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Digital Art Comes of Age

There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Incredible digital artworks such as this from Clement Morin now have a place in the art trading world

“This is ridiculous. Why would anybody pay so much for something they can just save to their hard drive?” I asked myself when I first heard that the Nyan Cat gif sold for over half a million dollars. Furthermore, this “ownership” did not entitle the buyer any kind of exclusive rights with which they could use the property. It was ownership in name and nothing else – backed up by the security of cryptocurrency to ensure a means of proof. They’ve been deemed Non-fungible tokens (NFTs or “Nifty’s”). In other words, they are exclusive and can not be replaced by a copy. The purchased item is deemed unique.

So what was the point, I wondered? Is this just rich people flexing? Or trolls having a laugh? It seemed absurd. Seems like a scam.

Then I thought some more.

Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup Cans (themselves a copy of an existing image) hang proudly in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. They are valued in the millions. The original soup can labels are worthless. Furthermore, the artworks are easily reproducible, and MoMA wouldn’t pursue a cease and desist should you decide to try. Your reproduction would likely be considered almost as worthless as the original can of soup. The original works have value because we as a society agree, in our collective imagination, that they should.

Say a photographer sells a limited run of 100 prints for thousands of dollars a piece, and they display a high resolution image of the photo on their website. You could just as easily save it and print it yourself. But it’s not the same, is it? Nobody would deem it as having the same value, even if you managed to attain the same level of print quality, because it’s not “authentic”.

Really, how is digital ownership any different? Hell, a crypto-secured artwork makes more sense to me than cryptocurrencies on their own, which is essentially the same thing – but instead of art it’s imaginary currency – gambling with an enormous carbon footprint (to produce nothing).

And money itself is a fantasy concept. It only works because as a culture we’ve all agreed that it has value.

13 years of making digital art every single day paid off for Mike Winkelmann (Beeple)

Even the biggest cynic surely can’t go past this reaction video above of Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) as he watches a grid of thirteen years of digital artworks climb to $69 million. For over 5000 days this Bill Gates doppelganger has pumped out a new artwork, not for financial gain – but out of love, and as a personal challenge. It’s endearing to see it rewarded. His joy inspires me to get back into making my own (unpaid) digital art again.

Obviously, there’s going to be people who get burned as with any new technology. People will exploit it. Celebrities will endorse random trash much as they do as with crypto. Some will get caught up in the excitement and lose out, trolls will escalate the price of complete crap (no different to traditional art), but many artists will gain from this – and largely artists who have, as yet, not had a market.

The cynic in me wonders if the true artists will get buried by the scammers. At some point, society may again deem these to be worthless, thanks to oversaturation – and if it no longer lives in the collective imagination of society, we’re back to square one.

Could we find a better way than carbon-intensive blockchain to secure them though?

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Books: Sierra On-Line Retrospectives

Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings | Ken Williams
The Sierra Adventure: The Story of Sierra On-Line | Shawn Mills
The Art of Point-and-Click Adventure Games | Bitmap Books

My collection of PC games which still lives at my parents’ home and I can’t bring myself to get rid of them

As I’ve mentioned previously, when I think back to my childhood, two images come to mind – riding my bike around the endless suburban streets of western Sydney, and playing computer games as much as I was allowed. Name a PC game from 1983 to around 1998 and chances are I’ve played it. From Commander Keen to Command and Conquer; Castle Adventure, Descent, Prince of Persia, Scorched Earth, Eye of the Beholder, Lemmings, Supaplex, JetPack, Earthsiege, Alone in the Dark. The list goes on.

But most of all I loved Sierra games. In the 80s and early 90s, Sierra On-Line dominated the PC gaming market. I loved them so much that I had dreams of one day working there. But in the late 90s, as the company deteriorated and eventually closed down, so too my interest in gaming dwindled.

At this time, every other game seemed to be another shooter with little-to-no story nor characters with whom to interact. Funnily enough, one of the last Sierra-published-games I got into was Half Life (which I loved). But mostly all I saw was a sea of sameness and as such I switched my attention to teaching myself 3D animation, website design and coding – all of which revolved around making fan content for my favourite series Space Quest. My goal switched from playing to creating.

Two books (the first two listed above) have been released in the last few months which have given some insight into the history of Sierra On-Line – how it began, how it thrived, and how it spectacularly fell apart. I devoured both books in only a couple of sessions.

  • At 8 years of age I tried to win over girls as Larry
  • King’s Quest was always their crown
  • Police Quest keeping it gritty
  • Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist
  • Space Quest. There’s nothing like it.

The Sierra Adventure is a work of love, written by a fan with the backing of a number of other fans via Kickstarter. It chronicles the company from its early days to its unfortunate end, highlighting the key games, designers and technologies along the way. Sierra’s success was found in its designer-driven approach and its technological boundary-pushing. No great work of art is designed by committee. As a Sierra fan, you always felt like part of a club or family, and got to know the game designers in the same way you would the author of a book. In the early days you could even call the designer to talk to them directly when you got stuck.

Unfortunately this approach was also expensive. An adventure game requires, story, dialogue, and characters. A successful game would sell around 250,000 copies and require a budget of around a quarter of the expected revenue. By the mid-nineties these numbers just weren’t competitive. Shawn Mills says it best:

A cultural change occurred in the early nineties that saw computers become a staple in most homes. They were no longer just for the tech-savvy, and as more and more people began using them throughout the decade, games and software were simplified to reach a broader audience.

More importantly, the technological advancement to 3D would become one of the major downfalls of the point-and-click adventure. While fast-paced, action-oriented games increased in popularity, the more cerebral adventure genre no longer dominated the market.

Shawn Mills, The Sierra Adventure
Sierra pushed the boundaries of what was possible in a PC game by embracing new technology. Soundcards changed everything and enhanced the experience. I still listen to these regularly.

Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings – written by Sierra’s co-founder and CEO for most of the company’s life, Ken Williams – covers similar ground from the perspective of the ultimate insider. It’s far more business-oriented, which becomes fascinating when considering what led to both the successes and failures of the company.

A few highlights:

  • Sierra made an offer to purchase id Software following the release of Wolfenstein 3D, which failed mostly due to stubbornness. Pride can be a bitch. Imagine the future which might have followed.
  • Ken Williams was adamant about games being driven by the singular vision of an individual designer – a belief I strongly agree with for any decent creative endeavour (“if you were to take the two greatest book authors in the world and have them collaborate on a book, the result would not be as strong as their producing two independent books“). When new management took over, they used numbers and spreadsheets to assign people to projects. Original game designers were placed on games for which they had no passion while others were placed in charge of their original creation with little to no understanding of the world which had been created over fifteen years.
  • Sierra (and Microsoft) benefited from IBM’s fear of government anti-trust laws. IBM wrote into their contracts that each company must make their product available elsewhere. As such, when IBM caught a cold it hit them harder and allowed Sierra to sail off with other manufacturers.
  • The concept of a game “engine” which could be repurposed for new games without having to be coded from the ground up was pioneered by Sierra’s SCI. It’s what allowed them to push out ten times more titles than their competitors. It was also amusing the see the parallels with my own experience in the VFX industry as creatives would become frustrated with updates under the hood.
  • It struck me how much the experience of working in the gaming industry at that time lines up with my own experience working in the film industry. Bill Gates is paraphrased in the book: “when you are in a business that depends entirely on having a series of hits, it’s just a matter of time until you fail“.
What other game besides Space Quest III tasks the player with rescuing its own designers from their bosses who whip them as they work

Invariably, in a company that grows the way Sierra grew, innovation gives way to emulation. Whereas Sierra’s management once strove to make it solid, profitable, and yet fun, they now strive to dominate other companies, force annual growth in the double digits, and (Like so many other companies) cut jobs mercilessly to improve the bottom line and thrill the stockholders.

Josh Mandel, echoing a sentiment true of any company

Not All Fairy Tales was written thanks to Ken being trapped indoors during the pandemic. In a similar way, my desire to explore again the possibility of creating my own game has risen with all the time I’ve had stuck indoors this year. I’ve been learning Unreal Engine and making my own digital art again and my mind has exploded with ideas of how one might tackle an adventure game in 2020. I’ll save that for another time.