Art that I don't like

I have a page on art I like, and I often have stuff to say about art I don't like, so I guess I'll make this page too.

more i could write about:

• flashlights in Halo 3 [compare to flashlight in Halo 1]
• the generic "sci-fi" look over the past decade or so
• normal-land, boring realism [in video games, for some reason]
  • here's a pretty egregious example, it's like a home movie with no budget, nothing stands out (not even a HUD) to give away what game it is.
• "tumblr ugly" drawing styles [see example], now popular on "every" huge corporate website [facebook, google][of course, those websites were always ugly to begin with]
• trend of sarcasm, "irony poisoning", audience-"assaulting", all seems very unfriendly and off-putting
• depression shit [i might not even like Ben Gibbard songs much anymore, despite their many other qualities that are good]
• synthwave [audio and visual, nearly everything must be purple, teal, pink, and black], people think it's 80s retro, but it's really not. people also think it's cyberpunk, but it isn't hat either. and people mix it up with vaporwave. it is not vaporwave. "it" [personified] needs to stay in its own lane and stop taking over all of these other things. it also makes me feel like i'm drinking pure syrup.
• perhaps nearly all references and "easter egg" type things.

not much to say about these ones, i just dislike them:

• cowboy shit
• zombies [i used to be really bothered by all humanoid things, like star trek aliens, elves, orcs, etc.]

StarCraft 2

I was disappointed.

Background

The good old days:

• DK3 [the hype, anyways]
• 2d to 3d!
• new genres! [RTS][RPG]
  • first RTS experience was starcraft? or did we play C&C first???
  • Alpha Centauri
• Empire Earth
• halo?
• Morrowind
• oh ya: map editors

But then:

• halo 2 [false advertising of original trailer, super nerfed guns, weird ugly graphics, lifeless vehicle movement, grunt voices, weird death physics, hunters, perhaps gravemind, perhaps arbiter story, perhaps Sgt. Johnson]
• starcraft ghost
• oblivion [radiant AI][ruined Argonians, everywhere looks the same, no levitation, levelled monsters]
• Turok 2008
• and ...starcraft 2...

StarCraft 2

nothingburger.

• just a reskin of the original? i had seen amateur 3d versions years prior on mod database. what was the difference? what was the point?
• maps: all the same. every corner the same. mostly wide-open nothingburger terrain. stuffy professional players want repetitive predictable maps like all the blank ones they've played before, like an assembly line playing one after the other, unthinking (no time to think, you have to do 600 actions per minute). few environmental challenges, little need to adapt, few clever new tactics
• "actions per minute", idiotic need to "micro" manage units to simply dodge incoming barrages? any game that makes the player perform 400 actions per minute is a failure of design.
• music: bland nothingness. unmemorable. [with cowboy shit, too!] they recently re-made the old songs, because [duh] that's the kind of thing people liked [but new versions are more blandly "orchestral", less meaningful instrumentation]
• some visual downgrades, more cartoonish

what i would think they should have made:

• more AI for units, requiring less micro-managing, adding more focus on strategy
• more realistic movement [less hovering aircraft (old C&C games already had proper airplane movement!), perhaps vehicle physics like in halo]
• more detailed taking cover in the environment, shots should miss moving targets more often, etc.

The current limited conception of "low poly" art

I'll have to check google image search, limited to certain years, to see when this arose. [EDIT: I found this article from 2013 which seems to correctly identify the peculiarities of the style, and traces it to perhaps its source which i think was released earlier in 2013]

For some reason (I think in the past half decade) the phrase "low poly" seems to come bundled together with:

• a particular cartoonish style
• no textures on objects, just flat colors
• for some reason, the "specific polygons used" seem weirdly arbitrarily "chosen" (not sure how to describe that). Like, they aren't chosen to better give the illusion of smoothness or the correct contours of an object if it were real. They are made to be even more noticeably blocky and strange looking than they need to be.

This is radically different from the wide variety of styles that were ALL literally low poly back on older game consoles such as the N64. For example, Perfect Dark is not as "cartoonish" as Mario, and all objects have added detail through texturing.

My speculative explanation:

• advances in graphics techniques separated a lot of the graphics (such as shading) OUT of textures. So a flat color surface could look like metal if it was given specularity and all that.
• the "what's the point" philosophy of art, where you only do something in a certain way because of the unique outcomes of that certain way. Specialization. Like asking: "why would you paint something realistic if you can just take a photograph? therefore painting should be even less realistic than it already is, and more uniquely painterly, like van Gogh or whatever".

Checking the trend on google

So, google image search doesn't allow custom search date range like that (I thought it used to?). But regular google search still does.

First result, range of 2000-2008, gives this page from 2006. Textures are present. Surprisingly to me, the comment thread is still going in 2021! And the images there also have a lot of textures and realism despite being low-poly!

2013 is apparently when it happened:

• How to Get the Low-Poly Look["the" low poly "look"? you'd think if it's low poly, it's low poly]["A reaction to photo-realistic 3D modelling" just as i suspected]["combined with a rendering style which rather than trying to smooth out the polygons, instead renders each of the facets of the model, creating a blocky, angular, look."]["the low-poly look recalls paper-craft or origami" well maybe they should call it "paper poly" or something then]
• this one actually serves as a bit of a comparison between low poly with textures vs low poly without textures

"low poly" unicorn trophy, 2015, just no texture or smoothing at all, just raw hard triangle edges

feb 2013, sorta realistic, textured

compare:

• 2007/2009 tutorial for a very detailed realistic character
• 2012 tutorial, cartoonish, but not weirdly blocky or angular, and still uses some texture. really, this one has a style quite similar to Zelda games from the N64
• October 2012, cartoonish and a bit blocky, but highly textured, no obvious "weirdly shaped" polygons in final product. this one has a style very similar to warcraft 3.

Offenders:

• Celeste
• TUNIC
• Kentucky Route Zero
• Totally Accurate Battlegrounds
• Voxel Tycoon
• decentraland
• sayonara wild hearts
  • combined with two more insufferable aesthetics:
    • synthwave [audio and visual, nearly everything must be purple, teal, pink, and black]
    • vaguely ironic/dead-inside modern urban hipster
• astroneer
• [parts of ] Super Mario Odyssey [which stylistically contrasts highly with the bizarre choice to include "realistic" uncreative designs for the "earth", "moon", and...t-rex (yes, there's a "realistic" t-rex in a game that also features a cartoonish yoshi)(there is also a realistic dog in a game that features the extremely cartoonish dog Poochy from Yoshi's Island). but in terms of being located at the two least-designed extremes of the spectrums i noted, perhaps there is a design philosophy similarity][i suppose "copy the designs for Yoshi and Poochy from previous games" is also a kind of non-design]
• project winter
• Hyperbolica

i guess these don't count, not all of them have really "weird" polygons or total lack of texture, just a lot of coloring that looks pretty flat, blocky designs:

• I feel that Minecraft (2011) deserves special mention, having the dubious distinction of being the ugliest game ever created
• Infinifactory
• Hardspace: Shipbreaker [combined with cowboy shit music and vocals]

The Near-Extinction of Design and Style

Regurgitative Photograph Realism

Loses out on various aspects of style. The lighting is not dazzling, and the designs are...things we already have photographs of. That means, no creativity. Not even a blending of elements. Just "google it, and reproduce the same thing basically". If something deviates from this, it's probably just random shapes.

Horizon Zero Dawn

First, the sequel proves that the original got something kinda right: the name. The sequel is called "Horizon Forbidden West". I don't know what that is, but it is definitely not the clear fusion of 2010's/post-ipod-nothing-corporate-tech-futurism ("zero") and vague feel-good hippie woo ("dawn").

Side tangent: this reminds me of something similar in the new ...show branded as being part of the star trek ...brand. [oh god, now i need a new section of this page devoted to "brand name in name only"]. In TNG, you have this Romulan group called "The Tal Shiar", in the new series there's a Romulan group called "The Zhat Vash". Seem fine? The thing to understand is that Romulans have a heavy bird-of-prey theme. They have ships called bird-of-prey, they have ships called "Warbirds". The Romulans themselves look vaguely eagle/hawk-like. So "Tal Shiar" is clearly a combination of "talon" and a screeching noise ("Shiar") that a predatory bird would make. Maybe that's silly, but it is something, and it fits the theming. I have no idea what "Zhat Vash" is supposed to be (and new ""star trek"" is still deeply silly, so, no bullets dodged there).

Anyways. A game with robot dinosaurs! Wow! But then you see them. What you get appears to be the result of a design process that involved taking dinosaur toys, coating them with glue, and then dumping a pile of shredded paper over them. That's all you get. This is what design is now.

I think the style was inspired by the transformers movies?

Misc

The Lighthouse, and In Fabric

Both purportedly inspired by David Lynch. Of the two, In Fabric is more enjoyably stimulating to watch.

i can only guess the writer of lighthouse had this flawed process:

1. what could be real drama in a real boring real-life lighthouse?
2. uh, don't make that a story really, i'm afraid of committing, just...HAVE that stuff in the movie...to fill time!
3. uh ...sprinkle some magic/surreal stuff here and there!  art!

this is NOT how you write something like Eraserhead! completely wrong approach!  but it's my only explanation for the difference [of course, i'd have to outline process to write Eraserhead to compare]. and then there's the direction, editing and so on.  "make it crazy! crazy acting and editing sometimes!  see?  it's weird!  art!"

in fabric has a bit more creativity. it's kinda ok i guess. Loved: the couple of parts where the guy is blathering about washing machine repairs. and the enchanting song

possible Lynch references in in fabric:

• like Mulholland Drive:
  • Starts with a sequence of disembodied images
  • telephone stuff
• character like Mystery man from Lost Highway:
  • similar makeup
  • eyes too wide (and similar facial expression I guess)
  • when she tells someone over the phone the name and number of the customer, seems also to play with similarity to Mystery Man scene.  It involves a phone, and we see on the other side someone's hands, with red nails, looks just like hers, maybe it is her, two copies of her, one on each side of the phone.  Maybe.
  • similarly comes up to the character, weird conversation, perhaps inspired by Mystery Man or even the visitor in Inland Empire, and Lynch stuff like that with "the mysterious conversation" kinda trope
• (also has night driving on highway, like Lost Highway)
• Eraserhead:
  • the cabinet at night

So do i have anything negative to say about in fabric? i guess it felt like a collection of random ideas. not really a complete thing.

More I could write about

• wayward pines [well i did write about it here]
• wild palms [i did write about it on my computer, just need to find and paste, i guess]