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Programming Businesses Education United Kingdom Games

UK Industry Group Boss: Study Arts So Games Are Not Designed By 'Spotty Nerds' 207

Posted by Soulskill from the you-must-be-a-blast-at-parties dept.
nickweller writes: John Cridland is the leader of the Confederation of British Industry, a group that represents over 100,000 UK businesses. In a recent interview, he spoke about his enthusiasm for adding arts education to more traditional STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) programs. Here's how he chose to express that: "One of the biggest growth industries in Britain today is the computer games industry. We need extra coders — dozens and dozens of them but nobody is going to play a game designed by a spotty nerd. We need people with artistic flair." Cridland also expressed support for an increased emphasis on foreign language education: "If we’re not capable of speaking other people’s languages, we’re going to be in difficulties. However, there is far too much emphasis placed on teaching French and German. The language we most need going forward is Spanish (the second most frequently spoken language in the world). That and a certain percentage need to learn Mandarin to develop relations with China."
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UK Industry Group Boss: Study Arts So Games Are Not Designed By 'Spotty Nerds' More

UK Industry Group Boss: Study Arts So Games Are Not Designed By 'Spotty Nerds'

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  • nobody is going to play a game designed by a spott (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14, 2015 @12:21PM (#50317351)

    Said no person with a functioning brain ever.

    Go ahead and walk into ANY game design studio. There will be slight differences, like the foosball table is on the left instead of the right. But one thing remains static across all of them.

    Pasty pale, slightly overweight SPOTTY NERDS have built all of this infrastructure, not to even mention gaming specifically. What an ass hat. Coding is art, game design is art.

    What an asshat

  • No thanks (Score:3)

    by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @12:24PM (#50317369) Homepage

    No thanks, we don't want our games designed by PHB's. Go back to your own job of creating... uhm... what do PHB's actually create?

    Game art is already designed by designers and artists. Game music is composed by musicians and composers. Game design is created by people who understand that mere game art and music alone does not make a good game.

    Considering the size of the gaming industry, I guess plenty of people are happily playing games designed by those "spotty nerds".

    • No no, this is not PHBs, this is GHC, or Golden Haired Child.

      SO artsy....

    • uhm... what do PHB's actually create?

      Ulcers.

    • No thanks, we don't want our games designed by PHB's. Go back to your own job of creating... uhm... what do PHB's actually create?

      Accounting irregularities, mostly.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nemyst ( 1383049 )

      No thanks, we don't want our games designed by PHB's. Go back to your own job of creating... uhm... what do PHB's actually create?

      Pain? Suffering? Awful articles that get linked on Slashdot for clickbait?

  • Just look at GNOME 3, Firefox 4+, Windows 8. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14, 2015 @12:28PM (#50317427)

    All we need to do is look at GNOME 3, Firefox 4+ and Windows 8 to see what happens when "artistic" types get involved with software development.

    The end result is always a huge fucking disaster!

    The old UIs, developed mainly by programmers, may have been deemed "ugly", but they were consistent and highly usable. You could use them to get real work done quickly and efficiently.

    The new UIs, developed mainly by "UI designers" and "UX artisans" may be deemed pretty by such people, but they are really goddamn inconsistent and fucking unusable. You can't get work done with these, because you'll waste all of your time trying to figure out how the fuck to use the software.

    Gedit is an obvious example of how these "artistic designers" completely fuck up perfectly good software UIs. Gedit used to look like this [wikimedia.org], where it had a traditional, consistent, and highly usable UI. Newer versions of Gedit look like this disaster [wikimedia.org]. Yes, it's true, the GNOME 3 developers somehow managed to fuck up the user interface of a simple text editor!

    We need to go back to "ugly" UIs developed by real programmers, not today's "pretty" UIs developed by terrible "designers" and "artists".

    • The design that moves the titlebar and menubar into the toolbar, which you referred to as "this disaster", gains two lines of vertical space in the document compared to the old UI. With 16:10 and portrait displays hard to find especially in laptops, how else is the user supposed to make the best use of vertical space?

      And when did it change? You give a screenshot of 3.11.92, while a Gedit 3.10.4 user on another forum offers this screenshot that has the old UI [imgur.com]. Did it change between 3.10 and 3.11? The user al

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The new Gedit UI fails even when considering your arbitrary criteria!

        With the old UI, you could disable the toolbar, gaining you three more lines of text, if you really needed them that badly. You'd still have the menus available to you, with the functionality very easily accessible and well organized. You can't disable the hodgepodge top bar in the new UI without losing access to most functionality!

        The tabs in the new UI are also nearly twice the height of the tabs in the old UI. For all your talk about "m

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rastos1 ( 601318 )
          Fuck vertical space. On my random e-shop when I restrict the size of the monitor to 22"-24" then 90% of models have 1080 vertical pixels. And if I need more, I'll pivot the screen. You think I care about 3 additional lines? Oh, you mean on your netbook or tablet you don't have enough space? Well then get an editor designed for a small screen. And don't fuck up the default plain text editor of the DE. (Alternatively make it configurable).

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tepples ( 727027 )

            And if I need more, I'll pivot the screen.

            Good luck doing that on a laptop, even one bigger than a netbook.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The design that moves the titlebar and menubar into the toolbar, which you referred to as "this disaster", gains two lines of vertical space in the document compared to the old UI. With 16:10 and portrait displays hard to find especially in laptops, how else is the user supposed to make the best use of vertical space?

        No, if that had been the driving point then the toolbar would have been switched to a vertical one along the left or right edge.
        The reason for the change was only "oh, shiny!"

    • The old UIs, developed mainly by programmers, may have been deemed "ugly", but they were consistent and highly usable.

      You must be talking about the amazing wget UI [pulse2.com], right?

      Gnome 3 is a problem, but there is a need for balance.

    • I think when it comes to design (with any product), the fewer people that are involved in it the better the outcome will be. So while you can get away with blaming fru-fru useless artists in a lot of cases, maybe what you should really look at is how many people were involved overall, and how they are managed. Instead of having a large number of UX professionals, maybe all you need are a few, or just one. Perhaps they should just be a single consultant offering "take it or leave it" advice. Then your team o

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Why you people think you need a GUI to work with text files is beyond me. We did fine before all you mouse jockeys came along and insisted on dumbing down everything to the level of a McDonalds cash register.

    • FFS, the first version looked horrible too. Who needs a button, or even a menu option, for "new" or "save" in a text editor.

  • wut? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by penandpaper ( 2463226 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @12:34PM (#50317475) Journal

    "One of the biggest growth industries in Britain today is the computer games industry... but nobody is going to play a game designed by a spotty nerd. "

    Is it just me, or do these two ideas seem contradictory?

    • Is it just me, or do these two ideas seem contradictory?

      It couldn't be more contradictory unless he made it, "designed by a spotty nerd with nice straight teeth".

      Where is this Brit planning on importing all the game designers from?

  • Fuck you, Cridland (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14, 2015 @12:37PM (#50317509)

    Hey feminists, see that? That's how people treat us.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by PopeRatzo ( 965947 )

      Hey feminists, see that? That's how people treat us.

      "Us"? Which "us" are you talking about, game designers or spotty nerds?

  • ... spotty nerds to be played by spotty nerds.

    Frankly, I don't see a problem.

  • Form over function strikes again? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @12:45PM (#50317571)

    I'm convinced that this phase of computer history is going to be remembered as the "UX Revolution." Seriously, even Linux distributions' GUIs have turned into iOS clones. Windows 10, while better than 8, is still a disaster because Microsoft is still convinced that people want to run a phone/tablet OS on their desktop PC.

    It's the deadly combination of:
    - Everything is a touch screen, so UI elements have to be massive and convey no meaning unless you know what the symbol means.
    - Millions more "normal" people have computers in their pockets now, so even if "spotty nerds" want to use them, the UI can't be made functional because it has to be dumbed down for everyone.

    I agree that just letting the developers do a user interface would probably leave us at slightly above the verbosity level of vi, and a complexity level of emacs, but there's a happy medium. Not everything needs to be rendered in a flat, featureless Jony Ive rounded rectangle style. Seriously, if people who are used to computers have to look at a user interface for more than a few seconds to figure out what performs an action, and where that action is located, than form has won over function.

    I'd rather have an ugly, functional UI any day. AS/400 style green screens are hideously ugly and primitive, but they're laid out well, the intelligent use of color highlights important things, and they're easy to stare at for long periods of time. I'm absolutely sick of web pages and app screens that have bright white backgrounds and tiny light grey text, chosen simply because it's pretty.

    • - Everything is a touch screen

      The dumbest thing about this is that people are now using more text/IM and less talking than they did in the days of number pads. While I prefer a real QWERTY on my phone, even the humble number pad could be used for tactile text input. In fact, it had the advantage of being usable by the single hand holding the phone.

      A friend of mine once remarked that touchscreen phones are a fad; it's only for a while that people can be fascinated by the sleek exterior, and they'll eventually want something that works

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rakarra ( 112805 )

      I'm convinced that this phase of computer history is going to be remembered as the "UX Revolution." Seriously, even Linux distributions' GUIs have turned into iOS clones. Windows 10, while better than 8, is still a disaster because Microsoft is still convinced that people want to run a phone/tablet OS on their desktop PC.

      They want to provide a "consistence interface" across devices, and they believe, probably correctly, that desktop PCs are on their way out, and tablets and phones will dominate consumer computing in the coming decade.

  • You cannot teach creativity (Score:4, Interesting)

    by allquixotic ( 1659805 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @12:49PM (#50317601)

    The most galling fallacy in this short statement isn't that he thinks "geeks" aren't creative; it's that he thinks art education makes people creative. Here's some news for you: it doesn't.

    The MOST an art class can teach you is to learn how to follow the design memes of people who came before you. However, this is not necessarily a good thing. Those design features may have been very creative and engaging when they first started being incorporated into works, but if they are used in such a widespread way as to be monotonous, it actually makes a product *worse* to start throwing them in.

    Consider, for instance, how many games have a soundtrack that is extremely similar to every other game in their genre. It's not similar enough to lead to a copyright infringement lawsuit -- usually -- but it's "generic" in the sense that it borrows 90% of its design features from past works, whether previous titles from the same developer or competitors. These soundtracks often receive poor reviews when they don't stand out in any particular way from the other games that came before, and players tend not to remember the music after they stop playing the game.

    On the other hand, the best, most memorable and enjoyable game music soundtracks that have existed have all been extremely original, with major innovative design features that give a distinct "feel" or "sound" to the title. This can be VERY powerful and greatly boost the sales of the product.

    Similar comparisons can be made of visual assets in games, of course.

    The problem is, even though you can teach someone to mimic what's been done in the past and grade them on their ability to do so, you can't teach people to be able to come up with entirely new design features or concepts on their own. And if you tried to grade an art class based on how unique or original the design features were, most students at the high school and 4-year degree level would fail the class because they couldn't think of anything creative that was also good (you could technically consider any random selection of features to be "unique", but not all things that are unique are beautiful, appreciable, or easily digestible by the person accessing (reading/viewing) the work.)

    Most truly creative, novel design features that win awards and universal acclaim happen *spontaneously*, without any sort of directed methodology used to derive the aspects chosen. Sure, the creator may digest some existing art aspects of the game as "input" when trying to determine how to come up with more assets (textures, sounds, music), but even with that input, there are numerous ways you could go with creating the new content that seem equally viable from the outset. It's not until you get others to experience your content that you start to get feedback, like, "wow, this is incredible!" or "this sounds very generic".

    So yeah, throw away money, making coders spend extra hours bored in art class doing watercolor paintings, as if that's going to make England's creative output any better. People who are born to be creators tend to do whatever they love doing on their own, without having to be forced to sit in a class to do it. You really can't force creativity, or the "forced-ness" of it becomes obvious in the content that's been created. That's just the way it is.

    And don't even get me started on the stereotype that "geeks" are lacking in creativity. Coding shops used to ask people in interviews what their creative outlet is, whether it's singing, playing instruments, drawing, etc. - and those who didn't have any to speak of were often passed over in favor of candidates who had a creative passion. I imagine that type of thinking is even more prevalent in game studios, though I've never worked at one.

  • ... take down the flag and stuff.

  • British Elite HATE engineers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14, 2015 @01:02PM (#50317747)

    Engineers, and programmers are most certainly engineers, tend to have certain personality traits. In the USA, bosses try to nurture such people, and thus the USA has become the home of much of the computer revolution. In the UK, home of some of the GREATEST engineers and scientists in Human History, the bosses EXPLOIT what they see as the psychological weaknesses of the engineering classes.

    The hatred has a class basis, originating from the time when the rich OWNED the talent of everyone below them in Britain, and kept their power and money by becoming PERFECT PARASITES. In comparison, the same bosses LIKE the arty types, and find them droll company. The tradition, of course, is the dinner party of NOBS including the odd writer and artist to 'amuse' them. The cliche of the engineer, on the other hand, is a 'BORE' who sends every listener to sleep by wittering on about the minutiae of their field of study. You can see the same cliche depicted in modern films and TV shows.

    Computer Games represent quite unique art. Most frequently, according to the rule 'FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION' the 'artistic' expression in a computer game follows the technology that makes the game work. Take shoot-em-ups, like Space Invaders or Galaxians. Or platform games like Donkey Kong or Manic Miner.

    Much later we had Quake, with its distinctive style driven by the engineering choices of Carmack and Abrash. Modern open-world games look as they do due to the engineering behind the 3D rendering and lighting- the 'art' follows the engineering.

    Art-driven games tend to be flash-in-the-pan shallow shit that appeal to Apple loving journalists. Today the SJW crown has jumped on the bandwagon, since these types CANNOT think or program for shit, and thus must explot the fundamental work of vastly smarter Humans for their own perverted ends. A SJW that 'creates' a game by paying others to slap a layer of crap on a pre-existing engine will claim responsibility for everything, INCLUDING the engine.

    Pop stars are FAMOUS. Blockbuster movie directors are quite famous. The programming talent behind the world's best video games is 99.99% utterly INVISIBLE. A person like Carmack is the exception that 'proves' (tests in Old English) the rule, and even Carmack is only known to fellow nerds.

       

  • We need games designed by people who play games (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @01:16PM (#50317861)

    We don't need games designed by nerds who have a sometimes rather weird sense of "fun". Granted. But at least those games would get played by nerds. Games designed by artists who have no connection with games would be played by NOBODY because, yes, they are artistically pleasing and maybe they will one day end up in some review of the "most beautiful games of the past", but an artist that has no idea what makes a game fun will not create a good game.

    What we need is people who have an idea what makes games fun. What makes games interesting. Why people play them. And why people play THOSE games and not the ones over there. What made Kerbal Space Program a great game that was generally praised and Hatred a bad game that was generally panned? Don't bother answering, pretty much EVERYONE here knows the answer.

    At least if they play games!

    • No. (Score:3)

      by DiEx-15 ( 959602 )

      We don't need games designed by nerds who have a sometimes rather weird sense of "fun". Granted. But at least those games would get played by nerds. Games designed by artists who have no connection with games would be played by NOBODY because, yes, they are artistically pleasing and maybe they will one day end up in some review of the "most beautiful games of the past", but an artist that has no idea what makes a game fun will not create a good game.

      What we need is people who have an idea what makes games fun. What makes games interesting. Why people play them. And why people play THOSE games and not the ones over there. What made Kerbal Space Program a great game that was generally praised and Hatred a bad game that was generally panned? Don't bother answering, pretty much EVERYONE here knows the answer.

      At least if they play games!

      No.

      First off: "Fun" is subjective. What you find "fun" others may not. So off the bat, what you are asking is not possible because there isn't a universally accepted measure or definition of "fun".

      Second off: Gamers make bad game designers. They have a penchant to make games they want to play. That may not necessarily make for good sales and sales are what keep the game makers paid. It also falls back on point 1: Their version of "fun" may not be what others consider "fun".

      Finally: A lot of Game

  • "Curriculum" overloading ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MacTO ( 1161105 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @01:24PM (#50317955)

    This is the same mentality which leads to so much being added to the curriculum that neither the teacher nor the student can handle it. Rather than having every special interest trying to get their bits into the curriculum, decide what is important in a particular field and focus on that. Then give the learner the option to pursue a STEM, arts, or blended education. The arts aren't going to die off because everyone is interested in STEM, because you're never going to run into a situation where everyone is interested in STEM. Likewise, STEM isn't going to die off because of the arts. You're even going to have people who are interested in a mix of the two because no one completely fits into those silos.

  • I don't speak British - is spotty some kind of mean insult? Or does he just mean unreliable as in a spotty paint job.

  • Some of the greatest games of the 8 and 16 bit era were conceived, designed, and programmed by those spotty nerds, in their bedroom, on their own. The concepts and ideas of those games live on today, and those programmers are the reason that Britain still has a thriving games industry today.

    They had more talent than this blowhard will ever have.

  • This is why companies of Tale of Tales are the new wave. No one wants boring games like DotA or stupid fighting games like LoL. They want walking simulators of visceral glory, of characters of depth and poignancy with their own agency. Fun is irrelevant, it's about the social and artistic experience. This is the tomorrow today!

    ...what do you mean the company failed harder than Crystal Pepsi?

  • The CBI (Score:3)

    by RogueyWon ( 735973 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @02:39PM (#50318469) Journal

    I've crossed paths with the CBI a number of times in a work context over the last decade and a bit. To be honest, I've never seen anything come out of them that wasn't either a) blindingly obvious or b) completely stupid.

    They're a bit of an artifact from another age, really. They were founded in mid-1960s, at a time when UK Governments tended to be much more hostile to business and often at the beck and call of the trades unions. The CBI was set up as a counter-point to that; to act, as it were, for a union for big business. And to be fair, that was a perfectly valid objective in the circumstances of the times and remained so throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s.

    Today, of course, British business is hardly cowering from the union menace and the CBI, like a lot of other institutions of the cold war era, is left without a clear purpose. With a divided and often disinterested membership, it mostly seems to exist largely only to perpetuate its own existence, which it does by making ponderous announcements on whatever vaguely business-related issue happens to be topical at the time. As I said above, sometimes it points out the obvious, sometimes it says something ridiculous.

    It would be harmless enough if it weren't for the fact that, for legacy reasons, it still commands more press attention than it deserves. It can be an absolute godsend for lazy BBC journalists who can't be bothered going out to talk to actual industry; get a CBI rent-a-quote to say something and present it as the voice of business on any given story.

  • Art degrees don't belong in the same group as STEM (Score:3)

    by Macdude ( 23507 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @02:47PM (#50318527)

    First off. F-You, John Cridland, for the 'spotty nerd' insult. And F-You for insinuating that coders aren't artistic and that coding isn't an art form.

    The whole point of promoting STEM is because Art degrees are waste of time and resources. You may be personally fulfilled getting your Masters Degree in 18th Century French Poetry but it's not going to help make you a productive member of society.

    As to game design, you have the game designer who designs the gameplay, then you have the coder who writes the code to implement the gameplay and then you have artist who creates the graphics (and sounds/music) for the game (among numerous other people). Game design is a team effort and everyone needs their own specific skills.

    That you think coders need to be able to draw really shows that you have no idea of how the video-game industry works.

    • I completely agree with you that this guy's comments are insulting and don't necessarily make a lot of sense. However...

      The whole point of promoting STEM is because Art degrees are waste of time and resources. You may be personally fulfilled getting your Masters Degree in 18th Century French Poetry but it's not going to help make you a productive member of society.

      This is unnecessarily narrow-minded as well. First, while college degrees seem largely about "job training" for most folks today, for most of the 1000+ year history of universities, the assumption was that getting a degree was also about "broadening one's mind" and acquiring a breadth of skills that may be useful in various ways.

      Someone who has a master's degree in 18th-century French

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • They formed the Ancien Régime, which is a way of saying they ran the country.

          While I do not particularly promote the old social order and politics, the nobles and clergymen were the ones to do worthwile contributions to physics, chemistry, medicine and all other things etc., simply because they could afford to, what with not having to work and being able to get educated instead.
          After the second industrial revolution when child labor was replaced by mandatory schooling then the general populace could ge

  • That and a certain percentage need to learn Mandarin to develop relations with China.

    Oh, should they? Will conscription be involved?

    Awfully sorry old chap, we're already 2% over quota for frog, and don't even ask about kraut. I'm afraid it's either tiddlywink or the firing squad.

  • Like academic "artists" actually can do art. Right.

    One of the reasons the art of videogames is so innovative is because of its significant lack of academic bullshitters involved in it.

    Even the biggest, most successfull studios (Eidos Montreal comes to mind) still have that 80ies underground subculture vibe to them. They all have more in common with street art than academia - luckyly. They don't give a flying f*ck wether you have academic rank or not. They're actually interested in your art and wether you ca

  • If you don't play games... do not critic them. (Score:3)

    by Karmashock ( 2415832 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @04:33PM (#50319249)

    Imagine if all you knew about Cinema was the occasional trailer for a Michael Bay movie. Lets say you never actually watched movies. Ever. lets say all you knew was the trailers.

    Cinema would be crap right?

    Okay lets say all you knew about literature was whatever was in the airport book stand. That is what you thought books were. A collection of romance novels, spy thrillers, self help books, and other assorted shit.

    Literature would be crap as well, no?

    The first mistake this little twat made was in suggesting that game makers are not real artists. Anyone that has seen the work put into character design, modeling the various objects, creating the sound effects, etc... there are lots of artists in gaming and they're as good or better than the artists in other industries.

    The second mistake he made was projecting HIS desires for what gaming should be without understanding what gaming is already. He probably wants the equivalent of art house movies in games. What he doesn't grasp is that first we already have those and second just like in film they're not very popular because they either are only of interest to a small demographic or they are outright boring. If its wrong for me to judge all movies by Michael Bay movies then where does this fuck come off thinking he can judge all games by grand thief auto etc?

    And it was upon seeing this second error that I just rolled my eyes and stopped reading. If the man wants to talk about gaming then he can sit down and learn something about it. He knows nothing.

  • >> We need extra coders

    Is it just me..or does anyone else also feel REALLY insulted when someone describes a graduate level software engineer's job as "coder"?

  • If one of the biggest growth industries in the UK is computer games, doesn't that imply the Spotty Nerds are already doing it right, and that the games "nobody wants to buy" are being bought?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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