Scott McCloud's Four Tribes

[ejh]

I got to hear comic artist Scott McCloud speak earlier this week and as an aside, in response to a question somebody asked, he threw out a fourfold classification of artists he had observed.  It occurred to me that it might have some relevance to game designers.  See what you think.

The four tribes are:

1. The Animists: these people just want to create a living world with their art, a world people can enter into and experience as if it were real.  The commercial successes tend to fall into this tribe.  They may annoy some of the other tribes with their "shallowness" (though that's a very unfair way to characterize them).

2. The Formalists: these people love to experiment with their form, to come up with new ways of using their medium that nobody has thought of with before.  McCloud counts himself in this tribe with respect to comics.  Formalists can annoy other tribes with their extreme analyticism and obsession with novelty and possibility over what the other tribes might consider "substance."

3. The Iconoclasts: these people want to tell the Truth about Reality, Be It Ever So Brutal, with their art.  They may seem artless, grim, and simple to other tribes.

4. The Classicists: these people simply want to create things of beauty, timeless beauty.  They may be the most likely to be appreciated 1000 years hence, if their works survive.  They may annoy the other tribes by seeming to be off in their own rarefied, aesthetic worlds.

This is the classification to the best of my memory from what I heard McCloud say aloud.  May not be 100% accurate.

But one thing that it struck me with was the extremely high concentration of Formalist game designers we have on the Forge.  That alone made it interesting enough to mention. :)

[Jonathan Walton]

Personally, I'm a 2/4 idealist.  My games will survive for 1000 years because they're innovative and beautiful :)

[xiombarg]

I dunno, with the emphasis on the Forge on actual play, there's also a strong element of "the animists", which, I think, for role-playing doesn't just mean setting-heavy Sim but any game that can be shown to "work" under the fire of play.

[Ben Lehman]

Wow.  That's a pretty cool breakdown.

I can't speak to game design (I'm more of a tweaker than a designer) but, as a role-player, my priorities are definitely 1/3 (with a somewhat looser 3 which allows any analysis of the human condition and/or life, not just a negative one.)  I don't know if, again as a player not a designer, it is possible to be priority 4.

Funny, as a writer I'd classify myself the same way.  Funny because I generally regard my gaming and writing as totally seperate.

yrs--
--Ben

[Windthin]

Ah.... can somebody be all of those and a bit more otherwise?  I never did like labels.

[SumDood]

I'd have to agree with Windthin, there's just too much crossover between the four "tribes" to use them as a real classification tool. It is interesting, though, to create the classifications and look at them.

Judging from the games I've seen here, the crossover level is massive, with most of us encompassing aspects of all four. Even realism fits into certain aspects of our worlds.

[Jasper]

I think this is yet another case of Mr. McCloud being fond of his own voice.  Every time I hear him say something, he's making various kinds of over-arching definitions, and "let's cut to the quick and see how things *really* work" statements that are ultimately untenable and simplistic.

I know I'm being harsh here, but his is a kind of ego that I particularly can't stand (and it's not a small one at that).  I should hasten to add that I don't really know his comics all that well, so he may be very skilled there, but every comment I've heard him make about "How the World Is" has coem across as being arrogant and ultimately vacuous.

[Trevis Martin]

I would suggest that the four types are arrived at similar to the way the three prioriites of GNS are arrived at.  They are decision types that go into the act of making any artwork and the decision type that is the majority tends to class the overall work.  

I am an artist, MFA and everything, and I have encountered all four types that Mr. McCloud is speaking of in visual art (particularly painting and printmaking).  I can also say for certain that all the artists I  have known have given a certain amount of consideration to each area, but most often one of the areas is most distinct.  Interestingly it is possible to have an 'incoherent' work of art that is trying to promote mutually exclusive priorities at the same level.

regards,

Trevis

[Windthin]

I'm sorry, but people are people: individuals.  Even those who prefer to follow the prevailing winds have definite individual qualities if you get to know them.  Labels of this sort, to my mind, only harm the creative process, because you begin to classify people as stereotypes and miss what they truly are: themselves.  Needless to say, I've never been fond of personality tests and other true-false/multiple choice situations where my answer is not this or that or that, but something else entirely, or in the middle, or a combination of various factors, offered and not.  In a way, this also typifies my search for a more fluid system, because all systems are ultimately attempts to quantify reality (and thus why I have an especially large problem with things like alignment and charisma which attempt to do so to morals and personality).  This system may work very well for Scott McCloud, but I cannot help feeling that he is missing out on something vital by using it (most noticeably his apparent focus on what about each pigeon hole annoys the others).

[Trevis Martin]

Windthin,

I agree completely that people are individuals but having things in common (culture, etc.) they necessarily show patterns of behavior that are similar.  I agree that in the best of times we recognize that each person is a unique constellation of experiences that cannot be caputured by a label.  However, these classifications arise because they are useful.  They are not restrictions, just phenomena that have become so prominant that they can be identified. Streams across a landscape that have dug a deep enough channel to be recognized. And we can learn from those phonomena.  They are the finger that points at the moon. If we mistake the finger FOR the moon, then we are in trouble, but the recognition of what the labels point to is not inherently harmful and, indeed, can be helpful.  You cannot discuss things without defining your terms, and contrary to being harmful to the creative process, working with Ideas like this provide a touchstone for comparison to real life and can help one understand the spectrum of possibilities and how they relate to it.

Mr. McCould's archetypes are, by necessity, extremes. Otherwise their usefullness as markers would be limited.  I don't know that he pretends that this addresses every possible preference or not.  My point is that  discussion of broad categories such as these has an implicit understanding that people are not wholly of one category or another.  And I suggest that such types, like any sort of classification, has its usefullness.

best

Trevis

[Alan]

I would suggest that the four types are arrived at similar to the way the three prioriites of GNS are arrived at.  They are decision types that go into the act of making any artwork and the decision type that is the majority tends to class the overall work.  

I am an artist, MFA and everything, and I have encountered all four types

I was thinking the exact same thing about fiction writing.  I think these four categories are based on some fundimental pillars of art.  

In writing fiction, one has to balance engaging the reader in an experience, structuring the communication, having something critical to say, and writing beautifully.  Every work of fiction I've seen has all four in some degree, but one is always dominant and I would bet it's the author's preference.

An interesting observation about the Iconoclast in modern fiction - the current style is to coat your iconoclast message with elements of the other three categories.  See Vonegut, Heinlein, and Viktor Hugo.

My one caveat is that not all "iconaklasts" need be grim.

[John Kim]

I agree completely that people are individuals but having things in common (culture, etc.) they necessarily show patterns of behavior that are similar.  

The problem is that, at least as Ed has described them, these don't describe patterns of behavior.  They are phrased in terms of what the artists wants rather than visible characteristics of what she does.  I would say that, say, "Surrealism" or "Cubism" as movements in art are useful because they describe visible and distinctive techniques of form.  In contrast, the "Classicist" seems to describe what the artist wants to accomplish with their work -- not a visible characteristic of the work itself.

[Trevis Martin]

Ah, I probably wasn't quite clear in what I said.  I should replace 'patterns of behavior' with 'patterns of decision.'

Regardless of what the artist wants conciously (which in my own case is not very obvious when I"m working) certain characteristics appear in the work that can indicate what the artist is concerned with, conciously or unconciously.  Cubism, for example, is a formal style.  It was a rather extensive manipulation of the formal aspects of painting.  Except for 'Guernica' perhaps, it had few paintings that were out for social commentary of any sort.  So too with the Abstract Expressionists.  Both of these 'styles' are methods of manipulating form for form's sake.  There are other works of art where social agenda is more evident.  There are also works where illusionism and transparancy of technique are important in order for the painting to be as immersive as possible.  

As I mentioned above, that these things are rarely entirely seperate in a work of art or within the body of a single artists work (which is really what you need to develp a hypothesis) but I do find the classification is indeed observable.

I am not contending that Mr. McCloud's categories are correct or complete (the category I'm most twitchy about is 'animist')  but I was responding to an idea in Windthin's message that suggested that such labels were not useful.

Back to Ed's orgiinal observation.  With a site and group of game designers who are centered around a group of articles that takes to heart the tenet of "System does matter,"  I think that does indeed result in extensive manipulation of form ( of the system), sometimes for form's sake alone.

regards

Trevis

[John Kim]

I should replace 'patterns of behavior' with 'patterns of decision.'

Regardless of what the artist wants conciously (which in my own case is not very obvious when I"m working) certain characteristics appear in the work that can indicate what the artist is concerned with, conciously or unconciously.  Cubism, for example, is a formal style.  It was a rather extensive manipulation of the formal aspects of painting.  Except for 'Guernica' perhaps, it had few paintings that were out for social commentary of any sort.  So too with the Abstract Expressionists.  Both of these 'styles' are methods of manipulating form for form's sake.  

Well, I agree that you can try to guess at what the artist is concerned with -- and that these concerns are reflected in the techniques which the artist uses (like Cubism).  But I don't think it is useful to categorize based on guessed-at subconscious concerns.  That is a judgement call which is contraversial and prone to error.  For example, there are many respectable people who would sharply disagree that Picasso's work is "form for form's sake".  Trying to define form-for-form's-sake as a category of art is just going to cause arguments rather than improve discussion.  

Outside of Scott McCloud, it  most categories in art/books/movies are based on technique or visible form -- i.e. genres like science fiction, forms like the novel, techniques like Cubism, and so forth.  If you are going to have "isms" at all, I think they should be based on relatively unambiguous qualities (i.e. visible techniques like Cubism) or perhaps with the professed intent of the artist.

[ejh]

To give a shred of context to this discussion, someone in the audience had asked McCloud whether he thought that in all of his emphasis on experimentation with form, the story was getting lost.

He replied by sketching the four categories (prefacing it with the disclaimer that this would really take an entire lecture to explain, so what he was saying was a woeful oversimplification), and saying that he belonged to the "Formalist" tribe, the ones who are indeed prone to prioritize formal experimentation/exploration over story and other considerations.  He said that different kinds of artists tend to have different sets of priorities, and these happened to be his priorities.  He found that in his experience these four "tribes" tended to crosscut different styles of art and to appear in many different creative professions, so he found the classification interesting.

I'd like to repeat and reemphasize that this is only my reconstruction of what he said; I was not taking notes, and many of the details (including some of the "annoy others" details) are probably just my own invention.  To do as Windthin has and use the details of how I presented it as evidence of why McCloud is full of it is just pointless.