Shader is a game I’m making and stranding on one laptop. Stephen Totilo wrote a great article on his brush with Shader, he relates his personal experience with it as well as my own in making it. It’s a great article because he doesn’t spend time talking about what Shader might mean or should mean. He focuses on what it means to him.

The comments are also pretty great. There are many many people on this article and others calling Shader pretentious and not-novel and dumb and for one reason or another think Shader is bad. And the haters might have a point. There is an argument that commenters haven’t hit on but that I think is important. An argument that Shader could be helping to destroy things I love, that is: the power of clued-in-art to destroy approachable-art.

Lets talk for a minute about everyone’s favorite piece of Dadaism: Duchamp’s Fountain. Fountain is pretty hated, then and now, and I think that makes sense. Say you pay a little money to wander into an art gallery in 1917, you’re used to seeing representational art like this but instead are presented with Fountain, or this or, god help you,  this. Of course you don’t get it, Fountain in 1917 is exciting to thousands of people, epic representational works are exciting to millions. Unfortunately for you, early 20th century casual art fan, you ain’t seen nothin‘ yet. Modern art pretty much kills representational art.

You’re not really supposed to get Fountain. Duchamp isn’t talking to you, he’s talking to the art world. He’s saying “dude, what does the word art even meannnnnn?” but you’re not super interested in that question. You don’t spend every waking moment of your life thinking about sculpture and painting like Duchamp does. You want something that moves you, something that hits you in the face and makes you say “wow”. You want art that speaks to you. Unforunately for Fountain to speak to you you have to know what’s going on in the art world in 1917. You have to read about and care about art to appreciate it and that’s not something representational art requires. Fountain is just too damned inside baseball for you. But this new kind of art, art that requires a deep understanding of the art world, kind of takes over. It shoulders representational art off the main stage and takes over. You hated Fountain and railed against it, but you lost, and now art sucks for you.

Now you walk into the NY MOMA and are just like “wtf“.

Of course there is great contemporary art that you don’t need an education to appreciate, I wrote a whole blog post about that. Unfortunately a lot of modern art does require deep engagement with the art world and in my oppinion the NY MOMA does a particularly bad job of stuffing itself with unaproachable art. In a way, those of us without an art education lost art. It was stolen from us by the likes of Duchamp and Jackson Pollock.

And so Shader comes to exist. A game (possibly) exciting to thousands instead of millions. Shader is exciting to me because of how it is different from writing a game that might be released. If you don’t write videogames for a living those reasons will not resonate with you. Stephen Totilo plays a lot of games and he plays a lot of games as his profession, but he has a different relationship with Shader than alllll those games he plays so it’s interesting to him. If games aren’t a big part of your life then Shader is probably not going to be interesting to you (i’m not saying that the obverse is necesarily true though).

Shader is too inside-baseball for most people to like, which is not a reason to hate it, but it also might be a tiny shot at populist games. It might be one little piece of kindling on the fire of games that are only interesting to those with a deep understanding of games. And could that fire eventually burn so furiously that it snuffs out beautiful games that everyone can love like World of Goo and Super Meat Boy?

No actually it can’t, because unlike painting and sculpture there is a popular market for games which means that the weird-abstract games will happily exist alongside populist gold just like books and movies and music.

So get over it forum commenters! People are gonna make games you don’t get. You can’t stop them!

Yesterday I went out and bought a cheap netbook. I’ve downloaded onto the netbook the as3 development environment I use to make games and started writing. I’m going to write Shader entirely on the netbook.

After I finish writing it I’m going to destroy all the usb, bluetooth and internet capability of the netbook and superglue the harddrive in place. Shader will be stuck forever on this little netbook I bought in Buenos Aires.

The game will be about using math and programming to make trippy visuals. It will have levels, a difficulty curve, a friendly UI. It will not have a tutorial. It doesn’t need one because I can explain to you how to play, because unlike most games there will only ever be one copy so I will always be there to show you how to play.

I’m not actually totaly sure why I’m doing this. I have a strong urge to do it. Ever since I thought of the idea about a month ago in Panama I’ve been itching to start. Here are some things I like about Shader, although I hesitate to say these are the reasons I’m making Shader. I know I want to make it, and that’s reason enough.

-Shader can never reach a large audience. Games can reach a massive audience, my game Fantastic Contraption was played by tens of millions of people. Because of the possibility of reaching an audience in the millions it is hard to ever be truly satisfied with how many people have played your game. Traditionally the audience’s experience is the entire point of the game but it is impossible for millions of people to play Shader. There is only one frail netbook, and when that’s gone, Shader is gone. This is weirdly freeing. I will never feel the hope, yearning, and stress of releasing Shader. This is also different from simply never releasing the game because merely the fact that you *could* release it will sit in the back of your mind. You will feel cowardly for not seeking an audience. After I sabotage the netbook it will be impossible to release it so there will be no stress.

-I get to see the game’s entire life. Usually the vast majority of a game’s life happens outside its creator’s view. You get to spend the formative years with a game, nurse it to life, help it stand, watch the first few people play it. But then it explodes away from you. All you get is tendrils of people’s reported experience. The game is now it’s own thing and you don’t really know what its life is like. I will get to see the entire life of Shader. I wont sit, staring out the window, wondering what the game’s life is like now. I will know. I will be sitting next to it watching.

-No need to attain standards but my own. Since Shader can’t find an audience there is no reason to consider what anyone else will love or hate about it. I will never nervously click on a review link or get an email about how much someone doesn’t like it.

-No tech support. No Tech Support!

-The feeling of creating one piece of art. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to paint a painting once and have only that. I’m so accustomed to being able to copy infinitely, I want to know what it feels like to have one of something. To sweat and work to create something and only have that. I want to know what a painter feels like when they finish a painting.

-Blurring the line between the game being easily-copied bits or a solid physical thing. In some sense the netbook will *be* Shader and vice-versa. I’ve never made a physical thing of value before. The laptop becomes my canvas and paint, I now have a materials cost like a sculptor or painter. The ease of copying has a vast impact on the perception of games. I can put a game up on a forum and have hundreds of people dismiss it in two minutes, the standard price for two years of my work on the app-store is 3$. I want to see if I, or other people, think about Shader differently.

I’m certainly not going to stop making audience-seeking games (I’m working on one of those now as well). Games being easy to copy and share is vastly better than the opposite. But for this one project I kind of want to see what it looks like on the other side of the reflection.

Most of which I stand by. But that middle tweet “Don’t listen to critics, they are trying to make you love what they love” reeks of bullshit to me now. What should we fellow human beings be doing about art if it is not bringing eachother an experience that we will love? Of course everyone should be evangelistic about things they love. That’s a wonderful thing to do.

I do think that the world of painting and sculpture has been stolen from us by critics though, and here is why:

I love contemporary art, part of the joy of traveling is that we get to explore contemporary art galleries from Tokyo to Istanbul to Paris to Vancouver but this love of contemporary art has come despite the established art world. For generations and generations painting and sculture was seperated into high art and low art. Low art was pictures of puppy dogs and sunsets, mickey mouse and advertising. High art was often oils, eventually abstract, basically whatever hangs in a museum. The divide was boolean and at the extremes the gulf was great: The Mona Lisa is a masterwork of great value, mickey mouse is common and not very interesting. Duchamp tried to smash down this wall. Pop art took a fire-ax to it. But both ended up being terribly horribly co-opted. Replicas of Duchamp’s Fountain (the original is lost) are displayed in galleries and have value whereas the average toilet urinal is not and does not. So while people have smashed at the divide between high art and low art it still stands, solid and unwavering. Staring any common-man who walks into an art gallery straight in the eyeballs.

And this is the damage that the critical divide between “good” and “bad” art does, it stares you in the eyes whenever you walk into a gallery and tells you what you “should” like. What you can admit to liking without having someone more knowlegable than you chuckle at you. You can say you like the Mona Lisa for instance, and Mondrian and 17th century portraiture. Saying you like these will make the people around you nod their heads in a greement. No one will laugh at you, those are some acceptably high-art tastes. But does anyone who hasn’t studied art actually like those things? No. That’s why going to the art gallery is a chore and not a joy. Because the things that you are expected to like are only exciting to people who have poured their entire lives into art. Mondrian was incredibly exciting at the time but now his work has been co-opted and reshaped so much and so many times his original works are boring and stale. It is only if you are educated in what came before and after does the work become interesting so it is only interesting to people who have dedicated themselves to studying painting. Those are the people who decide what is good, who can defend their decisions, and the rest of the world looks to them to decide what to look at when they go to a gallery.

So people don’t go to the third floor of the Vancouver art gallery where the contemporary art is. They stay on the first floor where the Picassos hang. Never mind that you’ve seen those paintings a million times already, reproduced in ads and movies and magazines and online. Those are the high-status paintings and high-status in the art world is everything.

But the stuff on the third floor is amazing! It’s got no history, you’ve never heard of the artist and you’re not sure if it’s even “art” or not but god damn, hanging from the ceiling is a whole whale skeleton made of lawn-chairs! How cool is that!? Lets be honest, anyone can appreciate a giant whale made of lawn-chairs. If that’s too shallow for you then over in the corner there’s work that talks about modern local issues in a way that you can understand without an art education (as long as you’re from BC). It’s a minor miracle this stuff is even here, the Vancouver gallery is particularly good at exhibiting local artists who do work that’s interesting to a crowd with no art-education. On the other hand the MOMA and the SFMOMA are particularly bad at it. They play to what you are supposed to like, artists that critics have all agreed are good and important. But these artists are talking straight over our heads because critics are bored by the stuff we like. That’s not surprising, they’ve spent their whole lives looking at paintings. I don’t think your average art historian would get The Stanley Parable just like I don’t get the Mona Lisa. Insisting that we have the same taste as someone who has spent their whole life engaged with a medium isn’t productive and it’s what keeps people out of art galleries.

When I read pretty much anything Tevis writes I get mad because his writing oozes a certainty and an authority that I think is slowly building a wall between the Mona Lisa and Lawn-Chair Whales. But I was so wrong to call out all criticism as bad. Critics probably had something to do with getting Brian Jungen’s work into the gallery to begin with. Many games right now have a frightening relationship with race and gender and it’s incredibly valuable to have people pointing that out.

Realistically games aren’t going to go the way of paintings and sculptures anyway, they are of too much populist interest. More likely we will fall into the casual snobbery of films and music where the wall exists but is more permeable. I just love that right now, among my friends, Angry Birds is a “good” game and so is The Stanley Parable. No one feels the need to call one inherintly “better” than the other. That discussion, along with “is it even a game” and “what is art” isn’t useful and doesn’t need to happen.

p.s. I also think I have some insight into why players are horrible assholes to people who criticise games they like. In a disagreement between the casual enthusiast and the studied critic the enthusiast has almost no way to argue his point. Art is very hard to talk about. Why do I love the whale? I really have no idea, I can not express it in words. I think this helps explain why well written pieces that sharply criticise a popular game are met with angry invectives instead of anything constructive. These players want to express how much and why they love this piece of art but have no idea how to do that so they collapse into hurtful personal attacks in a horrible attempt to defend the thing they love. I studied film a little bit in university so I can express to you very clearly why the structural problems in Game of Thrones make it infuriating for me to watch. But what’s your comeback going to be if you haven’t? “Oh… I like it”. Being able to justify your position has an odd importance in our world, that’s why some art galleries have those rediculous little writeups filled with art-speak and high-minded ideas, because, “Holy shit, that looks cool!” is, for some reason, not enough for us.

If you do need a greater reason to like the whale: “Brian Jungen’s sculpture ‘Shapeshifter’ makes a statement about cultural hybridity and institutional displays of marine life in aquariums and natural history museums. Jungen, who investigates the intersections and fluid boundaries between Aboriginal and Western cultures, asks us to consider the skeleton of a whale, not an anatomically accurate whale, but a composite influenced by the forms of chairs and by actual whale species. With his choice of material – the ubiquitous monoblock plastic chairs found in discount stores around the world – the artist explores the potential for communication inherent in mass-produced objects in the context of a global economy. Many societies are fascinated by whales and have endowed them with special significance. Aboriginal groups consider the whale to be an animal of great spiritual power, while whales in captivity are popular tourist attractions. The title “Shapeshifter” refers to the spiritual process of transformation from human to animal or vice versa.”

Human beings are relentlessly status seeking, and we are voracious consumers of novelty. These two things combine in weird ways when people talk about art.

You hear people leaving movie theatres saying bizarre things like “Yeah I really liked that movie but I wouldn’t consider it Good”. This is madness! Clearly if you enjoy a thing then that thing is good, that’s the best definition of “good” that I can think of.

But there are cases when you would be wise to couch your praise for fear of seeming a rube! We are all always, subconsciously, attempting to raise other’s opinion of us on pretty much every topic imaginable and when we can’t do it honestly we fake it. That’s why you didn’t ask the teacher questions in high-school if you were truly lost (unless you were confident that everyone else was also lost).

This means we all want to have “sophisticated” tastes in movies, painting, wine, music, games, everything. But what is “sophisticated” is what is liked by the medium’s Ultra Fans. People who devote all their spare time, or even their lives, to a topic. I am a games Ultra Fan, but I am not a wine or music Ultra Fan and hence I behave oddly around wine and music. I have actually caught myself looking up reviews for an album before suggesting it to a friend lest my taste turn out to be “incorrect”. I am very uncomfortable at wine-tastings because of the chance that my lack of wine-sophistication will be uncovered, even though it’s totally normal to not know anything about wine!

It’s also why people have “guilty pleasures”, songs they listen to in their headphones but don’t want people to know they like because the song is beneath their tastes.

There are times where you will profess ignorance and things I profess a proud ignorance of, like cars and sports, but that’s also status seeking “oh cars? I enjoy more intellectual pursuits thank you”.

A lot of the time we are trying to seem as sophisticated as possible, which is always more sophisticated than you actually are, so we deny our love of things that we think an Ultra Fan might not like. Ultra Fans used to like summer blockbusters, they were 13 once, and loved them (maybe only secretly) but the price of our voracious lust for novelty is that Ultra Fans get bored. They’ve seen a lot of action movies, rom-coms, slashers, and those movies have lost their novelty. So the best way to seem like an Ultra Fan is to think something is boring. To fake cool your default stance on everything should be boredom, because no matter how good something is you can always claim you’re above it.

This is offset by people wanting to gush about things they actually genuinely enjoy hence the “I liked it but I wouldn’t say it was a Good movie”. Simultaneously expressing your joy and couching it lest someone think you are unsophisticated.

We do the reverse sometimes and say something is “wonderful” if we think an Ultra Fan would like it, which is why total nonsense can be highly praised. If you don’t understand it then it must be for a more sophisticated audience than you and by praising it you appear to be part of that audience.

I was going to end this with a whole paragraph defending myself from accusations of extreme vanity, but that would just be more status seeking. I’ll let you decide for yourself, just as you should with whatever movie you watch next or game you play. If you like it, just say so.