Hello developers! Today I want to touch on a subject that I see rarely, if ever, discussed on here, which baffles me because it’s the most important thing for anyone that creates things really ought to know, and that is what the meaning of art is.
The Dictionary definition of art is: “The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power” [1] When we think about art, most of us probably do think of paintings and sculptures. But absolutely anything man-made can be a work of art, and that includes Roblox games and experiences.
What is the meaning of art then?
In simple terms, art is the most profound and revered form of human expression. There’s countless amount of works of art that convey some form of message, and oftentimes, left intentionally vague and up to viewer interpretation. This is because art affects us all differently, and the messages we see in art may differ from the messages somebody else may see. You will also find that a lot of artist are very personal and very connected with their own works, as their art can be a piece of themselves that they express. But it’s not just this – art is both a science and philosophy. Art is meant to be experimented with. Art is meant to be risk-taking. When you try to make art that hasn’t been experimented with, has absolutely no risk involved, you end up getting yourself things like multiple re-releases of Skyrim, and your 22nd Call of Duty game that didn’t change much after even the 7th one. You get a whole lot of Copy + Paste and nothing new, nothing innovated on or anything (Except for those sweet sweet microtransactions, lootboxes, season passes, other scams and forms of gambling)
How does art apply to Roblox games?
A very common form of artwork you can find on Roblox are showcases. Showcases can vary from environmental works, to showcasing how code can work and to see what it does. For the sake of this conversation, I am going to be referencing environmental showcases. In many of these showcases, a grand extra amount of work is put into them to make them beautiful. If you wish for examples, some showcases I’m quite fond of are Shanyue, Constraint, and Airship Station. Shanyue is a fantastic environmental showcase, while Constraint is a showcase that conveys powerful emotion, and Airship Station is a showcase that demonstrates the great power of passion. There are more messages and meanings you can pick up from showcases, and if you talk to other people on how they might see these showcases, they may tell you the same or something different.
But there’s much more to the art on Roblox than just showcases. Most games you play have an environment, characters, a story, thumbnail, generalised assets, special effects, music, sound effects, etc. Every single thing that goes into creating a game is an artform. Music has messages and meanings like showcases do. How special effects are used, such as particles and beams, can be equally just as awe-inducing and jaw-dropping as some of the finest paintings that exist. Once you see how every little thing that goes into a game is art, then you can easily see why video games themselves are a work of art.
It’s important to note that art often takes a lot of time. I understand that an artist like Bob Ross is able to conjure up a beautiful landscape all within an half-hour session, but that’s Bob Ross’ special artistic skill, not most people’s. Generally the more time an artist spends with a project, the more detailed and beautiful it becomes.
How does art conflict with corporations that make games?
Before the rise of ai-generated art, corporations would hire artists to make whatever it is they need. The issue, that’s very normalised today, is that corporations really only want eye-candy for something to sell, not art, but will sell it to you as an art. For this example, we will use the Roblox Corporation. To get a front page game on Roblox back in the earlier days, say around 2010, your game just had to be popular, and the popularity usually came just from how fun your game was. But nowadays, getting a front page game is significantly harder, and is downright impossible if your game isn’t intended to make much money. This is because Roblox sorts front page games these days by Monthly Active Users (MAU), player retention time, Premium payouts, and how much robux players spend on that game, and other details I don’t much understand well. But with these things in mind, Roblox front page games are only the games that make them the most money. Unless if your passion project involves trying to reel in the most amount of players – especially Premium players – and is expected to compete with the games of other corporations (and some independent developers), then you will be expected to fail.
What we are seeing here are companies doing what companies do best – make the most amount of money with the least amount of risk involved, if any. They dominate the front page while actual art projects are left to be discovered by those that somehow stumble upon them. This is why you will almost never see a showcase on the front page anymore, and if it does, it’s usually not there for a very long time. With the rise of AI, companies and corporations never lost interest on how to save money and to make more money, and many of them have turned a blue eye to AI, as AI, unlike people, doesn’t have rights, doesn’t require sleep or even to be paid. A company or corporation can treat an AI however they want and the AI will neither complain nor be grateful of their treatment, unlike human artists who usually demand to be treated fairly and paid appropriately; something many companies and corporations seem to play off as not understanding the best.
Conclusion
Your Roblox game is a work of art, and everything that goes into them is a form of art. But once you travel through games that were made passionately by independent developers, and then hop onto a game made by a corporation, you will find a great contrast in the quality of the game most of the time. Everything is usually better when it is made by artists, but is greatly expensive at the cost. Art is a luxury that is free for all to admire but costs to own. You, as a player and not an artist, must decide which is more worth playing: a game, or a product. If you are a developer, you must decide what your art is worth. Your lowest standard is your highest standard
