, by seducing the Painter to an ambition to please indiscriminately the mixed multitude of people who resort to them.

So yeah, in 1772 there was concern about mass media resulting in lowest common denominator pandering. And this was about a century before reproduction methods made it possible for the common person to own a copy of a work of art in their own home!

Patronage and the Internet

When googling around for articles on patronage, I came across a mini-manifesto about neo-patronage. It’s written by some folks who run Another Sky Press, a publisher in the modern internet model that I first came across through the works of Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. The idea is that you can read the book completely for free, but if you like the book and would like a hard copy you can buy one, or even just donate directly to the author.

It’s a cool idea, and it certainly works for some people, but reading their manifesto, its connection to historical patronage is tenuous at best. Their argument boils down to “Patronage was bad because the patrons controlled the artists, therefore the new patronage will be donations from enthusiasts with no artistic input from the donor.” I suppose that the donor should be content with the warm fuzzies they get from supporting an artist that they like.

I do occasionally donate money directly to artists whose artwork I love. But I will naturally give more money to an artist if it is to support a project that I am interested in. And I will give even more money if I feel like I have some input as to its outcome.

This is why Baur’s Open Design model is intriguing to me. There’s no date on the page, but archive.org lists the page going back to May of 2007, so I assume he’s been doing this for a year and a half. From what I can tell, the way it works is you become a part of the Open Design community by donating money to a specific project. The basic donation ($30) ensures you get a copy of the project when it’s done. Higher level donations, at $75 and $100, mean you get to be a part of the creation process. I’m pretty sure this is done through private forum threads, though I’m not sure how much control the high-level donors have over the final work. I’m guessing it’s just like any other collaboration, although because the donations are distributed between a number of donors the artist isn’t beholden to one person’s vision.

I believe that if you are a particularly high-level donor, you also get to pitch ideas for future projects — those ideas are then voted on by all the past donors until one or two projects are decided on for the next iteration of the Open Design series.

I may have this incorrect, but the summary of my understanding is: $30 means you get a copy of a project that’s in the works, and you get to vote on future projects. $75 means you also get some creative input into the project you’re supporting. $100 means you get to pitch ideas, and, I think, get a little bit more say into what the next projects are (I’m especially not sure if I have that one correct).

The books are also printed in an extremely limited edition run. The only people who are guaranteed a copy of the book are the original patrons. If there are copies of the book left, and you’d like one, you need to support a new project in order to become an Open Design member, and then you have the option of purchasing one of the old books. This is modeled on old-style patronage; one of the benefits of patronage was having a unique work of art to call your own. Obviously, this isn’t a case of owning something completely unique, but it’s pretty analogous regardless.

Actually, in the case of the first book in the Open Design series, the book only went to the original patrons, with no chance for latecomers to own the book. This was the source of some controversy, and the model I described above is the resultant compromise.

Digital Media, Replication, and IP, Oh My!

You can make limited edition or private runs of a book. You can’t really do this for a video game, because games are digital media that can be easily copied. So I think the whole “only members of our community get access to the creative works” might be really great for pencil and paper games, but it’s untenable for digital games.

How does this change things if we want to make video games modeled on the Open Design patronage system? In fact, what would such a system look like in the first place?

First of all, there can be no sense of unique ownership. As a patron of a video game, I am merely supporting an artist who is creating a public work. As a patron, I get some level of creative input.

The next big question for me is what the artist chooses to do with the game when it’s done. Does the artist release the game for free? In this case, the benefit to being a patron is that you get to see a game that you want to play actually created. And then you, and the rest of the world, get to play it. What if the artist decides to sell the game? Does a patron have ownership over the work? Do the patrons get a cut of the profits? Or did the patron merely exist to shepherd the work into existence?

Of course, in the case of selling the patron-backed game, we have the issue of intellectual property. I could easily see a lawsuit where a patron claims that they were the originators of idea X and thus are entitled to a portion of the proceeds. Thinking about this scenario, there is clear benefit to restricting all communication between patrons and the creator to a public forum. At least that way, there’s public record as to who said what, and when.

That said, I don’t believe that patronage really works without some level of creative input from the patrons. This comes back to the historical motivators behind patronage that Garber outlines so well. So maybe bringing patrons together to fund a completely open-source game is really the best way to go.

What do you think about patronage and game development? Do you think it’s tenable at all? Would the Open Design model work as is, copying be damned? If not, how would you change the model so that it worked?