Is no art better than bad art?

[Rob Lang]

I've been pondering this for some time. Bad art is art that doesn't fit the game.

I quite often find people have shoe-horned art into a free game because they "need art" and they found some clip art or CC-NC-BY-SA art they can use to make it look better. If the art fits, then that's OK. If the art is not fitting to the text, I find that jarring.

Is it better to rely on typography and have no art at all rather than bad art?

[Onix]

Yes. No. Maybe? People tend to be highly critical of art even of high quality but especially if it isn't taylor fitted to the game. On the surface, this means that art is always bad. However, games that contain art often get better acceptance, so art does do good for a game. So is bad art a detriment? My thinking is that it may not be, even if it doesn't quite fit. Art's biggest role in a game is to take the load of conveying information off the written word. If 70% of the art is informative and 30% is jarring, it's still conveyed a good deal of info.

We tend to focus on the emotional reaction we have to art, but there's a utility aspect that I feel is in the end, the more important. Emotional connection is great, but the dense information of art is also a big plus.

Now if the information in a picture is confusing or contradictory, "There are no magic users in this setting." followed by a big picture of a wizard, that would be a mistake.

People are going to dislike most art, They will judge it very harshly. Only, even the big titles of yesteryear had gobs of horrid art. People excuse the big names for bad art, I think because they must feel like "Well they must know what they're doing." because they're big titles. But it's easy to pick on the little guy. I'm not saying that's what you're doing Rob, to your question, there's probably a decent amount of discord in the art, but on balance, my attitude is that it's necessary.

I was just looking at some of my oldest rpg books. Some of the art is excellent. Some of it is simplistic but informative. Some of it is really bad. In the case of my old Battletech books it's ripped off. My first edition Mechwarrior book has some real stinkers.

In my opinion. . .

If you have excellent art, put it in. (duh)

I think that, the simplistic but informative gets the most undeserved hate from many "art critics". If you have this kind of art, put it in. It's vital.

If you have poor art that still conveys important information, still put it in.

If you have poor art that is confusing or misleading, leave it out.

If you've stolen art, leave it out.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Trying to discourage the use of art is anti-ethical to best standards. We encourage story before mechanics around here, since that is the big draw and reason you play a certain game. But that certainly doesn't mean that you can have a free pass on the mechanics and go without attempting to make rules that fit the genre.

I feel that art is the next level, the side dish that makes the main course more palatable, or the perfect wine accompaniment. Perhaps not completely necessary, but it indicates that you went above and beyond.

Images break up large blocks of text to make reading easier, even if they are not the best. Good or even great art can truly make the game, certain illustrations are iconic of various game lines. Think of the classic D&D cover of adventures robbing an idol, the stone heads in heavy gear, or Paranoia's computerized eye.

[kumakami]

to put it simple, bad art is wrong, no art is a sin. most people will deal with art they find bad, but will ignore a game without any..there eye's glaze over and they just set it down and say "next"

[Abstract Machine]

[Rob Lang]

Thanks for all your responses.

I don't really mind if figures are a bit disfigured or perspective has gone on holiday. What bothers me is that the art doesn't feel like the game I'm reading. It's a bi-product of CC type games. I read one free fantasy RPG (more than a year ago) that had the typical exposition of individuality and greatness. The CC artwork looked like Another Tolkein Fantasy RPG (ATFRPG) and it took ages to dig through the text to find the truly unique bits.

By using the stock art to break up the text, it set the tone of the game as something more familiar - that light lilt to fantasy most fantasy RPGs have. It was actually pretty dark - IIRC magic was used by everyone and will kill you (it was a metaphor for cigarettes). The author argued (quite rightly so) that without images people would not go any where near the game. I argued that it detracted from the game. It needed darker imagery to show that the setting was special, different. My big concern is that people would have rejected it as just ATFRPG when it wasn't.

That is bad art. Art that isn't doing the job it's supposed to. I don't really care if it was drawn by a 5 year old, as long as it correctly sets the tone.

[catty_big]

A very apposite topic. Sorry to talk about my own games, but I have direct and recent experience of this issue, as the artist I'd engaged for Sci-Fi Beta Kappa pulled out of the project a few weeks before launch date, leaving us with gaps in the text that I had neither the time nor the inclination to edit out (the editing and laying out itself having absorbed a huge chunk of my time, not to say sanity). So I was left with two options, which were pretty much Rob's alternatives: clip art or no art. Notice I don't say bad art, as clipart doesn't necessarily mean bad art, although it frequently does; or rather, it does if you're just grabbing images here there and everywhere, which people who are under the cosh as regards deadlines, and/or lack artistic training- and hence discernment- are likely to do.

In the end, I spent about a day combing clipart.com for suitable images, i.e. ones that followed Rob's constraint about appropriateness, and weren't too ghastly (believe me, a depressingly large proportion of them were).

But I haven't answered the question: is bad art better than no art? I think if you're talking about a quirky indie product costing no more than £10/$14, on the whole it doesn't much matter, as long as the art isn't absolutely hideous (of course, definitions of quality in art, be it visual, textual or musical, are notoriously subjective- forex, I personally can't stand Tracy Emin or Damien Hirst, but tell that to the collectors who pay millions for them). If OTOH you're producing a fantasy epic with a page count in the 100s, then no, 'bad art' isn't better than no art. However, in both cases, as Rob says, the art should fit with the text and not simply be there for the sake of it.

Not sure if that answers the question in the OP, but FWIW them's my two penn'orth .

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Production Value is a nebulous concept, but if you at least attempt some art direction, you show that you value the product more then saying, its just good enough. Think the difference between a badly made move and a B-move where the auteurs cared but couldn't afford more.

Supposedly, the original "Night of the Living Dead" was in black and white so they could manage blood effects cheaply using chocolate syrup. Resiviour Dogs spends 15 min in a diner, and then most of the rest in an empty warehouse - and even then, its the iconic suits that everyone remembers.

There are some companies that offer no-art/low art versions of their products for free, and sell a full art version. People are willing to buy the deluxe version.

I'm starting a new thread for a possible rule on how to fix this quandary:

[kylesgames]

It's entirely dependent on how good or bad you are. I've done a ton of reviews, and I've seen some truly awful cases where people's backdrops get in the way of their text (Bill Coffin's Septimus, otherwise a really well-done and pretty d6 game, falls victim to this), or the art simply clashes.

The thing with art is that it's entirely about judicial use. It's possible to have something with no images that is still very functional and feels fulfilling to read, while there are also far extreme examples of stuff like Eclipse Phase that is super busy and has color and art everywhere and still comes through really well. Then you have the people who included art "because we had to" and it really just mucked up their game and made something that was almost okay really awful.

[catty_big]

I think kylesgames' and Chainsaw Aardvark's last comments are more to do with art direction- or, in the case of clipart/free art, editing and layout- than the quality of the art itself, a change of emphasis with which I heartily concur: poor art well edited is probably better than no art at all. Still, the art shouldn't be shockingly bad, although see my earlier comment about some folks' inability to see that the art in question is bad.