I wasn't complaining about the aesthetics as much as I was about the whole clunky process.

I wrote a recent blog post:

It is tempting to force a player to follow a strict, linear path. I know. It's something I've caught myself doing on the game I'm curently working on. Even with more or less freedom movement, I've found myself attempting to direct the player. This is not the way to do things in an open environment. How can one expect players to be intelligent if one treats them like an idiot? Developers have to trust the player. Otherwise, we are simply pandering to the lowest common denominator.

I think this goes for the matter being discussed here. It's time to trust the player. Tell the narrative you want. The player will either be carried along or they won't. It's not a player problem, it's a writing/presentation problem. If you're not confident in your narrative, how can you expect the player to be?

That is the problem with the mainstream game developers and even indie games. They treat the players like idiots. Of course, there will always be those who don't "get it". So what; you can't please everyone.

It's all stylization of one sort or another. We rarely think about the structure of prose, 1st person, 3rd person, etc. As readers, we are exposed to it from a very early age. But like any art, it's an artificial structure that evolved to help make it easier to follow writing. The (not)games form needs developed more when it comes to narrative and character. Prose isn't obvious. Neither is WASD or d-pad and buttons A, B. Or unusual amnesia. These are conventions to make things easier, not just on the author but the player/reader as well.

These "problems" are the same faced in any artform. Especially in scifi and fantasy. Because the settings and situations are unusual, you have two options as a writer: amnesia or extensive exposition early on. There is a third option but it is much more difficult but is much more elegant; ease the reader into the world as you tell the story.

I don't have any concrete answers but I don't think this matter is as problematic as you think. Don't be afraid to lean on cliched conventions if necessary. Trust yourself and the player.

That looks like a fun thing to play with but I don't see how this is relevant to my point. There are some really nice tools like ZBrush. That's not the problem. The problem is the whole process. It's a bit like casting a bronze statue for every character; it's complex, time consuming, expensive and rarely captures the energy of the original sketches.

I think voxels make the process easier - you don't get ugly artifacts like pinching or stretching and shrinking of volumes, but to the larger point, it is still converted to polys at runtime and rendered using a simulation of the physics of light.  It also creates, by necessity, a perfectly logical structure in 3D space.  But what if we could break out of that rigid logical model? 

Just a random thought I had - what if, instead of pulling verts to construct a logical volume, a tool was set up so you could instead trace silhouettes with your stylus?  You'd start with your front and side views, but it would let you rotate to any angle and trace the appropriate silhouette.  When rendered, you would see the drawn silhouette, or an interpolation between the closest ones available, depending on how many you drew at different angles.  The result would not be a volume that logically exists in 3D space, but there would be enough information that it would hold together visually from any angle, and it would hold the visual life you get from a manually done drawing.

ZBrush has such a tool. It's useful for getting a rough outline. It's not something you want for any kind of detail. Also, you don't pull verts in ZBrush, you sculpt. That's why it works well from a artist perspective. But the problem is the final version and the number of steps it takes to get there that lock it into the ridged end result. The complexity is also what makes making 3d assets so time consuming. You can't actually use the final sculpt for animation, either real time or rendered. You have to bake it onto a low-poly model that you have to build after creating the high-detail version. It's kind of crazy.

I don't think voxels look very good, especially for what I'm after. I've been learning ZBrush, which alleviates the problem somewhat but not to the extent I'd like.

I have a problem with most 3d work for games, movies, illustration, whatever. Ever see a cool piece of 2d concept work from a game or movie and think it looks amazing but the final product looks static, bland and boring? Yeah, me too. I think the process is the biggest problem. 3d (this includes practical/traditional models as well as digital though it's not as severe) is so complex and technical that by the time one gets to the final stage of the creation process, everything that made the original designs loose, energetic and exciting, is refined right out of existence. This is a BIG problem.

Over-refinement is an issue in any art but the process of 3d is especially problematic. I wish there was a better way.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Are you talking about collective, crowd-sourced authorship? If so, I think that produces crap. As for remixing, we already kind of get that with game mods.

But, why is that bad? I mean, emotion is an essential part of the human experience. This is what we are.

I agree to an extent. A problem I've had with cinema is the lack of ideas. Film has a serious problem communicating concepts, if they try at all. The emphasis is always on emotion and drama, as if that is the only thing worth communicating.

Another contemporary criticism is "beautiful but lacking content". This goes for games and cinema. Isn't beauty enough?

If games and notgames can't be a rich experience, then what the hell are we all doing here?

Religion isn't being rejected enough as far as I'm concerned.

I have to disagree again. I don't see how playing a game is any less worthwhile than any other human endeavour, short of scientific exploration. Humans have been playing games since we could be called human. I don't think that is trivial.

Speaking of trivial, Cory Doctorow argued recently that the "trivial" is as important as anything when it comes to interpersonal communication as most of our interaction is trivial. I would extend this to most of human activity.

Anyway, the argument is anecdotal. Just because some people have addictive personalities doesn't mean games are bad. That logic is totally broken.

Sorry. I was speaking from my own experience. I've been brought up with this belief and it seriously messed me up. Took me thirty years of my life to even realize it. And I'm still working on getting over it, over a decade later. I'm not saying that we should not develop ourselves. I'm just saying that it's stupid to believe we need to be the best, that we need to win, that everything is a competition.

That make more sense to me, put like that. The computer games as competition thing is way over done.

The most dangerous myth of modern times is the one that says we are all heroes!

Yes, instead we should all know are place as cogs in the machine, worthless, rotting hunks of meat. You're right, that is much better! Why aspire to be anything better when we can be nothing at all.

I think your POV is dangerous. Simply awful.

I think the black-or-white POV that either you're a hero or you're a "worthless, rotting hunk of meat" seems far more dangerous...

I agree.

The most dangerous myth of modern times is the one that says we are all heroes!

Yes, instead we should all know are place as cogs in the machine, worthless, rotting hunks of meat. You're right, that is much better! Why aspire to be anything better when we can be nothing at all.

I think your POV is dangerous. Simply awful.