Ironically the nature of the phrase has changed. In the old days it was about not being put off by a crummy, boring cover with no special design. A book that was of artistic worth was not one that could necessarily fork out for a grand and fancy cover. But these days the methods to make one are very accessible. Go into your nearest bookstore, and look to the bestselling paperbacks. You can tell the genre just by the design on the book. Lesser known writers who write for a popular genre (in order to cash in) will often use similar designs on their books, so "Dark Fantasy" will look not entirely unlike Twilight; A Historical Mystery novel will look disturbingly similar to the cover of the De Vinci Code, etc.
The aesthetic is something modern society finds very easy to produce. It's cheap, anyone with Photoshop and 4 hours spare time can do it, and you don't actually require an awful lot of talent to produce it. Obviously, when people are preparing to buy things, they are likely to look at it for a matter of seconds, or perhaps minutes, before handing money over. So the moral of the story there is to make sure they like what they see, or at least like what they see for the amount of time it takes for them to hand their money over; even if they don't actually understand why it looks that way...
This leads me aimlessly to Games Workshop. I'm not going to deny that without Games Workshop, we probably still wouldn't have a wargaming industry, let alone one that looks so impressive, but it seems the biggest wargaming company in the history of the universe is now so big and arrogant that the aesthetic is the only thing they actually bother to get right.
The above picture shows this particular effort rather well, and we've already discussed it previously, alongside "Finecast", and GW's propensity for Gimmicks, which also appeal to that aesthetic. Even the writing is about maintaining a very simple (but quite rubbish) aesthetic. What it spawns from is something very simple. GW want to get as much money out of you as possible, for the bare minimum effort required, but costed at a premium price that suggests the opposite. Essentially they want you to think they are artisans, when really they're something significantly less than that.
Hard-backing army books is completely unnecessary. Its singular purpose is to increase the "value" that they attach to their own produce. In other words, they want it to be more expensive. Will it last longer? It might do, but it only has to last 5 years at most, and if you manage to mangle a paperback in that amount of time, you'll mangle a hard-back just as quickly.
Marketing resin as a quality product, rather than a cheap alternative to metal is similarly an effort of saving money on their part. An awful lot, as it turns out. Made doubly worse by the fact that they're trying to save said money on a new material, based on the possibility that the previous material might get more expensive. Not only are they saving money, they decided to fool the gaming community into concluding it offers better detail and thus can charge you even more for a material that is incredibly brittle and fragile.
There's then to consider that GW hire the likes of Matthew Ward to do their writing. The guy who writes like how a staffer is trained to sell you things. It certainly isn't artistic, or even good. But it doesn't need to be. It is GW's aesthetic for 40k which is best summed up by the phrase "OMG OMG! ZOMG THIS IS AWESOMES! HOW CAN YOU NOT LIKE THE AWESOMES! ITS AWESOMES!"
The point is that ultimately it is easier for GW (and more profitable) for them to sell you something that is fundamentally flawed, but appealing enough that you are willing to put up with it, than it is to try and make a very high quality product. I might be inclined to say "good luck to them" if they did anything other than charge a premium price for a mediocre service, but that is precisely what they do.
Still, there must be something about the aesthetic, right? Something about it surely matters? Well of course it does. It's actually more important than the gaming companies even realise. It is also a bit more temperamental than they realise. Some gimmicks actually fail, not because they are ugly, but because they try to oversell the aesthetic.
I've already discussed how Rackham did this previously, with Confrontation: Age of Ragnarok, that took completely aesthetic changes that alienated its customers. Charging people more for something they will do anyway (i.e. assemble and paint their miniatures) is a particularly bad move, and the move was so bad that Rackham, a company with some promise, ultimately folded.
Still, before they did, Rackham made some of the most beautiful miniatures in the entire industry. My Top 16 Wargaming Miniatures sports 3 examples from one system. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that the majority of gamers are in it for the pretty miniatures. I'm not going to call them toy soldiers. They fundamentally are, in the same way that the Mona Lisa is a college art project.
Aesthetics are wonderful things. They are the visuals that attract. But a hobby needs to be far more than that, because it encompasses the talent and hard work of the people who support it, so you need to keep up with those people. No matter how big you think your company is, you ignore them at your peril. Because they're going to make your job more rewarding, but considerably harder:
Every release you work on, they will expand in the time that you work on other things. Every story you write, they will fold out into a saga. Every miniature you make, they will make it look better. Every rule you write, will be analysed, re-written and stream-lined. Every faction you create, they will develop them a hundred-fold. If you think they need your help to remotely be creative, you might find you've blinked and found yourself out of your depth.
No comments:
Post a Comment