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[letsap]

Blame insomnia, but. An interesting and silly thing struck me today while replaying Super Mario World and crossing over to the Donut Plains:



That bridge's tiles are impeccably individual. A lot of pixel artists, myself included, would split hairs if they made a tile like that, with clear gridding when placed next to another one. It's an art flaw, but one that didn't really detract. In fact, when noticing it, the tiles gave the impression that the game wasn't without superficial flaws, which somehow made it feel more human and complete. A bit of a weird sentiment, sure, then I thought about some modern successful games. There's usually little bugs here and there and detailing issues and some of them are pretty rare. While it might be attributed to limited playtesting, consider Halo: Reach. Super popular, and apparently riddled with a ton of little bugs in multiplayer.

For instance, sometimes for no perceivable reason crates will launch players skyward, elevators will fatally spit you at a wall, ammo deposits actually leap up and crush you. It sounds like something I'd go nuts trying to figure out, but it again seems like one of the things that adds just a tiny bit. One little laugh or emotional startle that you wouldn't have gotten had the game been working. That's sort of interesting, I think: It's a mistake in the game itself, but it made the game just that tiny bit better.

So, I ask you folks out there making games your opinion on mistakes in games. Have you encountered any inconsistencies that actually added to a game's charm? And, at what point do you stop fretting over small errors? While you usually can't playtest and find every mathematical fluke in your engine, when you do find them what mistakes are acceptable? Is it a time thing for you, or an effort thing, or maybe even atmospheric?

Looking forward to some opinions.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

to me, wabi-sabi doesn't refer to small bugs or small imperfections, but rather, the imperfections or wear and tear of use, i.e. imperfections relating to the passage of time. i know it has extended meanings of course, and that the title of the thread isn't too important, i just don't see grid visibility issues in map tiles or programming bugs as wabi-sabi (wabi-sabi would be like if the game has a dog-eared instruction manual, and some rips in the label, and perhaps a cranberry juice stain on the side of the cartridge, or perhaps if you get flickering if you display too many objects onscreen on an emulator, even though the emulator could handle it it creates the artificial flickering for effect)

anyway, the grid being totally invisible feels like a *modern* pixel art ideal, not a perennial one. if you look at most nes or snes games, they're totally filled with visible grids. i don't see anything wrong with either way of doing pixel art, even if modern pixel art shuns it.

also yes, there are some mistakes i leave in my game because they make the game better. an example is 'level 101' in immortal defense. after you beat the final level, level 100 (which itself was a hidden level), and view the credits, you're taken to a 'level 101' which displays some garbage text (some random characters or something), and then you begin a level in which you win immediately, with no enemies -- it was a complete bug, but i left it in because it was kind of a cool bug (but i don't think that's an instance of wabi sabi either though, since there's no implication of the passage of time or impermanence in the bug)

[Pedrosanchau]

I think graphics errors need to be seen in game. Often, i looked at a sprite and said "it's awful, i'm gonna redo it". Now, as for me, this didn't worked. I saw that a lot of mistakes i saw in a sprite couldn't be seen in the real game. I decided to correct mistakes only when i'm already near animation completion.

So, give a chance to mistakes. Sometimes we are wrong, it won't worth losing time on unseeable mistakes or mistakes that can add a wonderful effect.

[letsap]

to me, wabi-sabi doesn't refer to small bugs or small imperfections, but rather, the imperfections or wear and tear of use, i.e. imperfections relating to the passage of time. i know it has extended meanings of course, and that the title of the thread isn't too important, i just don't see grid visibility issues in map tiles or programming bugs as wabi-sabi (wabi-sabi would be like if the game has a dog-eared instruction manual, and some rips in the label, and perhaps a cranberry juice stain on the side of the cartridge, or perhaps if you get flickering if you display too many objects onscreen on an emulator, even though the emulator could handle it it creates the artificial flickering for effect)

anyway, the grid being totally invisible feels like a *modern* pixel art ideal, not a perennial one. if you look at most nes or snes games, they're totally filled with visible grids. i don't see anything wrong with either way of doing pixel art, even if modern pixel art shuns it.

also yes, there are some mistakes i leave in my game because they make the game better. an example is 'level 101' in immortal defense. after you beat the final level, level 100 (which itself was a hidden level), and view the credits, you're taken to a 'level 101' which displays some garbage text (some random characters or something), and then you begin a level in which you win immediately, with no enemies -- it was a complete bug, but i left it in because it was kind of a cool bug (but i don't think that's an instance of wabi sabi either though, since there's no implication of the passage of time or impermanence in the bug)

Yeah I was a little unsure about the inclusion of wabi-sabi in the thread title. Thanks for added clarity! Alternatives... Leaving mistakes in games? Seems reasonable, I guess I was thinking more of "nothing is complete, nothing is perfect."

That totally reminded me though, of Yoshi's Island's instruction manual. Every other game had this glossy manual-y manual, but Yoshi's Island's felt more like a coloring book or something way older. Even if it wasn't a part of the game per se, it added a lot to the experience.

[I_smell]

I really see a lot more character in the things that work in games than the things that don't.
Glitches n shit are usually unintentional, or just cos the guy was running out of time or whatever.

Also what the hell is "wabi-sabi".

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

no the title is fine, if only because it'll introduce people to the concept (even if it doesn't directly apply) for those who haven't heard of it before, and as i said some people use it to mean it in the extended sense of 'imperfections that make something more aesthetically pleasing' rather than to its original sense of 'wear and tear, which reminds of impermanence and transience' -- e.g. the idea that used boots that have been walked in for 1000 miles are more aesthetically pleasing than the same boots new, because they hold the record of their journey in how they look

anyway, about the grid thing, i think games can look amazing even with a clear/obvious grid, for instance















images taken from http://www.flyingomelette.com/top100/part1.html

[I_smell]

That's a pretty good philosiphy, but people'd more likely pick it up if you called it something more descriptive of what it is.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

it's just that it's a historical term, it's been called wabi sabi for hundreds of years in japan, so when the concept was exported to the rest of the world they continued to call it wabi sabi -- sort of like 'sushi' would make more sense if you called it 'raw fish' but people still call it 'sushi'

[s0]

Yes I would like to see more wasabi in games.

[moi]

I think there are artistic terms in all languages for describing that although it's too hot here right right now to make such an intellectual work but I'm sure you could find if you looked for it and stopped being a weeaboo

[Aik]

I think there are artistic terms in all languages for describing that although it's too hot here right right now to make such an intellectual work but I'm sure you could find if you looked for it and stopped being a weeaboo

Well, looking forward to you giving one. But there's nothing 'weeaboo' about using Japanese loan-words for things without an equivalent in English, especially seeing that the main example is from a Japanese game.
Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

[moi]

Well actually I didn't intend to post that post the term weeaboo is a bit strong  .

[Philtron]

The term wabi-sabi didn't get "exported to the rest of the world". This forum is the first time I've ever heard or seen the term in my life even though I have been familiar with the concept behind the term for quite some time.

The idea of deliberate imperfection/inconsistency in artistic work has been around long before Japan's culture starting getting popularized around the globe (slant or sight rhyme in poetry being an example). In the West we don't have a specific term for the uncomfortable feeling you get when you sit down in a seat and you can still feel the warmth of the previous occupant's buttocks. Japan might have a word for that though and maybe they have several words, for different types of butts and different degrees of warmth and maybe different seat materials, but that doesn't mean that Japan was the first to contemplate residual butt warmth.

Stanislaw Lem, a Polish author, wrote my favorite piece about the deliberate use of inconsistency in artistic work. I wish I could quote a bit of it directly but I don't have the book on hand. To paraphrase, he wrote how contradictory or inconsistent elements of an artistic work lend it incredible life and vivacity. One of the examples he uses is Shakespeare's Hamlet and how some scholars believed that Hamlet's inconsistent behavior is actually a leftover of multiple rewrites of the play that were combined and not properly edited due to time constraints. Lem stated that these contradictions make Hamlet more alive and more believable and more enjoyable as a character than if he had been written perfectly with no contradictions.

Anyway, that's me getting side tracked.

Addressing the original post in this thread, I have seen cool mistakes in games before although I can't remember what they were at the moment.
As for at what point do you stop fretting over small errors? I would say intuition as a developer should guide you. I remember I once worked on an RPG where you could go to the temple to heal your wounds. I set it up so you would type in how many hitpoints you wanted healed and then the game would deduct the cost of the healing; it was like making a donation to the priests and the gods then blessed you. What I hadn't anticipated was that the player could entire a negative value for how much to health to revive. They could actually lose health and the side effect was that they actually gained money [because (total_money-(-cost_of_healing)) was essentially (total_money+cost_of_healing)]. I thought about fixing this mistake but then realized it was okay. It was essentially the player choosing to make an offering to the gods and the priests then rewarded the player with gold; the player was just donating blood. It all worked out.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

lem was actually part of that exporting of the concept -- he was influenced by it. the rest of what you wrote is just anecdotal -- e.g. if you hadn't heard of it till this thread, that's just you. i first heard of it 25 years ago, partially because my parents are visual artists. of course it's not a familiar term to most people, but it's familiar to most professional artists, particularly visual artists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi#Western_use

Potter Bernard Leach (1887 – 1979) was deeply influenced by Japanese aesthetics and techniques and founded an influential European aesthetic movement which also included Dame Lucy Rie and Hans Coper.

The work of American artist John Connell (born 1940) is centered around the idea of wabi.[6]

During the 1990s the concept was borrowed by computer software developers and employed in Agile programming and Wiki to describe acceptance of the state of ongoing imperfection that is the product of these methods.[7]

[Philtron]

I already read the wikipedia article you quote and notice the only mention it makes of a broad movement being influenced by the term is computer programmers in the '90s. Lem was not part of the exporting. He was writing during the Cold War, from behind the Iron Curtain, at the time. Not much Japanese culture slipping in. My mention of slant and sight rhymes was also not anecdotal. Nor is my example of Robert Browning's poem "Porphyria's Lover" in which a line is deliberately written with incorrect rhythm. A few months ago I finished reading Don Juan by another poet, Byron, in which he leaves lines too long or short on occasion, and sometimes pokes fun at himself for not editing or for writing in French or Latin incorrectly. My father is also a visual artist, he just wasn't a weeabo 25 years ago.

[oahda]

In the West we don't have a specific term for the uncomfortable feeling you get when you sit down in a seat and you can still feel the warmth of the previous occupant's buttocks. Japan might have a word for that though and maybe they have several words, for different types of butts and different degrees of warmth and maybe different seat materials

This made my day.

[SirNiko]

Perhaps this is on topic?

In Super Mario Galaxy 2, the Freezy-Flake stage has little velvet rails bordering some parts of the stage (you know, the kind like you see in a movie theater queue). While I was walking about, I noticed they were rather uneven. The rails were evenly spaced, but the velvet hung higher or lower in some places, and even in some places drooped down into the snow so you could not see it. There was no evident pattern to it, and it was in pretty sharp contrast to the perfectly identical lines of bricks in the middle of that arena.

There are a number of games with very eclectic level design, for example Rocket: Robot on Wheels or Psychonauts or Space Station Silicon Valley. The levels are made up of sharp angles and give the impression that each part of the stage was made separately from the rest of the game, rather than from a pool of pre-rendered objects arranged in different configurations like Katamari Damacy's sprawling stages. This also presents a lot of possibilities for glitches, as disorganized level designs make for lot of opportunities to wall jump or clip to escape the confines of the stage.

Is this what you're talking about, Letsap?

[letsap]

Ah, yeah! The thread probably wasn't the most well thought out, but that's the kind of thing I mean. I was actually playing through that stage a little bit ago, and yet I didn't notice that. I guess I sorta filled it in as being even, but that's a cool little detail.

[tesselode]

I think this is why people like retro graphics. Like Nintendo 64 graphics. The polygons are so obvious and there are so many glitches with the graphics sometimes that it becomes more likeable.

[Sankar]

I believe that every game should be 90% polished, and 10% should be just wild guesses and risks. It gives a different flavour to it, if not, everything looks artificial and "Placed there".
I always think of Zack Snyder's adaptation of Watchmen, everything is so perfectly placed on the backgrounds that the whole sets look very artificial, there is no soul to it.

We have a very streamline pipeline of "do, analyze, re-do, analyze, test, analyze results, re-do". It ends up taking some of the soul of games.