Game Design: Introduction to Aesthetics

Aesthetics, as a field, seems to intersect with another element of games that already exists. To a game designer, aesthetics are all of the sparkly bits used to decorate the game that don't have a direct effect on gameplay- I've referred to them mostly as "skins" in these essays, because for all intents and purposes they're just a thematic veneer placed over a skeleton of mechanics and plot. While they can affect the game experience, and some players will have much more fun in a game that's more vibrant and pleasing to the eye, games are not made great or terrible by their color schemes and art choices alone.

Unfortunately, here the game designers have to work with the artists, and the line between the surface and the skeleton becomes a lot less pronounced. Aesthetic philosophy is deeply interested in art- it's sometimes called the philosophy of art- and it would be very difficult to showcase it without any art at one's disposal.

More broadly, aesthetics is the philosophy of beauty and art, what they are and how we discover and make use of them. "What makes something art?" and "What is the relationship between beauty and morality?" are both aesthetic questions. They are also questions a bit outside of most people's understanding. While beauty is something every person experiences at least once in a while, it's not as if most people dedicate their lives to finding it and chasing it down any more than the next guy. That's a position reserved for poets, Byronesque globetrotters, and the rugged male leads of romance novels.

This isn't really true, of course. Gamers looking out for new and better graphics are seeking beauty in the middle of their play, because beauty is pleasurable. It's not fun- there's very little to learn in terms of it- but looking at something that looks nice is an easy way to score free feel-good biochemicals. This is why old games get reskinned by players and updated to better graphics, even though aesthetics should, by all means, be of little concern to them. While not every Halo fan would want to go to the Louvre, they still have an appreciation for especially well-crafted visuals. The trick to teaching aesthetics is to get them to notice that.

Because the skin is often interchangeable, it would be easy to create a game and then give it more than one. A game with a good modding community can already accomplish this- Minecraft with lots of visual mods and textures is barely recognizable as the same game, even though everything that makes it Minecraft is unchanged. This could be taken a step further by adding certain elements with each skin that change the gameplay- certain in-game textures point the player in different directions, out-of-the-way walls are revealed to be transparent and not walls at all, et cetera. The actual layout of the game and level design doesn't change, but the player is steered through it based on their own tastes and ideas about beauty.

There are other ways to make these elements affect the players without actually changing the game, and they're found primarily in horror games. In the game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem there are a variety of in-game hallucinations brought on by being around scary things, some of which seem to mess with the television of whoever's playing. In the final game of the Penumbra trilogy, the main character hears a female voice which guides him throughout trippy non-Euclidean levels, until the ending when she begs the player not to leave her all alone. These things strike at players and make them reconsider their opinions of these relatively small parts of their games. With a little work, these could be changed to convey something less unsettling, and more appealing.

The field is currently confined to extremes of horror (and humor- see also: Conker's Bad Fur Day), but there's no reason that it has to stay this way. An aesthetic game, regardless of its outer genre, is one that makes the skin a functioning part of the skeleton underneath. In other words, it stops treating it as some superfluous surface, and uses it as the gigantic sense organ it is.



Sources:

BLUR - Minecraft Cinematic. Uniblue Media. 1 Oct 2012. YouTube. 5 Oct 2014.

Eternal Darkness Sanity Effects Part 1. Go! Go! Troublemakers! 31 Dec 2007. YouTube. Oct 5 2014.

Slater, Barry Hartley. "Aesthetics". University of Western Australia. 5 Oct 2014.