Thanks for the encouragement! I do, in fact, tend to suffer from bouts of verbal diarrhea – but thankfully those can be edited out after the fact

I completely agree with you regarding the economic factors that drive much of game development. For the last several years publishers have completely depended on metacritic to drive their sales. Designers have a certain ‘look’ that they’ve already decided will sell, and boost metacritic scores. According to a few artists I’ve spoken with, many are instructed that “we want to see a certain [linear] look in your work”.. artists themselves don’t have much agency in bringing a unique look to the game. Rather than detracting from your point, the fact that Okami, Machinarium and Ico did so well suggests more to me that they stood out precisely because they tried something new when every other game looked exactly the same.

Thanks for pointing the conversation in the direction of materiality/economics – that of course is a major issue at the background of this linear/painterly debate. Glad you stopped by!

- Chris

I think Videogaming is going too much in the direction of the movie industry. Yeah it’s 3D, yeah it looks realistic…but i dont care how you did it, it’s what you do with it. I mean, we’ve reached a point in computer technology that games are not limited by it, unlike 20 years ago. And if it’s used to create a wonderful 2D game, why not? If it fits the purpose, then yeah!

First time post to your blog – I have thoroughly enjoyed playing catch-up and reading them! Your comments are marvelously insightful and not afflicted by any verbal diarrhea (though verbal diarrhea is not an altogether bad thing!).

I don’t want to veer too far from your point of painterly vs linear in the artistic styles of recent games, but may I suggest that since the industry is largely built upon successful metacritic scores that it has thusly cornered itself into having to employing ‘linear graphic designers’, as opposed to ‘painterly artists’ in (western) development teams (I am aware of the dangerous waters I tread when making a distinction between artists and designers there, but bear with me for the sake of hypothetical discussion!)?

It is a fair bet that Crysis 2 and Gears of War 3 will both have scores printed on their respective retail boxes for their releases proclaiming “10/10 – The best lighting/particles/shaders we have ever seen!” or some such hyperbole.

The kryptonite to this point is that games like Okami, Machinarium and Ico did review extremely well, regardless of (or perhaps because of) their art styles.

For anecdotal evidence of the metacritic effect, google no further than ‘games metacritic important’ and take in Peter Moore et al view points, and have a glance at http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1588303/20080529/story.jhtml.

Nonetheless, the next few years and certainly the next console generation will be interesting, as we have surely almost reached the summit of graphic fidelity with full-HD 60fps gaming, so a new frontier must be found (3D?).

Well, I’ve waffled on for far longer than I intended – keep up the wonderful blogging, I look forward to reading many more!

I’m the same age as you, and I still find myself disappointed with digital versions of games. The tactility of boxed games means a lot to me.

Interesting that you are customizing/beautifying your Boxer library. I think you’ve just convinced me to switch from vanilla Dosbox for mac to Boxer

I had not thought of comparing digital covers themselves – that is fascinating that MI2:SE looks icon-like while U6 looks ‘cover-like’. The U6 cover was painted by the wonderful Denis Loubet, and I think he’s just operating at a different level of expression than the in-house MI2:SE artist is. ALL of Denis Loubet’s Ultima game covers are fantastic; I’m thinking of U7 and U8 in particular.

I don’t think we’re wrong to be grumpy about this – no one (even folks younger than us) seem too happy about the new MI2:SE cover art. And it’s not really the cover art that is the problem, but more that gaming is moving in a new direction and we’re all just trying to keep up.

Thanks again for your thoughts.
- Chris

Thanks so much for your encouragement. And I’m especially glad that this is helpful with your final project – feel free to quote whatever you’d like from these pages. I’d like to hear more about your project some time, as my doctoral work is on the same topics of narratives/storytelling/aesthetics in games!

Good luck with the project – stay inspired.
- Chris

Anyway just wanna say that your articles are awesome! It’s very encouraging to find a like-minded person who have done a lot of in-depth analysis on these things. =)

I’m currently doing a thorough research on storytelling and narratives in game aesthetics (or so I named it) for my undergrad final project and your articles have strong and valid perspectives that help me a lot in my research. They got me thinking on things that I so often took for granted. So thank you!

Hope you don’t mind that I quoted some of your articles in my personal blog (and ultimately in my report). =) I’ll give the credits accordingly!

Maybe it’s just my age (30) but i really like the idea of actually owning a game and having some sort of box. I could go on about how digital distribution changed how we consume games, but i guess the line between grumpy old guy complaining about how everythings been better in the past, and really philosophising about how much everythings changed in the last 20 years since i started as a gamer would become pretty blurry.

But, to contradict myself (a bit), i spent a lot of time getting my Boxer library looking pretty sweet. (Boxer is a Mac frontend for dosbox)

This brings me back to this topic: I really like looking at the digitized version of the, say, Ultima 6 cover. I really see it as a cover, whereas i see the MI2 SE “cover” more as an icon for the game (on the ipad for example) to quickly browse throug your app list and find the game you were looking for. I dont wanna discredit the artist of the new style cover, but Purcell’s original (and knowing what “paintings” didnt make it and how much work went into it) just sums up what an epic adventure MI 2 really is (that’s Monkey Island 2, not Mission Impossible 2, thats just a dull movie . Yeah, the SE “cover” just says “heres your MI2 app”.

Oh god, i really sound like a grumpy old gamer!

You bring up something I had not thought of much: what does ‘box art’ mean when it’s just another cover in your iTunes folder? I doubt people spend much time looking at covers when they’re digital. I remember staring (for minutes) at my boxes when I first bought boxed games. That is no longer done, I suspect.
You might enjoy this article, where I take a look at digital downloads:
http://www.artfulgamer.com/2008/09/02/the-lost-art-of-game-packaging-and-the-digital-only-turning-point/

I really dont like the style of the new versions, they look shallow. Oh, and am i the only one who thinks that “A graphic adventure by Ron Gilbert” really adds some depth? Could also say “graphic novel” while the new version screams “GET THE CULT CLASSIC ON YOUR IPAD NOW!”. But, maybe its just me getting old, i prefer old gameboxes like these:
http://thalion.exotica.org.uk/games/ambermoon/ambermoon.html

I think the new, can you say box art when its a downloadable?, cover appears pretty soulless to me. Well, could be worse, they could have done closeups of the main protagonists whith a witty tagline in Helvetica.

P.S. i think artistic approach to graphics never looks dated…even a rather 3Dish game like Okami still looks brilliant.

You bring up something really important, that I’ve covered in another article – http://www.artfulgamer.com/2008/01/19/inviting-the-imagination-the-power-of-words/
I see another parallel aesthetic movement in games that has become extremely important in the way we experience them. Today game designers (and players) value “representational realism” or pure representation over emotional or aesthetic realism. We see the cover/box art as a representation of what’s inside (perhaps gamers have always been like this), rather than an expression or idealization of the game’s meaning. The end result is that many games have moved toward a representational/photorealistic realism that values high res pixels over emotional expression.

If I play with the terms a bit, the move from painterly (literally: ‘paint!’) to linear (pixels) has been accompanied by a move from the imagination (all those old abstract blocks/symbols in Atari games) to representational realism (the perfect skin and lighting of Heavy Rain). Computer artists tend to use pixels to “represent” things rather than express things, and I think part of the reason is because gamers demand games that push their new video card hardware to the limit. But that’s a whole other conversation – I just found it interesting that you noticed the link between linear and representational, which is another strong part of modern aesthetic theory.

(btw – I think that Wölfflin never intended to use the painterly vs. linear distinction to make any better-or-worse claim, so I’ve definitely bended his original usage a bit here.)

Many thanks for such a thought-provoking comment!
- Chris

While I absolutely agree that the original box cover is more striking and artistically nuanced, it is also a poor representation of the game. Not only does the game look like that, but it does not play like the that. The game is a light, whimsical farce whereas the cover seems to dwell on horror and suffering. The newer picture, while flatter and less interesting, also better demonstrates the games visual style (being very nearly what the game looks like), but also it’s aesthetic sense–in that it deals with suffering and horror on some level, but it is lighthearted and not to worry about. So in the end, the original painting fails to capture, really, what Monkey Island is about, and while it is much more interesting as a stand-alone piece, it is less successful as coverart.

Which isn’t to say that there should be a drift to the more linear (and I think your article does a great job of defining and representing the two), but that a more painterly representation isn’t necessarily a “better” or more fitting one.

Interesting perspective, in particular that you miss the old covers. Many players point out that they were inevitably “disappointed” with the in-game graphics when the cover seemed to promise so much more. I too appreciated the old illustrated boxes/covers – while they were obviously made to market the game and make it appear flashy, I now realize that they also served to invite the player into the world via rich illustration. Take the cover of BioForge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioForge)… it made wild promises about a biomechanical world where man and machine were intertwined. While the in-game graphics were of course a different story, the cover always gave me that “wow! I want to live in that world!” feeling.

Thanks for your thoughts!
- Chris

I still remember old games always having such wonderfully illustrated boxes that in no way reflected what the actual game looked like. I actually kinda miss that.