So, as I have recently hit the 100 day streak on duolingo and for this id like to start with a little reference. the Japanese have a saying “あそびましょう” or in English, Asobimasho, which means something along the lines of “let’s Play” or “let’s do something fun”, and I find it to be one of the most valuable, fascinating and beautiful things both about the Japanese culture and language, as well as the Japanese themselves.
For a country infamously known for workers dropping dead due to overwork, to even have a word or phase specifically for fun, seems peculiar on first inspection, however it is a valuable insight into their culture and world view I truly and deeply appreciate. this is probably one of the least important of their contributions to the world and I digress. the reason I bring it up is because, when working in the creative media space, that is what it’s all about ! and it is important to remember the reasons why we do things.
Why It Matters
When thinking about games design for instance, more often than not in the modern world, developers are wrapped up in deadlines, compartmentalisation, profit margins, other business area’s and trying to deliver a product to market as soon as possible with as few resources as possible. Seemingly forgetting WHY they are trying to make video games in the first place. And this doesn’t just affect the triple AAA studio’s from the lowest ranking artists to the creative directors, much of the pressure in the games industry can even be felt by individuals working on indie projects, making building even smaller games feel like a mammoth task from both the inside and out, and I feel it is important to start from first principles always.
why do we make creative media projects ? mostly because we hope to share a feeling with the world and more often than not it is for fun and enjoyment. Of course, it must be balanced with profitability, but audiences have a keen sense of when something has specifically been built for the purposes of greed, and projects built for the sole purpose of increasing shareholder value rarely pay off, at least not in the long term.
Let’s Go Back To Basics
Time for a small history lesson then, and we’re headed all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Greece in ancient times, as well as being militarily capable with the likes of the Spartans, was a place well known for its arts and culture, much of which survived on in and served as a basis for the roman empire which followed. I am specifically going to focus on their works in the field of dramatics and performance artistry, you see the Greeks were some of the first peoples in the world to actually categorise these works and set genre’s, and unlike today where much of our media is dissected into numerous genre’s, the Greeks decided to split their works into 2 distinct types, Tragedies, and comedies.
Much can happen in a story, and Homer, The ancient Greek, was the originators of the Iliad and the Odyssey which are both extensively long and exquisite examples of Epic Poetry, but their works were always split into being either a tragedy or a comedy, and in some senses that still holds true to the works we create today, thousands of years later, so it is my belief that it was highly prescient of them to have done so. But the question that this leads into is, WHY ? there are moments in a tragedy that can be comedic, there are moments of shear torment in comedies, why would this categorisation hold true thousands of years later ? and why only the 2 ?
Now, I myself not being an ancient Greek, and definitely not at the level of some of their great thinkers, Aristotle and Plato to name a few, I couldn’t definitively say why, however after studying creative media and art for long enough, I do have a sense for it and hints I can give you. It is my understanding that there are 3 factors that make a piece of art fall into one of these 2 categories;
The Two Emotions Behind Everything
1. the characters, setting and history – the characters, scenes and other background information greatly lend to what the true purpose of the story is, it would be incredibly difficult to set a happy go lucky rom-com in a concentration camp for instance. Characters and their dialogue are one of the main ways to transmit messages to the audience, scenery is there to reinforce the vibe and history is used as reference material to back up the feeling of the art itself.
2 the intention behind the story – when the writers of the great Grecian play’s set out to produce their marvellous works, I’m more than sure they had a purpose or a feeling in mind. many philosophers and psychologists argue today that most human emotion generally stems from 2 places, we either feel fear or we feel love. so when choosing to write a story, their great artists picked a side to express in their works, occasionally flitting between the 2 but the overarching theme of the story would have its roots firmly in one of these emotions, No wonder they only chose to set 2 genres.
3 how it leaves the audience feeling at the end – this is rather crucial to our understanding today and how we still categories our works of art. Does it end on a high note ? will the audience of whatever it is, feel uplifted after viewing it. Or does the piece end with the feelings of pain, sorrow, regret or even crushing defeat ? will this piece of art stick in the minds of its audience for the lower feelings all of humanity occasionally struggles with. The ending tends to be a key indicator of whether something is classed as a tragedy or a comedy and we can still see it today with the contrast between most works of Disney and marvel, and any off the shelf suspense thrillers or horror movies and dystopian fiction.
Why Only The 2 Genre’s
So there is a reason the Grecian classification for art into either tragedy or comedy still holds true today, because we as a species haven’t particularly changed at a core human emotional level in the thousands of years since then, and our works of art still tend to leave its audience with one of the 2 base level emotions, and that is the first question to answer as a creative of any kind of artwork and the first problem to solve as a developer of digital media. So from the ancient Greek perspective and from personal experience it is understatedly important to understand the question and answer it before you ever start drawing, coding, writing or picking up your instruments.
What This Means For You Right Now
It only happens rarely but from the few times it has happened to me it is extremely aggravating. when I have nearly finished a music composition, began to write lyrics and realized the chords or melody don’t or won’t match the feeling of the words, or even worse, listening back to a track I have already finished, mastered, bounced to mp3 and blue toothed to my phone, realising the music says one thing but the words say something entirely different. Perhaps my process as a musician is backwards, perhaps I was simply messing around on those days, but honestly it is truly infuriating, and I cannot begin to imagine the level of devastation this would cause after hundreds or even thousands of hours of development time.
This is the first principles conundrum of most creative endeavours today;
“what is it you want to express to your audience ? how do you want this piece to make them to feel ?”
Everything follows from there.
To answer the question of why we make things especially in the creative media space, I have drawn on 2 peoples and cultures that are thousands of miles and thousands of years apart, the modern Japanese with their irreverent saying that kind of cuts to the heart of everything we do as humans, and the ancient Greeks who knew exactly why they were writing play’s and purposefully intended for their audience to feel a certain way about it. Both human societies arrived at a deeper truth about the meaning of art and why we really decide to create anything; the Japanese want everyone involved, the audience and the creators, to enjoy it, even to this day, and the Greeks purposefully chose the intention behind the art before its creation and codified the fact for us to use even now, both societies came at the problem from different angles but arrived at the same destination. To know why you are creating your art and how you want the viewer to feel about it in the end is key to masterfully creating works of art that stay with their audience, be it something horrific, or something stunningly beautiful.
And to the person reading right now, who is wrapped up in level design, story writing, setting the chord structure on a new piece or even deciding what the characters for your stage production should look like, I ask;
“what is it you feel ? and what is it you want me to feel when you’re done ?”
