[MUD-Dev] wherefor in-game artists?

[ceo]

David Kennerly wrote:

> All that was a long-winding road to get to an answer of the
> question "wherefor in-game artists?": Therefore, a player could
> create art to entertain, dominate, trade, or provoke.

...

> but haven't encountered evidence to prove it either.  In editing a
> library of player art and literature
> (http://www.darkages.com/community/body_library.html), I felt that
> various artists were doing it for different reasons and that their
> art, or literature, was intended to have these different effects:
> entertainment, domination, trade, provoke.

In my experience, a vast number of artists [1] create art simply for
the sheer enjoyment of creation, which - assuming "entertainment"
means "entertainment of the spectator/user" - is none of those
things.

Many simultaneously enjoy looking at those works later on, but the
entertainment is a reliving of the memory of the act of creation - a
private entertainment, and not really a direct one from the work
itself.

This is the one point on which I disagree with any and all claims
that Creator is not a type in it's own right; apart from that
particular scenario, I'm quite happy with the notion that artistic
works are done for E/A/K/S reasons.

I can appreciate the view that this creation-for-creation's-sake has
a resonance with the explorers, but I personally feel that trying to
force those two together is an attempt motivated more by the desire
to retain a graph which is mathematically "pure", two-axis, balanced
and logical, rather than a fairly and evenly considered view. The
fundamentally logical mathematician in me really really likes
systems and categorizations that are "neat", especially if they are
symmetric; however, years of experience suggest that nothing in life
is ever neat or logical ;), and that the only way you can get away
with symmetry etc is by generalising until enough of the critical
detail disappears.

Of course, to do so is not inherently bad: a simpler, less accurate,
yet more easily *memorable* model has great practical advantage over
a more accurate yet less-trivial model that is harder to work with
(demands more attention, cannot be done "innately", etc).

  [1] NB: one point worth noting in particular here is that most of
  the artists I know are first-and-foremost artists - i.e. it is a
  profession, dominant talent, or dominant hobby of theirs. Rather
  than "something I do every now and then" it's more of a passion
  for them. This is probably due to my background and the
  self-selecting of the kinds of people I meet; I'm well aware this
  could heavily bias the kinds of creativity I tend to
  witness. Where I've seen people creating who would not consider
  themselves artists, my vague memories are of a much lower
  incidence of this particular motivation.

Adam M
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