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> And programmers are usually really bad at truly touching others with artistic games. I think you missed the key words "seems capable of" in my statement. Sa
by derefr 5y ago
> And programmers are usually really bad at truly touching others with artistic games.
I think you missed the key words "seems capable of" in my statement.
Satisfaction in creating art doesn't come from actually touching other people's emotions, i.e. witnessing them being touched. (People who need that feeling, should best avoid becoming artists, and instead become entertainers or performers, where your craft is done "in communication with" a direct audience.)
Satisfaction in art comes from when you've polished your work to the point where your mental model of other people is touched. It's actually completely solipsistic; it doesn't depend on whether any real person ever sees the art at all. Just whether you think your target audience (which can even be a fictional character, or a dead person, etc.) would like it if they ever did see it. (Art can also be entirely for yourself — though works of art of the complexity of games usually aren't.)
As such, you can be truly bad at expressing yourself, and still receive satisfaction from creating art — as long as you're also bad at predicting how other people will react to your art†.
Luckily for fledgling artists, skill in the craft of art, and skill in judging art quality, are usually developed together. So, when starting out, you can be satisfied by bad art, because you don't yet know it's bad. (Though this does mean that people who start out as art critics, have a very hard time of becoming artists, because they know from the start when they have no inborn talent for art, and that discourages them from doing the practice required to develop the skill for art.)
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† It could also be that you're bad at the craft of art, and have a well-calibrated mental model of people, but you're just driven to create art for people with weird/outré/"bad" taste, who are especially moved by exactly your brand of unskilled art. But that's beside the point I'm making here.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago> People who need that feeling, should best avoid becoming artists, and instead become entertainers or performers, where your craft is done "in communication with" a direct audience. Modern games technology allows this. I know many an independent developer in tight community with players. There's this dude who's making this game who emails me closed beta builds and I think he's an artist. He often watches streamers in his community playing his own game and having a laugh with them. It's very personal. He puts his biggest fans into the game as NPCs, it's adorable.