[MUD-Dev] Historical perspective (was: dealing with foul language)

[adam at treyarch.com]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2000, Matthew Mihaly wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Apr 2000, Joe Andrieu wrote:
> > Point being, anyone--heck, EVERYONE--who has an artistic vision should be
> > busting their butts working to get it to commercial success, IMNSHO. That's
> > the largest audience. That's the largest impact. That's where art really
> > matters. Don't throw up your hands and say that commercial success is
> > antithetical to art. That just makes things worse.
> 
> Hmm. That presumes that 1) The category of entity whose opinion matters is
> mankind (as opposed to, say, educated mankind at a narrower level), and 2)
> that the goal is to have an impact. I have a lot of respect for the poet
> who writes without concern for being published or the (increasingly rare)
> musician who doesn't care about selling his music. Art for the sake of art
> is a noble pursuit to me.

This is quickly drifting off-topic, but I indugle me just a moment and I'll
bring back the mud tie-in towards the end.

Art addresses, I think, a most fundamental human desire - the need to
communicate with others like ourselves.  Most of the time we do this through
simple discourse, just like this discussion here.  We tell people what we
are thinking, and hope that for just a moment, the audience knows exactly
what we are talking about.

But language fails frequently, for the simple reason that we are *telling*
rather than *showing*.  And that's what art is: an attempt to *show* your
audience what's inside your head.

Normally, most humans have an audience of one or two when they are trying
to communicate.  Does it make the art fundamentally different to have an
audience of one, or ten, or a hundred, or a billion?  Probably.  I think
that most people, artists included, would agree that reaching a larger
audience - bringing a larger group of people into sync on their thinking about
your subject matter, if only for a moment - is both more impressive and a
loftier goal.  There are times, of course, when one has a very certain
audience in mind: a single person, like a a lover, a small group of people,
like your family, or even just yourself (writing a diary so that you'll
remember the signifigance of events in years to come).

But the idea of "art for the sake of art" is a pretty vapid one.  Art, by
itself, is nothing more than a random collection of media, put into a
particular configuration.  The only signifigance to that configuration is
that sentient beings can observe it and perhaps for a moment get a glimse into
the mind of another sentient being - perhaps one far away, or long dead.

And all of the "art" that I create is for this purpose alone.  And for most
of it, I would prefer to reach as large an audience as possible.  This doesn't
mean that I am going to change the fundamental core of what the art is
presenting: to do so would be to sell myself short for the sake of my audience.
But to say that I would be upset if the mass market collectively decided one
day to shut off their TVs and go play muds - that's would just be eliteism,
me hiding the fact that I want to think that my art is superior to the
drivel on TV, and therefore can't address the same audience.

When someone plays my mud, they are wandering through a snapshot of the
inside of my brain (or one small part of it, anyhow).  And that is the
purpose of art.

Adam





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