Kellee Santiago Exiting thatgamecompany

@jakkblades said:

I've never played a thatgamecompany game, and I may be about to say something that makes me more enemies than friends, but here goes. In the interviews I have seen with her online, I have heard her say again and again that her interest is to be on the vanguard of art "avant-garde" if you will, not to design the games of her dreams, that she herself has never had much interest in games outside of what they could mean in further artistic achievement. I found her to be, in this respect, rather self-interested and self-important, with the goal of boosting her artistic acclaim, not of creating entertainment or art that she would enjoy or would be enjoyed by others. I'm not saying "down with art games" but I think they should be made by gamers, not pretentious NYU art grads.

You sound like someone with inferiority complex issues... How could you infer all that?, What is wrong with NYU grads? Is being ignorant "cool" then?

Marcus is awesome. So is Alex. Interesting, wonder what prompted this move.

@Etnos: Politeness goes a long way, "friend." With that said, my assessment of Ms. Santiago was based on nothing but what she said, that her interest in games arose from her desire to exist on the forefront of art. For my money, this is reckless self-interest, if you believe that your ascendancy to the avant-garde is of a higher value than what you may create or experience within that art. I could have worded my indictment of her more gently, and should have, but the fact remains in my mind that an artist must first be a lover of their medium, not ambitious to subvert or invalidate other mediums by sliding into year one of a new medium. Read the story of Brunetto Latini in Inferno to learn the value of artists who make personal achievement and acclaim the object of their lives. (Hint: he's burning down in Underworld.)

Hey Marcus!

she's probably gonna work for activision...

Would she even stay in games? Seems like Genova Chen will go onto great things, shame she didn't stick it out for the long haul, although Journey was in development for a long time!

@jakkblades said:

I've never played a thatgamecompany game, and I may be about to say something that makes me more enemies than friends, but here goes. In the interviews I have seen with her online, I have heard her say again and again that her interest is to be on the vanguard of art "avant-garde" if you will, not to design the games of her dreams, that she herself has never had much interest in games outside of what they could mean in further artistic achievement. I found her to be, in this respect, rather self-interested and self-important, with the goal of boosting her artistic acclaim, not of creating entertainment or art that she would enjoy or would be enjoyed by others. I'm not saying "down with art games" but I think they should be made by gamers, not pretentious NYU art grads.

I'd much prefer "art grads" influencing game design than Activision executives.

I suggest you check out Journey, then. It, and games like Bioshock, have gone a long way towards advancing video games as an artistic medium (though obviously the primary goal is entertainment). Surely that's not such a bad thing, to merely aim for greater heights of artistic achievement within the medium.

@mewarmo990: Journey really does look like a fantastic game. I'd love to play it, but I don't have a PS3. I realize now that my wording was overly harsh about Ms. Santiago and Art school bumpkins, er graduates. I disagree with the notion (agree or not) that a degree is needed, or even particularly helpful, in the creation of art. You learn by doing: obviously, she felt the same way, hence she's doing it and making seemingly exciting artistic games. I did not mean to imply that I think games are not art--not could be but are already. I agree with you that Bioshock further demonstrates the artistic nature of games, and from what I've seen, Journey seems to be doing much the same. As an artist myself, I found Ms. Santiago's story of her journey (hah!) to game development to be a little, mmm I don't know, pretentious may really be the best word. Her decision to enter the games industry, in her own words, rose out of a desire to be on the forefront of a burgeoning medium. It seems a little like believing there's something (glory) art could bring to you, rather than what you would bring to art.

@jakkblades: You know what? The older I get the more contempt I feel for self-professed "gamers" and the more interest I develop in so-called "art games". It's getting to a point where a "gamer's game" equals a boring, samey, generic experience with tons of padding (because 6 hours is bad value for money!).

Fortunately, "art games" are not a genre. I love that I'm getting the kind of games I like everywhere, from the five bucks of Binding of Isaac to the fifteen of Journey to the full retail releases of L.A. Noire. Even better, things are not mutually exclusive, I'm getting more of that kind of stuff than ever and Call of Duty still drops like clockwork, so I call that a win/win.

@NoelVeiga said:

@jakkblades: You know what? The older I get the more contempt I feel for self-professed "gamers" and the more interest I develop in so-called "art games". It's getting to a point where a "gamer's game" equals a boring, samey, generic experience with tons of padding (because 6 hours is bad value for money!).

Fortunately, "art games" are not a genre. I love that I'm getting the kind of games I like everywhere, from the five bucks of Binding of Isaac to the fifteen of Journey to the full retail releases of L.A. Noire. Even better, things are not mutually exclusive, I'm getting more of that kind of stuff than ever and Call of Duty still drops like clockwork, so I call that a win/win.

The unsettling premise to me is that developing games as art involves bringing in something foreign to them, rather than developing and expanding what they have always done.

@jakkblades said:

@NoelVeiga said:

@jakkblades: You know what? The older I get the more contempt I feel for self-professed "gamers" and the more interest I develop in so-called "art games". It's getting to a point where a "gamer's game" equals a boring, samey, generic experience with tons of padding (because 6 hours is bad value for money!).

Fortunately, "art games" are not a genre. I love that I'm getting the kind of games I like everywhere, from the five bucks of Binding of Isaac to the fifteen of Journey to the full retail releases of L.A. Noire. Even better, things are not mutually exclusive, I'm getting more of that kind of stuff than ever and Call of Duty still drops like clockwork, so I call that a win/win.

The unsettling premise to me is that developing games as art involves bringing in something foreign to them, rather than developing and expanding what they have always done.

Not my implication at all. It was the gaming culture that stepped away from, say, games about music that were a metaphor for death and into a parade of soldiers and space marines. Games went away from art, not the other way around.

Every time during Journey's development that I've seen a faux-jaded "gamer" question "whether it was going to be a game" I wanted to given them a "Ask me about Loom" button.

@NoelVeiga: Sounds like we're at a stalemate of putting words into the other's mouth. As I've had to explain/defend in response to numerous comments on my post, I don't object at all to the idea of video games as art. I think they have always been art and no amount of COD's will wring that title away from them. My objection is to an outside party educated in the "principles of art" coming in and applying a foreign generalized rubric to this new challenging medium. But now I've been rebuffed so many times I'm in a corner that I don't remember if I wanted to be in to begin with. Suffice it to say, Wasteland was art in 1988 and not one of the designers had a degree from an art school or would have thought they needed it. What they had was experience, playing, making games, both on the table and the computer screen.

@jakkblades said:

@NoelVeiga: Sounds like we're at a stalemate of putting words into the other's mouth. As I've had to explain/defend in response to numerous comments on my post, I don't object at all to the idea of video games as art. I think they have always been art and no amount of COD's will wring that title away from them. My objection is to an outside party educated in the "principles of art" coming in and applying a foreign generalized rubric to this new challenging medium. But now I've been rebuffed so many times I'm in a corner that I don't remember if I wanted to be in to begin with. Suffice it to say, Wasteland was art in 1988 and not one of the designers had a degree from an art school or would have thought they needed it. What they had was experience, playing, making games, both on the table and the computer screen.

That's a more interesting argument, actually, and I still kinda disagree with you.

Game designers have traditionally been programmers, and there's this trend among the old guard these days that they should keep being that. "A designer needs to know how to code" and "engineering-driven gaming studios are the best" and so on.

And... well, yeah, that's mostly true, but it's probably because most people engaged in game making got there through the tech side, not the art side, or the storytelling side. And that's because, frankly, telling stories or making art in movies or novels or whatever tends to pay better, require less work and produce more immediate results, not because they're more compelling media.

So I kind of wish we'd see more of the games a fully committed artist fully engaged in the medium would make, as opposed as getting a bunch of coders and hoping that some of them have artistic sensibilities. It's a lot like film. Many of the best directors ever are photographers. I'm sure if you asked Kubrick whether a director who can't shoot himself could ever be a good director he'd laugh in your face. And yet, some of my favourite movies are made by people who approached the medium from the angle of theatre, or comedy or visual design or even painting.

Games are there right now. They are the art form of the programmer, who becomes a game designer by way of being a programmer who makes interactive art. I kind of want to see more games from people making that trip the other way around. There's always going to be tech there, just like every director can tell you if they want a long lens or not for a shot, but as middleware gets better and more standardized, that barrier of entry is going to start to go away and I'm eager to see what comes of it.

Hopefully she's off to help some other indie studio become a huge success

@NoelVeiga: I promise a response to what you said, but I need some time to chew on it a bit.

@jakkblades: Ironically, that may be the most thoughtful response I've ever received in a gaming forum :)