Does art matter (split from older thread)

[Eric Provost]

Hey all,

I thought I'd throw in my opinion from the perspective of a game consumer.

"Does art matter?"  seems to be a very broad question.  Overall, I'd have to say art does indeed matter.  

I've made the decision to purchase more games and game supliments based upon their artwork than I can count.  Of course, I've probably turned down a similar number of games based upon the art.  When I pick up a game for the first time, I'd say that the game has about ten seconds to get my interest before I put it back down on that shelf.  The only way to get my interest in that amount of time is to either hit me with some nifty cover art, or to grab my imagination with a solid tag line on the back page.

I can't remember any game I've ever had where the art didn't help illustrate the world being presented in the game.  Indeed, I imagine that much of my early GMing influence was pulled directly from the artwork with thoughts in my head like "I wanna create a scene where that happens!"

Anywho... my 2 cents.

-Eric

[Jon H]

Something of a huge ramble from a longtime lurker, occasional poster:

Something which may be of interest is the differences in which art direction works on different games.

I've been working as an illustrator full time for a few years now, mostly for RPGs.  The differences in how art direction is approached by different companies, or even different product lines, is often sharply marked.

Two extreme examples spring to mind. Company A simply give their illustrators the title of the book, and let them get to work.  They then lay out the resulting illustrations wherever they see fit.   To my eye this often results in less than coherent illustration, and falls into the realm of simply decorating the text.  I'm left wondering what the point is.   I can clearly see why people may well dislike this kind of use of artwork.

Company B on the other hand send out sections of the text as part of an artist's brief.  They clearly have gone through the manuscript and taken clear decisions on which parts need some visual help, which moments or concepts would provide excellent atmospherics,  or which parts simply need illustrating - maps, character portraits and the like.  They tend to know what they want, and ask for it very clearly.  To my mind that's sound art direction, and provides a cohesive feel to a book.

The way RPG publishers put their books together comes in so many flavours that to talk about whether art is needed or not is not a particularly useful question in my mind.  It can be needed if you have a clear idea of what you are doing with artwork as part of a cohesive whole.  If you're just slinging in pictures here and there because that's what RPG books look like, I wonder if it is necessary.  And I freely admit my enormous bias toward artwork.

Some further thoughts:
Busy borders can indeed be distracting if thoughtlessly used. Alternatively well done they provide a cohesive, almost luxurious appearance to a book as it is being leafed through at the games store.  Some parts of a product are there simply to get it lifted off the shelf.  I dont find that particularly wrong or cynical. It's simply one way in which the product identifys and sells itself.  And without sales in a sense the game doesn't exist: Or rather, to put it more carefully, without players the game doesn't exist.  And sales are a way to get players.  Bearing in mind that even a free game has 'sales' in terms of attracting people to download it, or pick it up from a trade stand.

To my mind there's a lot of factors that go into selling an RPG book beyond it being a 'good' book or 'good' game.  We're not just selling a book, we're selling a game.  The book is a stepping stone, just like an umbrella is a stepping stone to keeping dry.  

We don't buy umbrellas, we buy keeping dry.  So in a sense it would be easy to disregard the appearance of our umbrella.  That said, I think we have to remember that we are also selling a concept with an identity, one with which we hope that consumers can happily align themselves and make a purchase.  We can't actually see 'keeping dry'.  And the visual plays an enormous part in selecting purchases - that's "sales 101". Hence the massive variety in visual style of umbrella available.  People identify themselves with the visual appearance of the things they buy and own.

Indeed some people would prefer plain text rulebooks.  They would prefer to be associated with that kind of product.  Maybe a little dry, but very serious, and apparently appearing to offer better value for money without having to pay for art.  As such plain text rulebooks would appeal to a certain section of the market.  However another, and I would argue larger, section of the audience seem to like artwork as part of their gaming experience. I include in that experience the anticipation of a purchase, researching the available products, the gamestore experience, browsing shelves, chosing a game, buying it, reading it, and finally playing it.  Art plays a potent role in that pre-game experience.  Whilst our personal tastes may not run to lots of fluff and filler when making practical use of a game book, that 'fluff and filler' plays an important role in market positioning, and initial communication with the customer, in addition to the more practical uses to gamers already mentioned in the thread.

The visual aspect of a game's physical incarnation becomes something akin to tone of speech, or accent.  Artwork tells us about the games' intentions.  Certainly there are other ways to present such information, but few are as immediate as visual imagery.  To not use artwork, is to ask a lot of the consumer in terms of initial investment of interest.  The largest novel publishers are careful to align their books with an appropriate cover. Even for the biggest authors.

Visual appearance of a product is a big signifier as to the perceived quality of the product.  Now, those of us who grew up cutting and pasting their own comics and short stories and trading them with friends may well realise that slick appearance doesn't always signify quality.  Not by any means.  BUT it does in many instances.  Visual appearance becomes a kind of quality experience of it's own.  To many people visual quality of their posessions is important.  Not because they are in some way shallow.  But because we live in a very visual culture.  Because 'nice' looking things are 'nice' to own and use: The appearance of my car reflects my personality, and informs my car owning/using experience.  If I chose to ignore that, whether by choice or by necessity that becomes a statement in its own right.  

There's a big 'however' coming, however(!):  Roleplaying games don't make much money compared to other areas of publishing as I'm sure we are all painfully aware.  And artwork is labour, time and skill intensive.  Which is to say expensive.  Thus publishers frequently are hard pressed to communicate exactly what they mean to say visually. Certainly in the indie sector we are frequently limited by what we can get.  Sometimes that's downright counterproductive, and again falls into the realms of decorating text because we have to, rather than because we are deliberately setting our own tone.  

Peter Jackson knew exactly who his lead artists had to be.  John Howe and Alan Lee were the artists who could very closely provide the right visuals for what he wanted to say.  Luckily for him he could afford to employ those people - he could make a choice and go with it.  Most RPG publishers are approaching visuals from what they can afford, rather than what they want.  Could this visual compromise have an impact on why RPGs are not currently widely viewed as an aspirational activity?  Given that so much of the assessment of a product or even a passtime is visual?



RPG art can also suffer in terms of product cohesiveness because the art department is (artificially?) seperated from the writing department.  I've met plenty of writers who cannot fathom why the artist produced the images they did.  Of course it turns out the artist was working in isolation, and probably never saw the text they illustrated.  I guess my point here is that there exists a lot of bad art direction in RPGs, but it's the art that takes the hit for that.  "These pictures dont match the text at all!" is less the fault of the art and more the fault of the art direction.

And as I began with, there are so very many different styles of art direction that there's no clear answer to whether art is necessary or not.  

My own conclusion is that art direction is very necessary. Whether that be the decision to not include visual imagery for a valid, creative reason, or whether to include a massive proportion of text for similar, though apparently opposite reasons.

edited for spelling