How Science impacts Aesthetics in Games
I opted for a less clickbaity sorta title. My inner troll is not pleased.
Welcome to another tangent from that obnoxious science tattoo face guy who does video game stuff. Fortunately, I have another week and change until my next project, so I am able to just barf words on a screen for all 10 of you reading this thing (you're welcome?)
Today I want to start scratching the surface of aesthetic in Video Games. Factually this lends to any sort of digital content, or if you modified a few things could apply to physical goods or packaging, but video games are my dysfunctional relationship, so that's what's going down here. I have done a brief (lol?) rant on artists being scientists too, but I want to take a step back and share how brains work in our every day lives, and how profound aesthetic is to what we connect within a variety of ways. Not enough work has been done to explore and quantify the extent of how we can leverage this understanding, but its one of a few (ok, maybe ten things) I obsess over in games.
Let's distill the concept of aesthetic preference, in a very general sense. Our tastes or interests at any point in time are the result/output of where we come from, what we experience, what we associate with, and what we want to associate with. This path in life we take is effectively a measurable game in itself, with small incidents during our lives that strengthen or weaken certain aspects of our preferences, sorta like our own internal leveling bars. Someone watching an amazing show, surrounded by great friends, who have parents that buy them all the toys about the show, and a growing connection to others as an adult who shares that common interest leads to a culture. You could correlate this as a brain's quest, with various buffs, or paid boosters to the level cap. And that culture has as much to do with aesthetic as anything else.
On the opposite end of this, someone who was watching that show with their friend, who did not have enough household income to get those things as gifts maybe didn't develop the same connection to that show, and by extension its shape language, color pallet, movements, etc. To the contrary of this statement, if that individual had a strong connection to their friend, and other friends in their social circle, which had a connection to the show, it could result in this child working hard to fit in, finding ways to connect with that show however they could. This would advance that aesthetic preference beyond that of his friends. Suffice to say, the SPECIFIC interests of people is a tough thing to target, but these kinds of patterns are more frequent than people realize, and you can see a lot of that in our players today.
However, our brains don't often work or act on specificity, and even in the cases that some do, that kind of self-awareness is uncommon and we typically follow the masses. And the masses are fed by larger organizations that are feeding content, and influencing culture, and its a LOT of stuff to take in for any individual brain. The more information our brains get, the better our brains get at breaking down general rules for things we tend to align towards. And the reality of this is it's REALLY easy these days to understand what kinds of aesthetics push the needle, the only thing we are missing when we decide to make the next game, is the context of what these aesthetics mean, and to whom.
As those kids, who watch the shows, and buy the things, and share the stuff, and stream that whatever, they are associating those consumption habits with behaviors across a variety of mediums. How they play, how they spend, how they feel rewarded, are all things they are associating with aesthetics in some form. More precisely, the spending habits, or play habits of different types of people, can be triggered with even just the aesthetics of the worlds we are creating. But with this, there are also two topics to be aware of, covering inter, and intrapersonal perception.
We have things that we associate with on a personal level, things that we own, we hold personal value in, even fall in love with. These same patterns also correlate more or less one to one with the kinds of people we have relationships with on a variety of levels. Granted, certain types of relationships have different outputs of expression, so we have a slew of deeper topics we store in our brains at that level to validate this. But in games, in social environments, aesthetic is factually one of the primary motivations of "social". Actually, it's foundational to all other aspects of social games, because of its social settings in which we connect with these aesthetics to strengthen a connection to people, a visual "common ground" as it were. And this understanding is INCREDIBLY important to be aware of.
So, how do we put this in practice? Well, first know whom you are building for if your objective is all the monies. That being said, enough amazing developers out there are also enamored by the same worlds they consume along with so many others, its part of the reason why some indie titles can become such sweethearts and so easy to share with others in streams, they don't have someone else at the top who faced their own paths as a consumer to make calls. Those calls are not made by market research groups who are assuming only a couple of thousand surveys, with subjective responses, and emotional responses from people who are generally unsatisfied with something, clouding their ability to communicate actual preferences... can you tell this is a touchy topic? I'll stop... for now. That blog is coming... for reals.
After you know whom you are building for, look at what exists now being consumed across most of types of media, this touches social media, games (et al), movies, shows, even toys. It's not a shameless thing to do, its a facet of communication, its a visual language people need to understand and feel connected with. It needs to feel like something they are familiar with or want to be familiar with. How much of that type of content exists? Where is it being shared? Who is following this? What are the social behaviors of those that reside within it? How are they spending? What topics are important to them that communicate or connect with that visual language? ALL of these things can be discerned from all the things we already see, we just have to get better at distilling things that could be obvious across the billions, as opposed to the surveys of a few thousand. I promise, there are ways to get access to data that can lead to these insights to feed quantified validation, but it's not going to happen without a shift in how we do business.
From here, look at the shapes being used with those ideal markets, or the way the characters move, or the color pallets. Break those things down into rules, and look at hints for how to evolve that beyond something that is a clone (or do, I don't judge, sorta...). The most profound works, while not intentionally driven from this practice, can blend a variety of these worlds to marry a unique aesthetic to a powerful experience and it really stands out. But the individuals who are doing this are deeply connected to those cultures online, or the shows, or the games. Even that person faces tradeoffs of how much time they have to observe and be a part of that, or pivot to get locked down to doing all the things and missing out with how rapidly those preferences are evolving (vacuums).
If you are able to define a style, which speaks the language of the individuals you want, something profound happens in an individual or groups connected to that world. This facet of social, and how it evolves in that experience, can become a culture. This act of self-representation is something we have done during our most crude existence as a human, where motivation was to not die and to create life. As we evolved with more social awareness, while more and more people connected, those topics became far more complex. Aesthetics alone resulted in stories, theories, religions, societies. Its the foundation of communication before even the written word, and its almost heartbreaking that it been dropped as something this important when we make games. Certainly, it's not an issue with ALL developers, but enough exist that I feel are really missing out one being a part of an amazing facet of communication.
What is more, like every other pain we face in games, we can look to other industries that really do this well. Fashion, packaging, film (sorta, don't get hung up on that), branding, all put so much in either making roles that are about exploring visual communication, to define products, or dropping millions of dollars to find quantifiable insights into the most simple and elegant brand (ok, seriously some of those groups sell hype b2b, but the idea is there in some form). And the neat stuff happening now in fashion is some groups finding ways to marry both. Games, we need us some of that.
Within all of these things being shared on this post, the TLDR of it is, visuals are a method of communication. Communication, and aesthetic are foundational to social. The aesthetic is an incredibly powerful mechanism to knowing who will, and won't play your game. There are subtle variables to rules with how this works as a science, but they are still measurable rules. And as commented on another wall o' word vomit here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/artcontent-data-science-games-peter-salinas/, if we give our artists a seat at the table to define this, with the right tools, and proper workflow, we can do a lot to understand the ever-evolving subtleties of aesthetic preferences in our digital worlds, and that understanding leads to actionable insights.