We were flipping through dashboards. Data points on productivity.
“You know what I really want?” he said.
“What’s that?”
“A safe space. Room to fail. That’s how we create the way we do. We give our team that kind of freedom to create without criticism.”
That was heavy. I felt like an ass. I could tell he wasn’t happy. The dashboards, all the reporting, felt like big brother. Micromanagement. Reporting on these creatives was not the norm.
His studio was seeing massive success, and it wasn’t because procurement types got their grubby little hands-on production data. It was freedom. They had been in perpetual beta for over a decade and the players didn’t care, they loved them for it.
Warts and all, they had created one of the biggest games on the planet, and they had larger ambitions still.
I sat with it for just a moment, but then I had to break some news. “I’m with you, but there is one issue.”
“What’s that?” he said.
“What you’re doing. It’s not art.”
Working with paint doesn’t make you an artist. If it did, Sherwin-Williams would look like a museum, instead it looks like factory. Art, regardless of the type and tools, is the creation of something all new and all you.
This team was scaling and recreating. It was copywork.
“Art is the product of emotional labor. If it’s easy and risk free, it’s unlikely that it’s art”
Seth Godin
In his book The Storyteller, Dave Grohl talks about the years after Kurt Cobain passed away. With the end of Nirvana, Dave was delighted to play with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on Saturday Night Live. It was an honor. But when Tom offered Dave the drumming spot full time he respectfully declined, because Dave Grohl is an artist, not just a drummer. It would have been a cushy gig, but regardless of the payday, sitting behind the drum kit and playing somebody else’s music is not the life of an artist.
Painting by numbers, Copywriting, backup vocals, it’s different. It’s artistic, but is it art? It takes skill and craft, but it doesn’t take guts. You can push back from the table. The artist doesn’t have that choice. Once they share their work with the world, they are forever linked.
“Do you know what Bowie said about Bob Dylan? ‘A voice like sand and glue.’ There are plenty of pretty voices with nothing to say.”
Bernardo Villalobos, CODA
Meeting this gaming studio and their creative team was interesting work. They were a talented bunch, and we were looking at ways to increase their output by leveraging technology. Their buyers were asking for gains in efficiency, but the creatives were cautious, wanting to keep their hands at the controls and not lose what they had built.
We walked through some ideas on how to use technology to assess quality (gross), productivity (puke), and asset management (meh).
How does measurement affect a team’s ability to create?
Does engineering stifle creativity, does the data browbeat the creative? Do they lose the human touch, do they lose the safe space, impact openness to try new things, to be whimsical, does the technology beat them into submission?
That’s a lot of questions and poor punctuation but stay with me.
It’s important to consider the negative impacts, those are real, but it’s also important to identify where technology can provide support.
I could see the promise of this group and wanted to find ways for them to grow. They could become artists.
“Like Kanye.” I said.
“Kanye West? I think he is pretty good already.” He wasn’t following.
“Yeah, but how’s his singing?”
808‘s & Heartbreak. Love lockdown. Like it or not, it’s art, and we don’t get it without Autotune, a technology that has negative connotations. It was used for touchup work, used if you didn’t have the chops. Whitney doesn’t need it and Christina doesn’t want it.
Kanye used it as an instrument and changed everyone’s perspective.
“The autotune amplifies his sound and fits it with the beat. Because of Kanye’s style on “808s,” artists grew to see autotune as a way to meld their voices and fit them with many different kinds of moods and beats. It wasn’t a cop-out or something to be ashamed of, but a skill to conquer.”
The impact of ‘808s & Heartbreak’ on modern-day rap – The Miscellany News
If we want to create safe spaces for artists to explore, Autotune is all that and more, despite the critics. A technology that measures and corrects in real time.
But I thought we hated all that damn measurement?
The truth is we get more art when we have tools like Autotune. And more art is a good thing. Kanye was enabled by Autotunes technology, it made him comfortable enough to share the music he heard bopping around in his head.
When Pearl Jam was awarded the 1996 Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance, Eddie Vedder said, “I don’t know what this means. I don’t think it means anything. That’s just how I feel.”
Awards lead to competition and judgement, a focus on winning.
But you can’t win art.
“Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes.”
Steve Jobs
Nobody wants to do their life’s work and have somebody wag their finger at them.
Measurement, analytics, and data are not the culprits, they are the scapegoats. They can help us be more prolific and produce new types of art if we embrace them. Using them to amplify rather than edit.
My daughter loves writing. Even on the weekends she’ll log into her school O365 account and jot down some ideas, some extra phrases, things from her life that she can shape into a short story. She puts those into the cloud so she can continue working on them during her free time at school. It’s very cool to see an eight-year-old using technology that way. I noticed on the right-hand side of her document was the editor tool, and she hadn’t looked at it yet. We cracked it open, and I immediately regretted the decision. It scores out your document, you can set the writing style, grammar checks, vocabulary, ease of reading, more than the red squiggly lines of spell check.
The tool gives some wonderful feedback. What it doesn’t quite get is art. What it doesn’t quite understand is rhythm, timing, whimsy, playfulness, and all the things that make one person’s writing different from their classmates. It doesn’t understand style as much as it does word counts and punctuation. For me it catches all the things that I’ve struggled with, spelling, grammar, punctuation. The potential for a “their” when it should be a “there”. Pins and Pens.
With my daughter, at eight years old, the last thing I want her to do is simply download the grammar in the spelling and lose what makes her writing unique.
Cormack McCartney’s The Road doesn’t get published if we defer to the AI editor. On the flip side, Love Lockdown doesn’t get made without the autotune algorithms.
So how do you make sure technology is being supportive rather than stifling?
Very carefully.
You can have technology enabled art. We’ve seen it.
New works that use engineering and analytics to produce more. Expanding the canvas with tools, support, and leverage.
I was wrong about the team. They are artists. They just needed my support, not my judgement.
