
Drawing is the best videogame - justanothersys
https://thecreativeindependent.com/weekends/drawing-is-the-best-videogame-by-jeffrey-alan-scudder
======
Agentlien
I can very much relate to the feelings of vastness, freedom and sense of awe.
I experienced the very same when I, as a kid, first came across Zelda. My
first Zelda, though, was Ocarina of Time. Despite having a SNES I'd somehow
missed Zelda completely before OoT and I didn't have a GameBoy before GameBoy
Color.

Video games have always meant a lot to me, but Zelda is one of the few
franchises which have blown my mind and made me reassess what games can be and
do. (Earlier, I'd had that from the Magic Carpet games and later on I'd
experience it again with Morrowind).

I can also relate to the idea that understanding more about what games are and
how they work can take away some of the magic. It's no longer a vast world
filled with freedom. It's a computer program with a scripted story. On the
other hand, having learned programming as I grew up and having worked for the
last few years in the video game industry brings a whole other level of
appreciation for the craftsmanship and attention to detail in some of the best
games.

That said, I do still feel like I can lose myself in the world of well-crafted
modern games as well. All it takes is a game which is good enough to tickle
the imagination and invite your immersion. It's funny, though, that the one
game in recent memory which made me re-experience that sense of vast freedom
and that treasured feeling of "can games do that?" was the Legend of Zelda:
Breath of the Wild.

~~~
elcomet
I discovered zelda very late, as an adult, and I don't share your awe. It's a
nicely designed video game with tricky puzzles, but I think the script is
still very linear. You don't have much freedom (except freedom to get lost not
knowing where to go to complete the quest).

~~~
_i____ii_______
Setting foot on Hyrule Field in OoT after crawling out of the cave of 90's 2D
games was momentous for me as well. "I can just run around wherever?" Yes
there was still a fence and you were in a yard still and linearity was still
in play but it seemed there was an expansiveness and freedom to it. But if
you've played Witcher 3 before OoT then it's going to seem like a prison.

~~~
lloeki
> Setting foot on Hyrule Field in OoT after crawling out of the cave of 90's
> 2D games was momentous for me as well

Interestingly enough the experience was the complete opposite to me at this
very point, it was immediately obvious I just exited the "tutorial" to set
foot on a fake open world rigged with artificial gates. I suppose Baldur's
Gate† (the first one and its later expansion, not the second one which I
didn't enjoy nearly as much) and games like Fallout or The Elder Scrolls
series spoiled me, and all I could see in OoT was, although hidden with great
care, an expansion of the DooM key system under an uninspiring story.

† Yes it was out one month later but I didn't got a hand on a N64 til a friend
had one a couple months later. Oh, and how much I _hated_ that controller.

~~~
PurpleBoxDragon
>I suppose Baldur's Gate† (the first one and its later expansion, not the
second one which I didn't enjoy nearly as much) and games like Fallout or The
Elder Scrolls series spoiled me

I think this is really what happens. With more experience you are better able
to deconstruct the building blocks in light of past experiences. Instead of a
well crafted fire dungeon, someone can see the building blocks that could
easily enough be repainted with poison theme or lightning theme. Much like
when one reads enough fiction they notice the tropes the author is using as
soon as the author introduces them, to the point that people begin to even
joke about things like death flags being raised.

------
keiferski
The easier-to-read transcript:

[https://tci-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/ditbvg/ditbvg-transcript...](https://tci-
assets.s3.amazonaws.com/ditbvg/ditbvg-transcript.txt)

~~~
jbkrule
Um, sure, I guess if you want to remove every element that make this
interesting or unique then go ahead. I'd rather experience it how the
storyteller wants me to.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _I 'd rather experience it how the storyteller wants me to._

I don't think the storyteller took into account how hard it is to focus on
text when the background looks like an optical illusion.

It's also completely inaccessible to people who are severely visually
impaired. Thanks for considering the author's intent, but some of us need a
handicap ramp to get up there.

------
falcolas
A thought: Drawing is a great way to explore the worlds of your imagination,
but you’re limited to your own imagination.

To expand the scope of the world you can create, you really do need to visit
the worlds imagined up by others. Be it in books, video games, TV, movies, or
radio (try listening to “War of the Worlds” sometime with an era-appropriate
mentality, it’s kinda crazy).

~~~
bargl
This is a great point. I find I'm a WAY better DM in my D&D game now that I've
had years of books to back up some of my plans. Instead of having to create
everything from scratch I am able to integrate these other worlds into my own.
It helps so much in creating a fuller world for my buddies. I think it's paid
off in that my last foray into DMing (same guys) ended in a 2 year break and
this time they seem to want to keep going. I partly blame Ravenloft, but only
partly.

------
grawprog
Video games inspired me to learn to draw. I was always terrible at it and
never bothered to learn how to do it properly, I figured it was just something
I couldn't do.

But a while back, I played a game with artwork I really enjoyed and I started
actually looking at it the way the lines were drawn and everything and
realized there wasn't that many of them and it wasn't really all that
complicated despite looking nice. So I set out to draw as many of the sprites
and characters from the game as I could and did them over and over again until
I got them as close to the references I was using as I could.

Since then, i've tried to learn as much as about drawing and art as I can. I'm
not saying I would really call myself an artist now but i've been happy with
the progress i've been making and find myself enjoying the process. It's a
cool feeling to look down at some paper and see an object that came from your
mind.

Lately, i've been learning more about shading and colouring my drawings. I've
been enjoying learning about light and colour theory it makes you look at the
world in a new way. I also like the process of layering colours or values in a
drawing. I also do stone carving and crafting and it reminds me of the process
of polishing stone.

I still enjoy video games occasionally but I do find myself leaning more to
creating something, playing music or working on hobby programming projects
than playing a game.

~~~
matrixagent
A bit late, but do you by any chance have some resources to share that helped
you? Started drawing a bit more lately and would love to improve beyond just
practicing more.

------
nv-vn
Lovely article! Reminds me a lot about how I came to programming and what drew
me into it. A good read to explain that idea to any friends who might be
interested

------
dfxm12
There are games where you may express yourself via gameplay as you express
yourself via drawing.

These are the types of games that make no assumptions in how you will play.
They give you a set of rules, yes (otherwise, would it be a game? - This is
the only problem I have with the article, it's not fair to compare drawing to
gaming), but after that, in a way, the d-pad is your brush, the buttons are
your colors, and the game is more about how you express yourself rather than
advancing a story or reaching a goal.

These are few and far between though (Ikaruga, fighting games, parts of
Katamari Damacy, among others), and many popular games are so rigid and linear
that I can understand where the criticism is coming from.

~~~
cableshaft
Minecraft (in particular their Creative mode) seems to be the closest software
to a paint program, as far as artistic expression is concerned. I haven't seen
any other software where so many people have created their own worlds and
objects in 3D, painstakingly, brick by brick, that can be explored and
interacted with in first person.

I even built a small city in the game myself several years ago, and would
spend some nights just watching tv while strip mining in the game, in order to
gather the raw materials to build with. No other game before or since has
compelled me to do that.

There's probably a market for a dedicated paint program where you are
essentially placing different shapes and colored/textured 3d blocks on an
invisible grid, with the focus on providing features for that, not making a
game around it.

------
hajderr
Love the article, the web site and the fonts too! It was so easy to read. So
you were on a euro-scandi tour, too bad we missed each other :)

~~~
Rexxar
I don't think there is any font, all letters are slightly different. It's
probably manual input converted to svg.

~~~
justanothersys
Yes, using [https://goodnotes.com](https://goodnotes.com), with a bit of post-
processing for minification.

~~~
mkl
That link doesn't work for me, but
[https://www.goodnotes.com/](https://www.goodnotes.com/) does. An iOS only
app. It does OCR, but I suppose that information doesn't get exported.

~~~
archagon
Actually, I believe the OCR information persists as an invisible layer when
you export to PDF.

------
undershirt
For those reading—this is a performance art and really has to be listened to
while reading to get in the intended headspace.

------
zapzupnz
> Just like with today's iPhone, you couldn't write programs on the device
> itself.

Tell that to the developers of Swift Playgrounds, Codea, Pythonista,
Continuous, Hopscotch, Scratch Jr, Pyonkee, and plenty of other apps.

(Yes, I am aware that one can do a lot less with these than native development
with Xcode, but that "less" is still non-zero. In the case of apps like Codea
or Pythonista, a few now-native iOS games started life in those apps because
they expose quite a lot of the native frameworks to the user.)

------
markhollis
I think one can experience something related in either writing or even just
playing with puppets. J.K. Rowling had to 'program' the rules of her wizarding
world, in a way. As a kid, I used to play some kind of civilization and empire
game with K'nex pieces that I used as little puppets, without knowing that
computers existed. Part of it is certainly the joy of building a dynamic model
of a virtual world.

------
audiometry
Was curious to read this, but the font is appalling. Hurts to read this on my
phone without glasses.

~~~
avian
I wonder, do you go to an art gallery and complain that paintings don't adhere
to the Material design? This is a work of art. It's supposed to be playful and
colorful and a bit crude. The message would be quite different if it would be
written in a dark-grey Helvetica on light-gray background, don't you think?

~~~
zapzupnz
> The message would be quite different if it would be written in a dark-grey
> Helvetica on light-grey background, don’t you think?

Yes, it would be quite different. It’s be readable, to start with.

Also, GP was complaining about the font — which is very decidedly /not/ made
for legibility. You’ve added colours to the hypothetical, slightly changing
the argument.

Also, what’s with the crack about Material design? That has nothing to do with
anything, least of all the well-studied and thoroughly understood principles
of text legibility.

No, people don’t go into art galleries and complain about them not adhering to
user interface design principles because that’s absurd and irrelevant. This is
text intended for people to read, not a drawing. Your argument is a weird
straw man one.

~~~
avian
The point I was trying to make was that the parent comment completely missed
the point. Is the hand-written text really intended for people to read? Why is
there a voice-over then? Or a link to a plain-ASCII version of the content in
the bottom? It should be obvious that the form was a deliberate choice on part
of the author, not some kind of web design incompetence. If nothing else, the
color shifting backgrounds, blinking dots and animated swirls should give it
away. You don't need to like it, but commenting on the font choice is just as
silly as judging paintings by human-interface guidelines.

Speaking more generally, I was just being annoyed with this type of comments.
See any post that links to a website that doesn't adhere to whatever the
latest web design fad is and there is a good chance that a large part of the
discussion will be about how the font or colors make people's eyes bleed. As
much as HN is able to foster intelligent discussion, this aspect of it is
pretty annoying.

~~~
falcolas
Font, color, and size choices don’t just impact the meaning and the tone of
the text, they can cause the text to become unreadable at worst, and painful
in many cases (eye strain).

I was lucky to have an 11” display that I was reading this on - I could
enlarge the text to a point where it was readily legible. It was a good text,
but the experience wasn’t enhanced by the fonts used. If I had a phone, I
would not have been able to read it, even with reading glasses. The voice
version of it was so slow and monotone I gave up on it after realizing the
body of the text would be spoken in the same cadence.

TL;DR: Your stylistic choices can limit who can even view your text.

~~~
icebraining
> Your stylistic choices can limit who can even view your text.

And sometimes that's okay.

~~~
falcolas
Honest question - what author would knowingly limit the scope of their readers
not only to those interested in the topics they're writing about, but those
who can read moderately legible handwriting on a busy background? From getting
their point across, building an audience, and making a living, it makes no
practical sense.

Even the OP came out with transcripts and improved accessibility in the long
run - but you have to dig in the HN threads for those. How many potential
valuable followers and opinions were lost in that time?

~~~
CptFribble
> making a living > valuable followers

Gaining followers and financial success is usually a sideshow to the artist's
message.

Compromising your message for more money is like the actual definition of
selling out.

~~~
falcolas
> Gaining followers and financial success is usually a sideshow to the
> artist's message.

There's a subreddit devoted to the rather painful ridicule of this
(unfortunately common) belief. It's /r/ChoosingBeggers and it has lots of
tales of people who try and exploit artists for "the exposure" and accuse them
of "selling out" when they demand payment for their work.

I know of no professional-grade artists who are happy to give away all their
art. Even face painters at fairs charge for their moderately simplistic work.

~~~
CptFribble
I'm not suggesting artists must give away their art or be sellouts, I'm just
saying that not all messages must necessarily be optimized for maximum
exposure.

Artists shouldn't give away their art for free, but audiences shouldn't expect
all art to be easily digestible either.

------
p1mrx
Viewing this page on my Skylake laptop burns 4 threads at 60% CPU utilization.

~~~
justanothersys
Depending on the browser / OS combo you use, animated CSS filters can really
take a toll on a page. Chrome on macOS was terrible while testing for example,
but Safari was great.

------
Hoasi
I can confirm the sentiment although coming from another perspective. I was
never interested much in video games because I would rather spend my time
drawing.

------
EamonnMR
I wonder what the colored dots above some letters mean.

~~~
mkl
I think they're just part of the background, like stars, and not connected to
the letters at all.

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sitzkrieg
This seemed interesting, but it freezes Firefox mobile and back didnt work. Or
it was too toast, argh

