This blog is based on my honours dissertation.

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The Making of Fresco: Exploring the Expressive Potential of Games as a Poetic Medium

The creation process is something that most creatives will wonder about during their careers. This project looked to understand my own creative process as an aspiring developer and “auteur” through the development of a game with a “poetic” aesthetic.

I looked to find a definition for poetic games and to develop guiding principles of practice, derived from the medium of poetry and my own needs as an auteur, to aid in allowing a process of creation that is expressive and exploratory.

This project arose from an interest in exploring my creative expression through the medium of games. I have always loved writing, and have found it an enjoyable, easy and expressive medium to communicate the stories I wish to tell. Yet writing is simple in some ways. While it requires narrative structure, character, tone, pace and plot, in essence it is simply the process of writing down words.

Games are far more complicated. In the barest sense, in order to create a game, one requires art, audio and interaction, typically done through code. I have always considered games development to be a potentially uncomfortable combination of engineering project and creative expression, where the limitations of reality and technology contrast with potential and creative freedom. It wasn’t necessarily creative freedom that I found interesting, but rather that ineffable expressive itch where one attempts to overcome the tallest barrier between us all, to catch a glimmer of another person's truth.

While potentially a romantic view, I consider this the prerogative of the creative minded. They create, siphoning their thoughts, feelings and intentions into a piece for a user/audience/witness to enjoy. I want my relationship with game development to be as close to that as possible. I want to be able to create and develop with an element of genuine intention.

“What allows someone to create like this?” is the question I sought to answer when I began this project. Can video games, an engineered artwork, allow a practitioner to break down this barrier between us? This was the central driving force of the project, and one that I would discover through my practice. Yet I wanted to give direction to that driving force.

The direction I found was one that occurred as ideas tend to, without beckon or hail, but through a serendipitous occurrence. To create in an expressive way is to make an expressive result and understanding this I decided to look at how I could characterise this aesthetic I wanted to capture.

“Poetic,” “having an imaginative or sensitively emotional style of expression” was the term that initially felt most aligned with what I wished to achieve.

Finally, the driving force of creative expression, directed at the aesthetic end result of “poetic”, needed a process of creation. As mentioned, games are complicated, but it is through their totality that any emotive style of expression has a chance to emerge. If you remove the audio from any game, is it still the same game? More importantly, does the game have the same aesthetic?

I wished to challenge myself to become an auteur. “A creative with a distinctive approach and controls every aspect of their creation to create a unique style.”

Therefore, the aim of the project was:

To explore the potential of games as a poetic medium through the creation of an artistic interactive game, and how an aesthetic approach to practise impacts the auteur's creative expression.

I decided to make a game entirely by myself as an auteur, with the intention of creating a poetic aesthetic, to achieve creative expression through the combined disciplines of art, music, audio and design.  

The game is a 2D explorative pixel art game that lets the player explore with their eyes and ears in a surreal world of their own creation. All music, audio, art, code and design have been created by me using the Godot game engine. 

In my exploration of the potential of games as being “poetic” it is very important here to divorce the notion that “poetic” has much to do with the medium of written poetry. Poetic is the end result of the intended aesthetic that poetry delivers. Poetry is the words written on paper or screen that deliver that result

If we are to take every component of a game as a facet that can be used in communicating an intended poetic aesthetic it is essential to use a terminology for these components that can enable us to create a definition later.

I suggest the use of “means”. These are factors that contribute to the Mise-en-scene which is the combination of said factors in creating an intended experience for an audience/player. Traditionally, “means” is employed in the theatre context and refers to the arrangement of the stage and actors and to what extent that arrangement may convey story or narrative. Applying this term to games, the example of “means” would be items such as "gameplay mechanic, character, type of environment, specific animation, scripted sequence, type of monster, sound, and so on." It is the intention of the game developer, and how they may utilise these “means” that dictates what the player will receive at a given time and therefore the resulting aesthetic. One can liken the “means” available to game developers to the devices and techniques a poet may utilise. A poet has a range of devices available to them that change and conform the ostensible meaning of the poem into a blend of intonations

For games then, to create a poetic aesthetic, one would have to utilise “means” in the same way one would utilise poetic devices and techniques, not necessarily in their sonic qualities, but their expressive and emotive intention and utilisation.

Therefore, I suggest the definition:

A poetic game is a game that uses the aesthetic qualities of means to evoke expressive and emotive experiential meaning and understanding in addition to typical ostensible meaning.

This definition relies first on the intention of the developer, and in the case of my project, I intended to create in a way that explored my own expression through practice. To expand on what my definition of a poetic game might entitle in practical development, I also suggest that while a poetic aesthetic may be achievable through the expressive and emotive use of game specific ‘means’, there is merit in exploring ways in which poetic devices and techniques may be transferred and utilised within the medium of games.

On top of the goal of creating a poetic aesthetic I want to create a semantic shift in thinking, from “what is poetic?”, to looking at what can be learned from a poetic approach to practise.

I seeked to achieve expressive development, with an expressive aesthetic through a playful and explorative approach to practise.

Fresco is a game about creation, atrophy, and that little place of evolution in between. The game allows the player to use their eyes and ears to explore a changing symbolic and surreal world that leads them back to the inevitable. Development started with a period of exploration in my areas of interest. These areas were exactly the skills I wanted to develop and demonstrate as an auteur, in particular 2D Pixel Art, audio, music and design. 

In terms of the process of creation, I was able to learn much from poetry. In exploring every aspect of my craft through quick iterations I was able to freely express myself and allow myself to follow creative instinct in a medium that is far more complicated than poetry.

However, despite this, I noticed a failing in a purely explorative approach to practise. Without a strong guiding theme, narrative, story or intention the exploration can lose focus. I was able to create a small scene that was beautiful, but as it lacked context, it lacked meaning. One could say that the scene was beautiful, but without experiential meaning or understanding, this example did not fulfil my definition of “poetic.”

It was easy not to plan or stick to scope if one is exploring. Without the constraint of a goal other than that of exploring, it became very difficult to know how to continue practice and in what manner.

This was further exacerbated by a lack of skill in certain areas, namely my coding and familiarity with the game engine, and my artistic ability. Without skill in these areas, it was very difficult to be expressive as friction would occur as I had to dedicate time to learning skills and building understanding.

I was held back by this fundamentalist approach to exploration and by a reliance on skills that I did not have. The latter is a simple mistake, one that will diminish with experience, but the former represented a fundamental difference to how games and poetry are made. Without a narrative, theme, or mechanical goal, I was made uncomfortable and unproductive as the rate at which I could explore my way out of that situation was far slower than that of poetry. The game suffered because of it. Without a strong goal or direction, I feel that there is the potential to view some of the content in the game as arbitrary and meaningless, the direct opposite to what I intended was a “poetic” aesthetic. 

This process of development still fulfilled my intent in expressing myself through the medium of games. As my skills increased and my familiarity with tools grew, small, almost thoughtless decisions gave rise to interesting and provocative aesthetics and from these I would be inspired to create more. Not just linearly continuing in the game world but also when it came to other practices.

In the end I felt I was able to create an aesthetic result that communicated experiential meaning and understanding through an aesthetic use of “means”. Furthermore, I took inspiration from my poetry and focused on sound and music to create a rhythmic quality to the experience and a strong but evolving tone.

I was also able to create a definition of “poetic” games catered to my needs as an auteur. This definition may prove useful in the future as a guide to others looking to view games not just as a medium for entertainment or artistic expression, but also as a medium that can be shaped and used to express emotions and experiential meaning with a poetic aesthetic.