2 ms·

Nah, you're just wrong about your quality measure. The production of "conventional pap" is very much a form of mastery. And so is good marketing. Raw technical

Nah, you're just wrong about your quality measure. The production of "conventional pap" is very much a form of mastery. And so is good marketing. Raw technical skill isn't enough for success, you also need an audience for that skill. It doesn't matter that your skill at the guitar is divine if you only play technical pieces only other expert musicians appreciate. Take Minecraft for instance. A graphically unimpressive game made by nobodies before it got famous. It didn't get so big because it demonstrated the pinnacle of game development.

dbspin 2y ago
Minecraft was revolutionary in the openness of it's game design... It's a terrible example of 'technically bad'. The technical quality of Minecraft is in design, not graphics. There's no parallel for musicianship. I don't disagree that there are fantastic producers working in bad pop music - they're not the musicians who's names mast the tracks, they're folks like Max Martin, RedOne, Boi-1da. Their skill is not in making music better. It's in producing prototypes that the factory of the industry can mass produce and tweak for different demographics. This has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of music. It's more akin to propaganda or marketing. The talent at work here is manipulation, not artistry.
Qwertious 2y ago
Minecraft had good graphics, actually - the color pallet was clearly well thought-out, and the blocky low-poly aesthetic was chosen for visual consistency with the 1m voxel size that makes up the entire world. Short of shipping with raytracing (which notably wasn't real-time possible in 2010), there's not much Notch could have done to improve the core graphics. (Note that while I'm using 'graphics' and 'aesthetics' interchangeably here, they're separate things with graphics meaning technological capability and aesthetics meaning artistic choices.)

dbspin 2y ago

Minecraft was revolutionary in the openness of it's game design... It's a terrible example of 'technically bad'. The technical quality of Minecraft is in design, not graphics. There's no parallel for musicianship. I don't disagree that there are fantastic producers working in bad pop music - they're not the musicians who's names mast the tracks, they're folks like Max Martin, RedOne, Boi-1da. Their skill is not in making music better. It's in producing prototypes that the factory of the industry can mass produce and tweak for different demographics. This has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of music. It's more akin to propaganda or marketing. The talent at work here is manipulation, not artistry.

Qwertious 2y ago

Minecraft had good graphics, actually - the color pallet was clearly well thought-out, and the blocky low-poly aesthetic was chosen for visual consistency with the 1m voxel size that makes up the entire world. Short of shipping with raytracing (which notably wasn't real-time possible in 2010), there's not much Notch could have done to improve the core graphics. (Note that while I'm using 'graphics' and 'aesthetics' interchangeably here, they're separate things with graphics meaning technological capability and aesthetics meaning artistic choices.)