put good art in your games

put good art in your games

now you tell me what this is doing here

the best thing your game can have in it is good writing, and the writing needs to be art. that's important, it can't just be good. a distant second best thing is good visual art, (and that, too, has got to be art. and the art has to be good. sorry. not just pictures.) and, close behind, the third best thing is your game's mechanics. after that it's maybe layout and usability. i am so serious about this.

it doesn't even need to be your art. play is curation. if you talk copyright at me i will melt you into paste and from it grow a sort of structurally unsound homunculus so that i can actually twist your head off your neck with my delicate wrists. i literally do not care and you won't make me start because i'm busy making an adventure out of Collette's Break of Day. this is a book about an older woman tending to her garden in Florence and breaking a guys heart and thinking a lot about nature and death and it's maybe one of the most gorgeous things there is.

pretty grooovie rooovie

"dawn comes, the wind falls. from yesterday’s rain in the shade, a new perfume is born; or is it I who am once again going to discover the world and apply new senses to it? It’s not too much to be born and to create each day. The bronze-colored hand that runs, stops, crosses out and starts again, is cold with emotion, cold with a youthful emotion. For hadn't stingy love wanted to fill my cupped hands one last time with a little shriveled treasure? In future I shall gather nothing except armfuls. Great armfuls of wind, of colored atoms, of generous emptiness that I shall dump down proudly on the threshing floor." (p. 139)

find it for me?

lowly guardian angels of the present (p. 7, p. 85)

• horribly, horribly sad. abandoned, still warm but scarcely alive, silent because of you-know-not-what shame. 
• imagine an elf-child, a soap-bubble baby sleeping in a tulip. Now imagine that it has suffocated in its sleep, iridescent panic-blue with cold violet lips.
• blue bamboo lances, a pearl hanging at the tip of each.
• sad enough to contract ones throat and dry up one’s saliva, to inspire the lowest instincts of terror and self protection. Become unhappy, ward off the fear of death suddenly, immediately, dramatically, or try to destroy the angel. 
• They were made to shepherd the present, only to find that each instant they were assigned to died as it was born. The only thing they can think to do is kill you when you’re happy, so quickly the smile never leaves your lips. If you aren’t happy, they’ll just stand still with their backs to you, shoulders shaking, trying not to cry even if you hurt them.
  
  
  

  

  do you know that i've cried for you? like almost certainly, yes, the girl reading this. you!

vessels and hiding places (p. 45)

• a clearing of closed boxes, dressers, coolers, bear bottles, overturned cups and bowls. very very still and quiet. as each hiding place is opened or uncovered, there’s an animal inside. size inversely proportionate to the size of the hiding place. tigers in teacups, toads in armoires
  
  1. albatross
  2. toad
  3. tiger
  4. viper
  5. antelope
  6, swarm of 172 wasps
• each cries crystal tears as they are discovered. these tears split and scatter into duplicates of themselves as they splatter and multiply quickly begin to flood the area.  if they are caught carefully and their integrity is preserved, they remain pure crystal
• if the clearing floods fully, this takes you automatically to the summer companions.
  
• the animals try to crawl inside you and each other to hide themselves again. the larger they are, the more horribly this hurts, though it will never kill you. once they are inside of you, the next time your blood is shed or your tears fall, the creature will be released from that droplet
  
  
  

  

  yuan yuan yang where ARE you

summer companions (p. 82)

• 10 in number, reveling in the contrast between the fresh weather and the warm, jellyfish colored, clouded crystal water. 
• Each companion has a large, dangerous animal from vessels and hiding places inside of them as protection against Barbarians
  
  1. tiger
  2. alligator
  3. bull
  4. harpy eagle
  5. bear
  6. 27 scorpions
•  they ripen jugs of dry wine in the sand and will always happily trade alcohol or food for anything to read. to feed themselves they practice what they jokingly call orlaton, where one stands over a barrel of wine, bleeds out some small animal contained inside them (usually a chicken or rabbit) and drowns it in the wine before roasting it over the sand. 
• the clouds overhead cast squirming, abstract shadows into the water, the bathers try to flee from with real, deadly terror, only to regroup, laughing and embarrassed.
• the shadows are shark-clouds; if you remain in them, you are mauled horribly and the cloud turns sunset scarlet as your blood falls upwards into them
• if all the clouds turn red, the sun sets. night sets in, and with it, cold wind. the grasses dry up and frost clusters along everything.  there’s no more fruit, and meat is the only thing to eat. wine becomes precious enough to kill for. everywhere you go now, summer is over.
  
  
  

  

  and a grace jones moon to guide us

the ugly heart in my gorgeous transsexual chest cavity is that i'm a modernist and all of the deconstruction in the world has not changed the fact that some art is good, and some bad, and that through talent or training or observation some make things that sing and others make things that choke while you swallow them. 

if you write as good as you talk, nobody reads you. lou reed said that i think and ur gonna get mad at me because among other things what's Art actually. that's easy u fuckin goose.

there's a thing that I say all the time that is a thing Vladimir Nabokov said though I don't know if he said it all the time

“For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."

 

type shit

or if you prefer, cherry pick'd from the bitter orchard of liz harvey

 

"have you ever been to an art space in your life? Wheres the disproportionate line drawings of a bicycle coming out of a vagina or a knotted peice of yarn slumped over as fiber art. Or a looping 35mm of someone painting their toenails.

 

These are all real pieces that i have, not lying at all, seen multiple versions of. I dont see ai ppl doing a series like using topographical map styles but to demonstrate scar tissue after surgery on crime scene outlines on a floor. Again. Real art ive seen.

 

everyone makes fun of art(tm) but i will defend even the worst art… the most sophomoric photography of a shadow of a telephone pole on a brick wall… over some softened edge cartoon slop!! ART SHOULDNT BE SMOOTH AT ALL!! IT SHOULD MAKE YOU WINCE, BE KINDA MAD, & BE A LITTLE STUPID! 

Sorry for having an opinion that is correct, again, but wrt art if you cant say “so what youre doing here is…” about the art….. its not art. little cartoony ai shit… well unless its a commentary on satiating juvenile underdeveloped taste and yearning for mediocrity..." <3 <3 <3

oh i'm yearning for something alright