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#ConfabQ: Art vs. Science
By Corvus | May 5, 2009
If you’re just tuning in, the #ConfabQ is a short-format question I pose on Twitter in the hopes of encouraging short-format answers. After the answers die down (and/or I finish moving into the Zakelro Manse as was the case this week), I scrape them all up into a post and invite further comment. As my Twitter feeds, not to mention my Tweeps, end up scattered about various places on the internet, I also also scrape comments on my Facebook status, FriendFeed entry, and any discussion in the #GBConfab IRC channel.
I started the #ConfabQ in part because I am connected to an interesting cross section of several industries and arts and I think it’s valuable to collect and compile such diverse feedback. In this particular response feed there are novelists, crafters of historic board games, artists, game developers, gamers, and other interested parties.
I’m also interested in how diverse and nuanced the responses often are. The questions themselves usually presume some false dichotomy and are often inspired by some blog post or the other.
This #ConfabQ was inspired by the following quote from a post at The Cesspit:
Made worse by the fact that game design isn’t art, it is science.
Such certainty! Such absolutism! And I knew I had to give my community a chance to respond. And thanks to the urgings of the #GBConfab, I decided to snap pictures of the replies, rather than cutting and pasting them all into tables. Let’s see how it goes, shall we?
Here’s the question:
The Twitter replies:
And the Facebook comments:
So what do you think? Any particular response leap out at you as right or wrong? Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments (or expand upon your thoughts if you’re already in the feed above).
Tagged:art vs science, confabq, game-design. | 3 Comments »
May 5th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
I’m with everybody who thinks the question doesn’t even make sense to ask considering the words “science” and “art” don’t carry enough meaning/carry too many different meanings to answer the question tidily.
That said, I’m happy that my degree program is an M.S. instead of an M.F.A., because it recognizes the fact that I have to learn a lot of science in order to create my art.
May 5th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
When you use the word ‘science’ I think you actually mean ‘engineering’. Science is the process of discovery. Engineering is the use of scientific principles to create a working artifact.
May 7th, 2009 at 1:12 am
I only started to read Conrad’s preface to this (the title makes me uncomfortable to repeat) piece of work, but it was packed full of our assumptions of art and science:
<i>It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential—their one illuminating and convincing quality—the very truth of their existence. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal.</i>
Conrad continues to make the point that the artist and scientist have the same goal, though the process may seem different. The scientist tries to appeal to our sense of logic and reason, whereas the artist, as he states:
<i>He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn. </i>
I’m not sure I buy it wholesale, because I see science doing much the same. We just like to think of science as cold and unfeeling; logic as unbending; knowledge as an immutable truth.