Ethic for graphics: Facing the creative crisis thorough ethical dilemmas

Nota: el texto original fue escrito en inglés.

The COVID-19 pandemic broke into everyday life redesigning plans, goals, and expectations. In this context, we will share the experience of a video game creation project with students from different countries, with different profiles. Given the situation, we faced the massive abandonment of students who understandably focused their energies on immediate and urgent tasks. The uncertainty affected a large-scale project: cancellation of trips, incompatibilities of schedules, depression at school due to sick relatives or affected family economy. We ask ourselves the question how to reactivate the creative, team and collaboration will as the center of the task in such a context? How to enforce membership and participation in the project? Is it possible to advance for freedom by refusing to use any authority over the members to participate? How to adapt project approaches and keep students excited about participating despite the uncertainty? We find the answer by changing the beginning of a normal methodology, by ethics. The effects that ethics operate on normal methodology were interesting: we were no longer focused on results or objectives, or on any methodology. We know in advance that the team members, once summoned by ethical dilemmas, will give results. They have the ability to define goals by themselves, we know that they internalize different methodologies from their teachers throughout their school life. Therefore, we take the risk of playing to develop a story for a video game before worrying about times, deliverables, and objectives. Although without a doubt, we define some objectives. The dynamic was that students from very different cultures chose a specific project in the emergency of the pandemic, in this case the Mask of Truth project. This one is based on a story full of ethical dilemmas through science fiction and real health issues. Step by step, session by session, the students built a story that became, thanks to the discussion of ethical dilemmas, a place to discuss and dialogue about their own uncertain context, releasing their own questions, criticisms, as well as their profound understanding of this complex world. The result was a solid team not only involved in a process, but also creating new processes, paradigms, and procedures for intercultural collaboration in real time through innovative tools, proposed and dominated by them. With ethics guiding the creative process through reflection, they themselves became not only objects of education but also subjects of creation to successfully face the problems of creativity in a critical context. The general balance at the end of the experience is that fraternal ties have developed that transcend the project, giving rise to a solid community of colleagues and friends in different countries.


Context

The present paper delves in the experience of an experimental project named Game Lab, implemented with the sponsorship of the National Agency of International Exchange (NAWA by its acronym in polish). Before the pandemic the objectives of the game lab were: to explore pedagogical problems in the creation of video games with students from different universities in different countries. The unexpected onset of the pandemic raised unexpected challenges for the project. Finally implemented in the first half of 2021, the main idea of the project is to register, diagnose, find and solve problems related with videogames creation. Students chose one mentor of a specific university based on some concepts proposed by the mentor. In this case, the proposed concepts were presented in form of a story with the aim to develop it and implement it as a videogame. The name was Mask of Truth. The Universities and students involved in the Mask of Truth project were: Wout Janssen form LUCA School of Arts Belgium; Jacqueline Ueltzen and Jonas Wehling form Harz University of Applied Sciences, Germany; Abril Gutierrez from Northern Illinois University, USA; Sandra Czerniawska from University of Silesia, Poland; Mauricio Rabiella and Sandra Velazco form Autonomous University of Puebla, Mexico. So below we will develop three sections that show the way in which we approach the issue of encountering others thorough culture, ethical dilemmas, and contemporary criticism.

Encounter with others through culture

Encounter with others is an attempt to sow a seed that becomes a bridge. This process depends on daily habit of the presence of the other. That presence, due to actual situation, should be a strong echo produced in the brief moments of video meeting. The conscious that we are in front of a person with different culture, made a balance between a critical beginning and a joyful transcultural experience. So, we put as the core of the experience, respect, understanding, and sharing. The first topic in the meetings was the myths that every culture knows that exist around itself. Which are the cliches that we face in front of the world? Can we understand why they exist, and can we laugh about ourselves? Mexican culture is well known for the openness to foreigners. So, we dedicated many sessions to show different sides of each one culture, forgetting even goals or time restrictions of the general project. This allow to discover that the essence of the project was to know each other and learn from different cultures as the most important thing. American students, Germans, Belgians and Polish shared interesting aspects of their countries, stories, and national identities in a self-critic and respectful ambient of joy and friendship. Discover the crazy habits of other countries, transformed the team, and expanded our tolerance. We learned that the human desire for coexistence always reinvents itself and keeps the doors of coexistence open, producing new possibilities for history and encounters. I think this beginning was one to the succeed criteria for the ethics as the core of creativity, that made the students exited an anxious to meet again. Despite of the pandemic context, the screen becomes a window to travel into far and different places and know new people. Once we had a general introduction of our cultural contexts, we lead to debate about the contemporary world to find common issues and topics that concern all of us. The next two sections were developed almost simultaneously in the meetings but here we present them separately.

Encounter with others through ethical dilemmas

In this section, we show a brief review of the topics with which the team began to develop a critical dialogue on ethical dilemmas. After this, we will see how these dialogues were creating a specific methodology that was useful to the team and were built in an environment of consensus. Ethics always have a strong link with ontology: Every human is sensitive to the question “To be or to have?” Excessively competitive global context allows to open these questions. If we are producing thousands of specialists with great technical skills, why prospects for humanistic fulfillment, narrowed and decreased? Why the progress of ones implies the slavery and injustice for others? Why every comfortable aspect of our live has enormous social cost? We concluded that the “having” has displaced the “being”. Thus, open the existential problems to dialogue prepares the environment to arise ethics as the core of any creative process. Do the youth have proposals to change the world? Which things make them angry and disillusioned? The fact that this kind of problems are universal, gives the students a strong sense of opening perspectives, community, new points of view in front of topics that contemporary society permanently avoids. Besides, these topics awake the wish to participate leading to forget the initial fear to express themselves in a different language. Mask of Truth was a great excuse to continue talking of ethical dilemmas.

Encounter with others through contemporary criticism

In this section I present general topics that lead us to go deeper in the exercise of strengthening our capacity for dialogue, discrepancy, and interchange of ideas. For many art students, fame, fortune, are synonyms of success. A complete generation abandoned in front of a monitor (Turkle, 2001) has built their concept of life following the paradigm of the spectacle (Debord, 1992) and simulation (Baudrillard, 1981 and 1991). Extreme individualism and competitiveness at school not always provide a space of confidence. Besides, youth have the idea that the previous generation has failed building a better world. The inter-generational social fabric is torn. Amazing and impressive technical innovations haven’t provided a significant paradigm to stop social and nature degradation. The more powerful processors for graphics give us more detailed textures and realistic environments but even great companies have failed to propose significant stories. High technology does not guarantee a good story. Internet has arisen as a fourth voice in opposition to the classic context home-school-society: there is virtual society now, come time more real than the others. Since the Internet is not made for humanism but for consumerism delve into a kind of techno-obscurantism in some senses, a sui generis type of educational on-line promises emerges based on some world-famous personalities using the crisis of the education as a chance so sell online courses. This leads to a new pedagogic subjectivity that we could call the student-fanatic. The hegemonic paradigm of success based on spectacularism never explains how a real professional or creator solves the tension between circumstances and will. Indeed, they never talk about circumstances, the uncontrollable dark side of success and life. Many schools had become Fordist industries that spells people to the market of job with any critical thinking nor real creative skills. And most of creative skills developed in schools never will be used on industry. Besides, thorough specializations the schools enforce the social division of labor in a Taylorist logic that separates the hard job form the creative job. We asked if the main competence demanded today by the industry over the great majority of professionals is obedience, low criteria, and high resistance to the exploitation (24 hours of activity in the so-called game jams is presented as something funny and good; of course it is fun, but at the same time, it normalizes super exploitation in the big industry, which is a very important issue for students. Students are conscious that big industries lay off form one day to another hundreds of creatives or engineers with the confidence that there are hundreds more begging for a chance. The enormous and colossal growing of profits in the videogame industry during pandemic had a weak impact on the salary of workers. Young people every day more and more are sensitive to this realty. May be at the beginning they just have a vague intuition about it, like a grey shadow under the bed, but this shadow is real no matter we simulate the opposite. Can videogames change this situation as a product form massive consumption? The general idea is, yes. But new approaches are needed. Develop the critical thinking as the same importance as software skills could be an answer. So, we can conclude, at least partially, that the hegemonic paradigm of success, in fact, lead to failure and massive cheat to creators. Every day more and more students do not see themselves in big, important companies. Ethical dilemmas were a strong source of dialogue, inspiration, and a strong platform to self-expression.

Creating a paradigm to face a crisis

Unexpectedly our first sessions in the Game Lab lead all of us to take time from other projects, and even to the project itself. We put this situation over the table. We accepted that we were enjoying the experience enough to dedicate more time but the time to finish a videogame was absolutely short… Some kind of pragmatism make us to think on strategies to be the best team and maintain the happiness of the experience, but after some talks, we noticed that due circumstances, being in these two roads was impossible. We formulate a question for the team: do we want to be the best or the happiest team? There are methods for both, and with more time, even both can coexist, but due the situation, time restrictions, and completely new dynamics in the “new normality” obviously both were not possible. So, we bring an interesting paradigm to face this situation that we called “Little Miss Sunshine”. This paradigm that we create in the moment is based on the movie with the same name. Basically, is about the high portability to not be as good as the rest of the participants but we appreciate more the illusion to participate than win. With this perspective, we destroy the fear to failure and suddenly emerges the beauty of the creative journey more than the obsession with a perfect end. After a very significant time of thinking we found our first consensus: we wanted to be the happiest.
This decision brings some ethical principles for us to organize the work and to have clear what do we expect from each other:

1. Not to make a fake game play.
2. Work hard to make a real and important video game.
3. Go as far as possible with a high degree of significance.
4. Not to put over any person abusive amount of job.
5. Not to treat anyone as a replaceable.
6. Free ourselves from impress someone.
7. Whatever the result, we would be there to present it with pride, together.

This is not a simple achievement since the strongest problem during pandemic was the lack of interest of students in continue with the projects, resulting in a crisis of participants. We noticed that we were not developing a game for a cruel company but for a comprehensive initiative that, exactly, wanted to see what kind of problems appear or emerge and the way we solved them freely and creatively.

A strong team

Make a strong international students’ team that develops a sense of identity and pertinence is a matter of seriousness and gratitude with the openness of the other. We were trying to compensate the fact that meetings in person were not possible due to pandemic. When we went deeper on objectives, times, organization, duties, and tasks the “Little Miss Sunshine” paradigm started to give answers to the feeling of stress and anxiety. Despite that our expectations about what we wanted to do were beyond the time and conditions we had, the fact to know that “Whatever the result, we would all be there to present it with pride” gave us the strength to face that we were depending on ¡the behavior of a virus! In every aspect of our life, —i.e., rate of contagious and the singular politics that each government and university where implementing—. The natural way to maintain the quality of our meeting time was good communication. Extreme situations of absence for COVID-19 problems, obviously affected the road map that the team were creating, changing, and redrawing every day. The soul of the team become a document called “the plot so far” where everyone could go and add some lines to the story in absolute freedom.

Open method: achieving consensus

The horizontal way of work made us noticed that most our normal life we were receiving orders under mechanisms of pressure and awards that we didn’t need anymore. The truth is that creativity rarely flourish in this kind of ambient, and this ambient is rejected for creative people, even worst, this environment can destroy the creativity. Since we realized that authority was not part of our method (Marcuse, 1968), new problems appeared, mainly long discussions full of amazing ideas but very passionate dialogues that sometimes take much time and leads nowhere. I encourage students to develop their own organizations forms. First idea was to implement a democratic way. Vote to choose one of ideas in conflict. Democracy didn’t work because vote for options make part of the team just obey the majority. Of course, it makes everything faster… but exactly we were trying to avoid tyranny of time. So, we find that consensus will be our way. One problem remains, the cost to achieve consensus was more time to meet. Those who proposed democracy, change to trust in the decisions of those that was proposing to meet often to achieve consensus. The result was to have not one but two meetings per week, the general one every Tuesday —tree ours that very often become four due to the passionate dialogues— and the so called “soft meeting” of strict one hour every Friday. This last meeting maintains tasks clear and reinforce consensus. Besides these two meetings, specific teams of work have the freedom to meet any time they decided.

“I want to do” or “I want to try”: a skills matrix

Once the team felt confident and strong, we define more specific roles through a skills matrix. The matrix shows two lines of action, 1. I Want to do, and 2. I Want to try.
Common tasks for the creation of a videogame lie in the matrix (writing, art concept, programming, level design, sound, etc.) We opened the possibility to start taking risks in the form “I want to try”, despite not being so good or not having the necessary skills. The Game Lab allow this kind of experimentation and we take it. The high level of compromise gave results on a dynamic team using: a) their advanced skills, b) empiric experience, and c) experiment trying new tasks to develop new skills.

Roles, organization

Abril Gutierrez focused on story board and animation of cut scenes. Finally, she worked together with Jay Ueltzen to create a cut scene with sound. Jay Ueltzen did write and project management, a skill that she develops on the road with success. Mauricio Rabiella and Andrea Velazco chose concept art. Wout Janssen focused on programming and animation. Jonas Wehling focused on writing and level design. Sandra Czerniawska focused on concept art and illustration of the Room “A”. Almost all members of the team work together in the concept art of Room “A”. To organize ideas, debate and topics, our basic tool was Discord. For video meeting, we use Google Meet and sometimes Zoom. The first one was especially useful because it has subtitling when someone talk in English, besides, is the best tool for weak internet signals. A complex and well-organized system of storage in Google drive maintained all the files in its place making easy go and check any proposal.

Physical and mental health within the team

During the process we were open to personal issues and everyone had the chance to share them. Depression has become an issue of public health in many countries and arises with pandemic. Despite the mentor is not a therapist, the simple fact to hear personal and hard moments had very positive effect. Sandra and Jay become extra involved in the coordination of concept art. Complex situations in the most critical moment of pandemic demanded not only coordination of art team, but general management of the tasks of all teams. We had a special workshop with Professor Dominik Wilhelm form Harz University for this part. After his workshop to project management, Jay Ueltzen, student form the same university, developed a complex and excellent board in Trello where all tasks were always monitored, thus, she reorganized the system of achieves and storage in Gmail, and folders in Discord previously created by Mauricio. Abril Gutierrez form USA shows an impressive capacity to story board and animation capturing even the most fine and subtle emotions, suspiring us permanently with story boards that catches the spirit of all of us. Unfortunately, a delicate injury to his arm decreased significantly her participation. For all the team her peaceful recovery was more important than the whole project. We were agreeing on that. Despite this Abril were always working with us. Wout Janssen shows an extraordinary capacity to hear, being several times the wise voice that found consensual ways to understanding each other despite intense discrepancies in the team. During the project he attend his internship, sharing with us his works of 3D modeling with masterpiece level. Jonas Wehling seems very insecure of the task he “wants to try”, rejecting in the skills matrix to highlight any task as specialist. But he resulted an excellent writer with an overflowing imagination and inquisitive spirit to find the internal congruence of any proposal for the script, besides a terrific memory for the topics on the discussions. Jay Ueltzen shares with us her archive from almost a decade of RPG gaming with a group of friends. This gave her a very precise sense how to maintain a complex world in harmony and balancing. These two elements (Jay and Jonas) working together in writing, resulted in a powerful team capable to excite the general meeting with their proposals. At the end we developed together a strong story, with a high level of originality. Specially Jay Ueltzen showed an impressive capacity to manage different tasks with precision and assertiveness providing the last and definitive character design. Mauricio Rabiella shows an impressive practical knowledge about videogames with a deep sense of criticism. Andrea Velazco developed huge iconographic research that give to the team a clear view of influences and inspirations to imagine and propose art concepts in any fields with the confidence of a serious and exhaustive research: assets, characters, environments, architecture, clothes, etc. Special mentions deserve the fact that Andrea and Mauricio were working during a year before pandemic and during the broke up about ethical dilemmas that creates the basements of the early Mask of Truth story.

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