this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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You mean commercially, or artistically?
Commercially is the only metric I can measure, so I mean commercially
What does it mean for something to be an "artistic success"?
That you like it, then it has a meaning to you. Gives you something to think about.
Massive artistic success: you're able to talk to other people about the art and they find it interesting too
That's... Better than what you said before, but it pains me that people think that's the full depth of artistic endeavor, to have given people fodder for small talk.
Art is a kind of conversation, but it's not small talk. If you've been following that conversation and you bring a new perspective to it that changes how everyone thinks and shapes the conversation from that point onwards, that is what you might call "artistic success".
On the other hand if all you're doing is trying to make money...
I think you're struggling with the mix of artistic endeavor and commercial success. For the vast majority of artists they do not exist independent of the need to survive and have money.
But the games industry, by virtue of it being an industry, needs to make money. So commercial success is the primary target.
In the envelope of commercially viable projects, people can be artistic, and have demonstrated great feats of art, but the vast majority of output is not moving the dialogue forward.
Think pieces, conversation pieces, emotionally evocative pieces, they're all part of the artistic vocabulary, but these are not bi-directional dialogues, the vast majority of artists are dead, and their art is appreciated in the context of the viewer. Hopefully the message is clear, but sometimes especially for abstract art, the message is deliberately ambiguous.
On the contrary, I think the games industry is struggling with it. Larger developers keep increasing their budgets, and the need for return on investment is making them too risk averse to create anything worth much of a damn. Meanwhile low or no-budget (kick-started) indie titles are making several times their investment while doing really commendable creative work. The profit incentive is self-destructive in art.
Nobody knows. People have been making art for several thousands of years and nobody has ever known whether it was any good unless it made a lot of money! Thank goodness we've cleared that up, now I'm going to go try and will myself to have an aneurysm