report on the design choices

Design brief

This Twine is inspired by World Art Studies, a book that presents new ways to look at art, beyond the frameworks of traditional European Art History. Art History is often described as a timeline where new techniques, styles and movements are developed. The book proposes an alternative approach to think about it, one of these is art as an anthropological phenomenon. Art doesn’t limit itself to masterpieces in museums but is something that humans started doing all over the world and in a lot of different ways.

Setting

I want to show that the cultural practice of art as something universal. The story I meant to tell is not one defined in stone, the characters or setting are left vague. The narrator could be someone from prehistory, a child in the Middle Ages, or someone having a midlife crisis. To stay vague, images should be avoided and texts are on the short side as I didn’t want to give much details. This choice to write short texts also allowed me to write a lot of different story branches. 

Combinatorial mechanics

One of the main inspirations of this Twine project is the game 'Little Alchemy'. Its game mechanics consist of trying out combinations of objects to unlock new objects. Fire and sand will create glass, and glass can be used to make more complex objects, thus the game has some educative nature. It embodies some idea of universal knowledge which can be discovered with the presence of the necessary materials. Most of the combinations don't result in something, it is a process of trial and error. This isn't too much of a problem as it is easy to make combinations through the visual and tactile aesthetics. However with my Twine, as it is text based and more static, unfruitful interactions may have a boring effect for the player. Instead of a combinatorial mechanic of trial and error, I made a decision tree, the user explores predetermined combinations that always lead to a successful outcome. 

Looking back at my sketch I removed a number of the planned combinations: these were unlocked materials and primary necessities (planks, clothing, food) which are needed later on to make artworks, but these don’t add much to the global idea of the game, so I choose for a setting where the player already has access to the main living commodities. One that I didn’t remove is the material ‘pigments’, however finding and expressing colours is also something of the scope of creativity and not always a utility.

Gameplay

After trying out an option the player always goes back to the same place, which contains a list of all the things they “discovered”. There are 11 things they can discover, the paths that lead towards them use different interaction styles so that it doesn’t get repetitive. To achieve this the paths make use of special unicode symbols, animation markups and different manners to navigate the passages. I incorporated a precondition for a certain path: to discover ‘painting’ the ‘pigments’ needs to be unlocked first. As this makes it more difficult to discover it, I made a second path that would converge towards it. I could have added more forms of art, but my goal wasn’t to make an exhaustive list. It is difficult to make a taxonomy of types of art, it implies we should be able to clearly define them, different cultures characterise them in different ways. I prefer to stay vague again and let the player use their imagination on what the general art types they discover in the game might exactly be.

Artistic log feature

An inventory system was made, it is an array containing strings of art types, which get appended each time the user discovers one. As it isn’t about making a collection, but more of a creative and exploratory process, there is no progress bar and the inventory can contain several times the same type of art. These repetitions can be interpreted as a preference for this medium or to discover new ways to innovate it. The game has no point where it ends, but at some point a link to a page with more information about the inspirations of this game appears, it also asks the player to reflect on their artistic production in relation to the art world. When the user has tried out quite many art types a message appears to hint that they almost ‘finished’ the game. 

Reflection

I think there is some irony in the fact that I use a narrative centered tool such as Twine to make a game where I want to challenge the conception of the art historical narrative. This still may work well in some way: the art canon is formed by comparing a lot of artists between them and looking at their relation to historical events, determinating in this way which ones can be considered as important and forming a canon. This art narrative takes a distant scope, whereas in this game we only have the perspective of an art creator and thus the game is disconnected from this framework.