Surreallism

The Surrealist artists sought to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock the power of the imagination. Disdaining rationalism and literary realism, and powerfully influenced by psychoanalysis, the Surrealists believed the rational mind repressed the power of the imagination, weighting it down with taboos. Influenced also by Karl Marx, they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution. Their emphasis on the power of personal imagination puts them in the tradition ofRomanticism, but unlike their forbears, they believed that revelations could be found on the street and in everyday life. The Surrealist impulse to tap the unconscious mind, and their interests in myth and primitivism, went on to shape many later movements, and the style remains influential to this today.

Key Ideas

André Breton defined Surrealism as "psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought." What Breton is proposing is that artists bypass reason and rationality by accessing their unconscious mind. In practice, these techniques became known as automatism or automatic writing, which allowed artists to forgo conscious thought and embrace chance when creating art.

The work of Sigmund Freud was profoundly influential for Surrealists, particularly his book,The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Freud legitimized the importance of dreams and the unconscious as valid revelations of human emotion and desires; his exposure of the complex and repressed inner worlds of sexuality, desire, and violence provided a theoretical basis for much of Surrealism.

Surrealist imagery is probably the most recognizable element of the movement, yet it is also the most elusive to categorize and define. Each artist relied on their own recurring motifs arisen through their dreams or/and unconscious mind. At its basic, the imagery is outlandish, perplexing, and even uncanny, as it is meant to jolt the viewer out of their comforting assumptions. Nature, however, is the most frequent imagery: Max Ernst was obsessed with birds and had a bird alter ego, Salvador Dalí's works often include ants or eggs, and Joan Miró relied strongly on vague biomorphic imagery.

Beginnings

Surrealism grew out of the Dada movement, which was also in rebellion against middle-class complacency. Artistic influences, however, came from many different sources. The most immediate influence for several of the Surrealists was Giorgio de Chirico, their contemporary who, like them, used bizarre imagery with unsettling juxtapositions. They were also drawn to artists from the recent past who were interested in primitivism, the naive, or fantastical imagery, such as Gustave Moreau, Arnold Bocklin, Odilon Redon, and Henri Rousseau. Even artists from as far back as the Renaissance, such as Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Hieronymous Bosch, provided inspiration in so far as these artists were not overly concerned with aesthetic issues involving line and color, but instead felt compelled to create what Surrealists thought of as the "real."

The Surrealist movement began as a literary group strongly allied to Dada, emerging in the wake of the collapse of Dada in Paris, when André Breton's eagerness to bring purpose to Dada clashed with Tristan Tzara's anti-authoritarianism. Breton, who is occasionally described as the 'Pope' of Surrealism, officially founded the movement in 1924 when he wrote "The Surrealist Manifesto." However, the term "surrealism," was first coined in 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire when he used it in program notes for the ballet Parade, written by Pablo Picasso, Leonide Massine, Jean Cocteau, and Erik Satie.

Around the same time that Breton published his inaugural manifesto, the group began publishing the journal La Révolution surréaliste, which was largely focused on writing, but also included art reproductions by artists such as de Chirico, Ernst, André Masson, and Man Ray. Publication continued until 1929.

The Bureau for Surrealist Research or Centrale Surréaliste was also established in Paris in 1924. This was a loosely affiliated group of writers and artists who met and conducted interviews to "gather all the information possible related to forms that might express the unconscious activity of the mind." Headed by Breton, the Bureau created a dual archive: one that collected dream imagery and one that collected material related to social life. At least two people manned the office each day - one to greet visitors and the other to write down the observations and comments of the visitors that then became part of the archive. In January of 1925, the Bureau officially published its revolutionary intent that was signed by 27 people, including Breton, Ernst, and Masson.

Concepts and Styles

Surrealism shared much of the anti-rationalism of Dada, the movement out of which it grew. The original Parisian Surrealists used art as a reprieve from violent political situations and to address the unease they felt about the world's uncertainties. By employing fantasy and dream imagery, artists generated creative works in a variety of media that exposed their inner minds in eccentric, symbolic ways, uncovering anxieties and treating them analytically through visual means.

Surrealist Paintings

There were two styles or methods that distinguished Surrealist painting. Artists such as Dalí, Tanguy, and Magritte painted in a hyper-realistic style in which objects were depicted in crisp detail and with the illusion of three-dimensionality, emphasizing their dream-like quality. The color in these works was often either saturated (Dalí) or monochromatic (Tanguy), both choices conveying a dream state.

Several Surrealists also relied heavily on automatism or automatic writing as a way to tap into the unconscious mind. Artists such as Miró and Ernst used various techniques to create unlikely and often outlandish imagery including collage, doodling, frottage, decalcomania, and grattage. Artists such as Arp also created collages as stand-alone works.

Hyperrealism and automatism were not mutually exclusive. Miro, for example, often used both methods in one work. In either case, however the subject matter was arrived at or depicted, it was always bizarre - meant to disturb and baffle.

Surrealist Objects and Sculptures

Breton felt that the object had been in state of crisis since the early nineteenth century and thought this impasse could be overcome if the object in all its strangeness could be seen as if for the first time. The strategy was not to make Surreal objects for the sake of shocking the middle class a la Dada but to make objects "surreal" by what he called dépayesment or estrangement. The goal was the displacement of the object, removing it from its expected context, "defamilarizing" it. Once the object was removed from its normal circumstances, it could be seen without the mask of its cultural context. These incongruous combinations of objects were also thought to reveal the fraught sexual and psychological forces hidden beneath the surface of reality.

A limited number of Surrealists are known for their three-dimensional work. Arp, who began as part of the Dada movement, was known for his biomorphic objects. Oppenheim's pieces were bizarre combinations that removed familiar objects from their everyday context, while Giacometti's were more traditional sculptural forms, many of which were human-insect hybrid figures. Dalí, less known for his 3D work, did produce some interesting installations, particularly, Rainy Taxi (1938), which was an automobile with mannequins and a series of pipes that created "rain" in the car's interior.

Surrealist Photography

Photography, because of the ease with which it allowed artists to produce uncanny imagery, occupied a central role in Surrealism. Artists such as Man Ray and Maurice Tabard used the medium to explore automatic writing, using techniques such as double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization, the latter of which eschewed the camera altogether. Other photographers used rotation or distortion to render bizarre images.

The Surrealists also appreciated the prosaic photograph removed from its mundane context and seen through the lens of Surrealist sensibility. Vernacular snapshots, police photographs, movie stills, and documentary photographs all were published in Surrealist journals like La Révolution surréaliste and Minotaure, totally disconnected from their original purposes. The Surrealists, for example, were enthusiastic about Eugene Atget's photographs of Paris. Published in 1926 in La Révolution surréaliste at the prompting of his neighbor, Man Ray, Atget's imagery of a quickly vanishing Paris was understood as impulsive visions. Atget's photographs of empty streets and shop windows recalled the Surrealist's own vision of Paris as a "dream capital."

Surrealist Film

Surrealism was the first artistic movement to experiment with cinema in part because it offered more opportunity than theatre to create the bizarre or the unreal. The first film characterized as Surrealist was the 1924 Entr'acte, a 22-minute, silent film, written by Rene Clair and Francis Picabia, and directed by Clair. But, the most famous Surrealist filmmaker was of course Luis Bunuel. Working with Dalí, Bunuel made the classic films Un Chien Andalou(1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930), both of which were characterized by narrative disjunction and their peculiar, sometimes disturbing imagery. In the 1930s Joseph Cornell produced surrealist films in the United States, such as Rose Hobart (1936). Salvador Dalí designed a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).

Rise and Decline of Surrealism

Though Surrealism originated in France, strains of it can be identified in art throughout the world. Particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, many artists were swept into its orbit as increasing political upheaval and a second global war encouraged fears that human civilization was in a state of crisis and collapse. The emigration of many Surrealists to the Americas during WWII spread their ideas further. Following the war, however, the group's ideas were challenged by the rise ofExistentialism, which, while also celebrating individualism, was more rationally based than Surrealism. In the arts, the Abstract Expressionists incorporated Surrealist ideas and usurped their dominance by pioneering new techniques for representing the unconscious. Breton became increasingly interested in revolutionary political activism as the movement's primary goal. The result was the dispersal of the original movement into smaller factions of artists. The Bretonians, such as Roberto Matta, believed that art was inherently political. Others, like Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning, remained in America to separate from Breton. Salvador Dalí, likewise, retreated to Spain, believing in the centrality of the individual in art.

Later Developments

Abstract Expressionism

In 1936, the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged an exhibition entitled Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, and many American artists were powerfully impressed by it. Some, such asJackson Pollock, began to experiment with automatism, and with imagery that seemed to derive from the unconscious - experiments which would later lead to his "drip" paintings.Robert Motherwell, similarly, is said to have been "stuck between the two worlds" of abstraction and automatism.

Largely because of political upheaval in Europe, New York rather than Paris became the emergent center of a new vanguard, one that favored tapping the unconscious through abstraction as opposed to the "hand-painted dreams" of Salvador Dalí. Peggy Guggenheim's 1942 exhibition of Surrealist-influenced artists (Rothko, Gottlieb, Motherwell, Baziotes, Hoffman, Still, and Pollock) alongside European artists Miró, Klee, and Masson, underscores the speed with which Surrealist concepts spread through the New York art community.

Feminism and Women Surrealists

The Surrealists have often been depicted as a tightly knit group of men, and their art often envisioned women as wild "others" to the cultured, rational world. Work by feminist art historians has since corrected this impression, not only highlighting the number of women Surrealists who were active in the group, particularly in the 1930s, but also analyzing the gender stereotypes at work in much Surrealist art. Feminist art critics, such as Dawn Ades, Mary Ann Caws, and Whitney Chadwick, have devoted several books and exhibitions to this subject.

While most of the male Surrealists, especially Man Ray, Magritte, and Dalí, repeatedly focused on and/or distorted the female form and depicted women as muses, much in the way that male artists had for centuries, female Surrealists such as Claude Cahun, UnicaZurn, Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning, sought to address the problematic adoption of Freudian psychoanalysis that often cast women as monstrous and lesser. Thus, many female Surrealists experimented with cross-dressing and depicted themselves as animals or mythic creatures.

Important Art and Artists of Surrealism

The below artworks are the most important in Surrealism - that both overview the major ideas of the movement, and highlight the greatest achievements by each artist in Surrealism. Don't forget to visit the artist overview pages of the artists that interest you.

Harlequin's Carnival (1924)

Artist: Joan Miró

Artwork description & Analysis: Miró created elaborate, fantastical spaces in his paintings that are an excellent example of Surrealism in their reliance on dream-like imagery and their use of biomorphism. Biomorphic shapes are those that resemble organic beings but that are hard to identify as any specific thing; the shapes seem to self-generate, morph, and dance on the canvas. While there is the suggestion of a believable three-dimensional space inHarlequin's Carnival, the playful shapes are arranged with an all-over quality that is common to many of Miró's works during his Surrealist period, and that would eventually lead him to further abstraction. Miró was especially known for his use of automatic writing techniques in the creation of his works, particularly doodling or automatic drawing, which is how he began many of his canvases. He is best known for his works such as this that depict chaotic yet lighthearted interior scenes, taking his influence from Dutch seventeenth-century interiors such as those by Jan Steen.

Oil on canvas - Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Battle of Fishes (1926)

Artist: André Masson

Artwork description & Analysis: Masson was one of the most enthusiastic followers of Breton's automatic writing, having begun his own independent experiments in the early 1920s. He would often produce art under exacting conditions, using drugs, going without sleep, or sustenance in order to relax conscious control of his art making so that he could access his unconscious. Masson, along with his neighbors Joan Miró, Antonin Artuad, and others would sometimes experiment together. He is best known for his use of sand. In an effort to introduce chance into his works, he would throw glue or gesso onto a canvas and then sand. His oil paintings were made based on the resulting shapes.

Battle of the Fishes perhaps references his experiences in WWI. He signed up to fight and after three years, was seriously injured, taking months to recover in an army hospital and spending time in a psychiatric facility. He was unable for many years to speak of the things he witnessed as a soldier, but his art consistently depicts massacres, bizarre confrontations, rape, and dismemberment. Masson himself observed that male figures in his art rarely escape unharmed. Battle of Fishes has subdued color, but the fish seem involved in a vicious battle to the death with their razor-like teeth and spilled blood. Masson believed that the use of chance in art would reveal the sadism of all creatures - an idea that he could only reveal in his art.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York

Mama, Papa is Wounded! (1927)

Artist: Yves Tanguy

Artwork description & Analysis: The most pivotal moment for Tanguy in his decision to become a painter was his sighting of a canvas by Giorgio de Chirico in a shop window in 1923. The next year, Tanguy, the poet Jacques Prévert, and the actor and screenwriter Marcel Duhamel moved into a house that was to become a gathering place for the Surrealists, a movement he became interested in after reading the periodical La Révolution surréaliste. André Breton welcomed him into the group in 1925. Tanguy was inspired by the biomorphic forms of Jean Arp, Ernst, and Miró, quickly developing his own vocabulary of amoeba-like shapes that populate arid, mysterious settings, no doubt influenced by his youthful travels to Argentina, Brazil, and Tunisia. Despite his lack of formal training, Tanguy's mature style emerged by 1927, characterized by deserted landscapes littered with fantastical rocklike objects painted with a precise illusionism. The works usually have an overcast sky with a view thatseems to stretch endlessly.

Mama, Papa is Woundedshows Tanguy's most common subject matter of war. The work is painted in a hyperrealist style with his distinctive limited color palette, both of which create a sense of dream-like reality. Tanguy often found the titles of works while looking through psychiatric case histories for compelling statements by patients. Given that, it is difficult to know if this work is relevant to his own family history as he claimed to have imagined the painting in its entirety before he began it. His brother was killed in World War I and the bleakness of the landscape may refer generally to losses suffered in the war by thousands of French families. De Chirico's influence on Tanguy's work is obvious here in his use of falling shadows and a classical torso in the landscape.

Oil on Canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Accommodations of Desire (1929)

Artist: Salvador Dalí

Artwork description & Analysis: Painted in the summer of 1929 just after Dalí went to Paris for his first Surrealist exhibition, The Accommodations of Desire is a prime example of Dalí's ability to render his vivid and bizarre dreams with seemingly journalistic accuracy. He developed the paranoid-critical method, which involved systematic irrational thought and self-induced paranoia as a way to access his unconscious. He referred to the resulting works as "hand-painted dream photographs" because of their realism coupled with their eerie dream quality. The narrative of this work stems from Dalí's anxieties over his affair with Gala Eluard, wife of artist Paul Eluard. The lumpish white "pebbles" depict his insecurities about his future with Gala, circling around the concepts of terror and decay. While The Accommodations of Desire is an exposé of Dalí's deepest fears, it combines his typical hyper-realistic painting style with more experimental collage techniques. The lion heads are glued onto the canvas, and are believed to have been cut from a children's book.

Oil and cut-and-pasted printed paper on canvas - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932)

Artist: Alberto Giacometti

Artwork description & Analysis: Giacometti was one of the few Surrealists who focused on sculpture. The Palace at 4 a.m. is a delicate construction that was inspired by his obsession with a lover named Denise the previous year. Of the affair he said, "a period of six months passed in the presence of a woman who, concentrating all life in herself, transported my every moment into a state of enchantment. We constructed a fantastical palace in the night - a very fragile palace of matches. At the least false movement a whole section would collapse. We always began it again." In 1933, he told Breton that he was incapable of making anything that did not have something to do with her.

The work includes representations or symbols of his love interest as well as perhaps of his mother. Other imagery, such as the bird, is less easy to interpret. Thus, the work is characterized by its bizarre juxtaposition of objects and a title that is seemingly unrelated to the constructed scene, giving the piece an undercurrent of mystery and tension as if something frightening is about to occur. The work, in its child-like simplicity, captures the fragility of memory and desire. Giacometti's postwar interest in Existentialism is already evident here in how he represents the isolation of the various figures.

Wood, glass, wire, and string - Museum of Modern Art, New York

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/surr/hd_surr.htm
http://www.theartstory.org/movement-surrealism.htm

DADA

Dada was an artistic and literary movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland. It arose as a reaction to World War I and the nationalism that many thought had led to the war. Influenced by other avant-garde movements . its output was wildly diverse, ranging from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting, and collage. Dada's aesthetic, marked by its mockery of materialistic and nationalistic attitudes, proved a powerful influence on artists in many cities, including Berlin, Hanover, Paris, New York, and Cologne, all of which generated their own groups. The movement dissipated with the establishment of Surrealism.

Key Ideas

Dada was the first conceptual art movement where the focus of the artists was not on crafting aesthetically pleasing objects but on making works that often upended bourgeois sensibilities and that generated difficult questions about society, the role of the artist, and the purpose of art.

So intent were members of Dada on opposing all norms of bourgeois culture that the group was barely in favor of itself: "Dada is anti-Dada," they often cried. The group's founding in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich was appropriate: the Cabaret was named after the eighteenth century French satirist, Voltaire, whose novella Candide mocked the idiocies of his society. As Hugo Ball, one of the founders of both the Cabaret and Dada wrote, "This is our Candideagainst the times."

Artists like Hans Arp were intent on incorporating chance into the creation of works of art. This went against all norms of traditional art production whereby a work was meticulously planned and completed. The introduction of chance was a way for Dadaists to challenge artistic norms and to question the role of the artist in the artistic process.

Dada artists are known for their use of readymade objects - everyday objects that could be bought and presented as art with little manipulation by the artist. The use of the readymade forced questions about artistic creativity and the very definition of art and its purpose in society.

Important Art and Artists of Dada

Ici, C'est Stieglitz (1915)

Artist: Francis Picabia

Artwork description & Analysis: Picabia was a Spanish artist who worked closely with Alfred Stieglitz, who gave him his first one-man show in New York City. Stieglitz is here represented as a bellows camera, an automobile gear shift, a brake lever, and the word "IDEAL" above the camera in Gothic lettering. The fact that the camera is broken and the gear shift is in neutral has been thought to symbolize Stieglitz as worn out, while the contrasting decorative Gothic wording refers to the outdated art of the past. The drawing is one of a series of mechanistic portraits and imagery created by Picabia that, ironically, do not celebrate modernity or progress, but, like similar mechanistic works by Duchamp, show that such subject matter could provide an alternative to traditional artistic symbolism.

Fountain (1917)

Artist: Marcel Duchamp

Artwork description & Analysis: Duchamp was the first artist to use a readymade and his choice of a urinal was guaranteed to challenge and offend even his fellow artists. There is little manipulation of the urinal by the artist other than to turn it upside-down and to sign it with a fictitious name. By removing the urinal from its everyday environment and placing it in an art context, Duchamp was questioning basic definitions of art as well as the role of the artist in creating it. With the title, Fountain, Duchamp made a tongue in cheek reference to both the purpose of the urinal as well to famous fountains designed by Renaissance and Baroque artists. In its path-breaking boldness the work has become iconic of the irreverence of the Dada movement towards both traditional artistic values and production techniques. Its influence on later twentieth century artists such as Jeff Koons, Robert Rauschenberg, Damien Hirst, and others is incalculable.

Urinal - Philadelphia Museum of Art

LHOOQ (1919)

Artist: Marcel Duchamp

Artwork description & Analysis: This work is a classic example of Dada irreverence towards traditional art. Duchamp transformed a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa (1517) painting, which had only recently been returned to the Louvre after it was stolen in 1911. While it was already a well-known work of art, the publicity from the theft ensured that it became one of the most revered and famous works of art: art with a capital A. On the postcard, Duchamp drew a mustache and a goatee onto Mona Lisa's face and labeled it L.H.O.O.Q. If the letters are pronounced as they would be by a native French speaker, it would sound as if one were saying "Elle a chaud au cul," which loosely translates as "She has a hot ass." Again, Duchamp managed to offend everyone while also posing questions that challenged artistic values, artistic creativity, and the overall canon.

Collotype - Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Cubism

What is Cubism

Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view."

The artists abandoned perspective, which had been used to depict space since the Renaissance, and they also turned away from the realistic modeling of figures.

Cubists explored open form, piercing figures and objects by letting the space flow through them, blending background into foreground, and showing objects from various angles. Some historians have argued that these innovations represent a response to the changing experience of space, movement, and time in the modern world. This first phase of the movement was called Analytic Cubism.

In the second phase of Cubism, Synthetic Cubists explored the use of non-art materials as abstract signs. Their use of newspaper would lead later historians to argue that, instead of being concerned above all with form, the artists were also acutely aware of current events, particularly WWI.

Cubism paved the way for non-representational art by putting new emphasis on the unity between a depicted scene and the surface of the canvas. These experiments would be taken up by the likes of Piet Mondrian, who continued to explore their use of the grid, abstract system of signs, and shallow space.

Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

Artist: Pablo Picasso

Artwork description & Analysis: Picasso's painting was shocking even to his closest artist friends both for its content and for its formal experimentation. The subject matter of nude women was not in itself unusual, but the fact that Picasso painted the women as prostitutes in aggressively sexual postures was novel. Their blatant sexuality was heightened by Picasso's influence from non-Western art that is most evident in the faces of three of the women, which are rendered as mask-like, suggesting that their sexuality is not just aggressive, but also primitive. The unusual formal elements of the painting were also part of its shock value. Picasso abandoned the Renaissance illusion of three-dimensionality, instead presenting a radically flattened picture plane that is broken up into geometric shards. For instance, the body of the standing woman in the center is composed of angles and sharp edges. Both the cloth wrapped around her lower body and her body itself are given the same amount of attention as the negative space around them as if all are in the foreground and all are equally important.

The painting was widely thought to be immoral when it was finally exhibited in public in 1916. Braque is one of the few artists who studied it intently in 1907, leading directly to his later collaboration with Picasso. Because it predicted some of the characteristics of Cubism, Les Desmoiselles is considered proto or pre-Cubist.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York

Houses at L'Estaque (1908)

Artist: Georges Braque

Artwork description & Analysis: In this painting, Braque shows the influence of Picasso's Les Demoiselles of the previous year and the work of Paul Cézanne. From Cézanne, he adapted the uni-directional, uniform brushwork, and flat spacing, while from Picasso he took the radical simplification of form and use of geometric shapes to define objects. There is, for example, no horizon line and no use of traditional shading to add depth to objects, so that the houses and the landscape all seem to overlap and to occupy the foreground of the picture plane. As a whole, this work made obvious his allegiance to Picasso's experiments and led to their collaboration.

Oil on Canvas - Hermann and Margrit Rupf Foundation, Bern

Design issues in Logo

Logo is essence of any Brand. It reflects your brand value and identity. So Designing a Logo is very important for any business. Most of the brands are recognized by people with just looking at their logos. So designing right logos for your brand is the first step to achieve right Marketing Mantra.

Designing logos comes with its own share of problems. Today we are discussing some issues related with Logo Designing. For logo designers, trademarks, copyright and registered designs can be a career minefield. The advent of cookie cutter designs and design contests isn’t helping. Just getting from basic design to finished product needs a sort of designer’s travel insurance in the form of knowing what might be a problem.

It’s quite possible in all innocence to infringe on one of these things through sheer ignorance and lack of information. The legal side is that a court ultimately has to judge any real dispute. Logos, which are by definition a combination of the legal properties of trademarks, copyright and registered designs, can also infringe on all three.

For example:

A square inside a circle, and a letter in bold font are the basic logo.

• Party A says the logo infringes on their trademark because of the square/circle combination.
• Party B says the letter in the circle infringes their registered design.

These are actually pretty shaky claims. There needs to be a clear, damaging resemblance to existing designs to constitute an actual infringement. The parties are within their rights to claim infringement, but they didn’t invent the square and circle combination or the font.

If basic issues are fairly straightforward, ironically, the real danger comes from another direction- design software. If you have a look at logo design contests, you’ll notice that the briefs include a requirement for Adobe Illustrator files, vector drawing etc, as specifications. Most logo design work is done on this high quality software, because it’s a lot easier to work with.

Now look at the designs themselves. See any common elements? See large numbers of designs which, by virtue of using the same software, tend to create natural points of conflict in terms of the logic of trademarks, copyright and registered designs?

There’s a problem here. Design briefs for logos do include common elements. The brief wants particular things. The designers, on the other hand, want their designs to stand out, despite these common elements. The result is an unholy mix of individuality and commonality in designs.

OK, that’s a natural result of briefs and the requirements of the design themes, right? Unavoidable, to a degree? The designer had to do what was required in the brief, correct?

Yes, and that’s where the huge clash with trademarks, copyright and registered designs begins. Large numbers of cookie-cutter designs are coming onstream. Clashes are inevitable. For designers, this is a rock and a hard place. Matters aren’t helped by corporate culture, which tends to prefer the sort of designs which “look corporate”, and are actually a very narrow bandwidth of design concepts. These designs are unspeakably lazy conventional and boring. It’s no coincidence they clash so often and so easily.

Designers will be pleased to hear that their artistic preferences and instincts finally have their vindication- “Don’t do what everyone else is doing”. Good designers don’t imitate lazy designers while they can still breathe, so the way out is to use your talent. If you can simply outclass other designs, you’re unlikely to infringe on anything. The highly individual, standout design is better business, anyway. Please feel free to share your comments and thoughts on this.

Design issue in Coop Games

In some ways, cooperative systems make a designer’s life much easier. It’s easier to enjoy even a mediocre experience with friends, because humans like to goof, harass, support, and suffer each other. And unlike a similar benefit from competitive multiplayer, cooperative games don’t need to worry as much about the usual kinds of balance — if a player or item is overly powerful, the players can decide how to share that power.

Yet for all the advantages, there are unique problems in cooperative gameplay. Even if you target a collaborative audience, with a happy-fuzzy theme that encourages cooperation, it’s entirely possible to create mechanics that put players at each others’ throats.

Here are 5 unique cooperative design problems I’ve observed or designed around, along with some possible solutions!

PROBLEM 1: KNOWLEDGE MISMATCH

“She always tells me what to do.”
“He makes the dumbest mistakes.”
“You’re not listening to me! I know how to win!”

“Veteran syndrome” happens most often in cooperative puzzle or strategy games. True cooperation is difficult when one player can make a master plan and then order the others to execute on that — and for that plan to always be the best solution. This causes intense domination and/or boredom.

Consider playing Portal 2 with someone who had already played it 8 times previously. Even if they play very politely and don’t treat you like a hand-puppet, it’s just not as fun, right?

Concrete Solutions

1. Real-time challenge: if there’s enough time pressure, El Capitan can’t perfectly order every move. This results in more individual tests of skill, and more satisfaction in your personal performance… but this increased individuality can also result in each player choosing their own goal, rather than contributing to the group goal cooperatively. We deliberately made the combat in Moon Hunters frenzied action rather than turn-based, in order to give players mental independence.
2. Match-making: if you ensure newbies and veterans each play with matching skillsets, it can be somewhat mitigated … but this breaks up friends and isolates communities.
   Dilute communication: you can’t give orders when you can’t talk! Journey benefits enormously from allowing more experienced players to role model rather than order. Teaching by showing is also more supportive than teaching by instruction.
3. Secret information: you can’t give orders when you don’t have all of the necessary data, and other players have incentive not to share with you. Werewolf simultaneously encourages competition and wary cooperation, resulting in even the most experienced players often keeping their mouths firmly shut.
4. Unpredictability: in Moon Hunters, we procedurally generate both the level design and world map, as well as cause dynamic responses from non-player characters, based on player choices. Cooperative players can vote on which choice to make, but one player probably won’t tell everyone else what to vote for with any kind of authority, since it’s unlikely even an experienced player knows what the “correct” choice is.

Solution Goals

Give players a reason to trust each other. Or, give players a reason to distrust each other.

At worst, encourage teaching by example and allow some player goals to be mutually exclusive.

PROBLEM 2: SKILL MISMATCH

“Noobs are the worst.”
“I always carry my team.”
“I feel useless. My team does better without me.”

Striving together to accomplish something genuinely difficult is extremely satisfying, and possibly the reason the human species has succeeded. Yet we resent being forced to cooperate with people that make our games more difficult. Even if we love that person. This causes frustration on one side and (assuming the other player is aware of the difficulties they’re adding) shame on the other. And when players see that their performance is much worse than even A.I. teammates…

Your first experience with team sports was probably somewhat less pleasant due to skill mismatch. Although it can be a great moment for character building and personal growth, as game designers, it’s worthwhile to try and improve our players’ experience.

Concrete Solutions

1. More is always better: no such thing as failure or “harming” the team. If you can re-structure your rules to reward even participation, all players will be more welcoming, and may even reach out to newbies warmly without further incentive.
2. Match-making: players could be automatically placed where they are most needed, and the game suggests how to employ their skills usefully. However, as with other kinds of match-making, this will still separate communities and friends from one another.
3. Randomness: most cross-generational games allow for a strong element of randomness, empowering younger players (though often at the cost of older players’ satisfaction).
4. Subjective skill: if you can add an element of open-ended personal expression, every player can decide for themselves how much they ‘won’, separate from score tallies. We applied this in Moon Hunters by allowing players to define themselves in terms of personality traits — even if you didn’t help kill a boss very effectively, you can still feel special for being the one with a reputation for being “Cunning”.
5. Mentor network: explicitly acknowledging the imbalance and encouraging skilled players to befriend and train newbies can really help with community building. But any mechanical incentives should be closely monitored for potential to cause bullying or conspiracy.

Solution Goals

Let even the newest, least skilled player meaningfully contribute to the team. Provide a means for more experienced players to connect and share their insight.

PROBLEM 3: PUBLIC HUMILIATION

“I just want to practice.”
“I don’t like multiplayer games.”
“I don’t know how to do it.”

Remember trying to speak a new language in front of a native speaker for the first time? It’s horrible and intimidating, and that’s how many people feel the first time they try playing a new multiplayer game, even if it’s cooperative and there’s no mechanical competition. Some players will withdraw due to stress before the game even begins! Performance anxiety is strongest when people are counting on you.

This is one of the hardest problems because at its worst, the sufferer may never play your game at all! But there are many ways to lessen the impact and minimize early quitters.

Concrete Solutions

1. Private tutorial: give player a supportive place to learn, without time limits. Ideally it is 100% private and feels ‘safe’ in every way, without judgment.
2. Newbie “channel”: give players a chat channel or other place in game to ask (self-selecting, helpful) veterans for advice and information.
3. Solo mode: although expensive, a way to play the game without prying eyes can help people get comfortable before making the leap to multiplayer. This can be quite limited, and ideally throughout, it’s clear how friends would enhance the experience. We’re fully supporting single-player Moon Hunters.
4. Friends-only mode: why allow strangers in at all? I’ve never played Minecraft with strangers and I never will. It’s less traumatising to learn with friends, though still not ideal for many.
5. Mentor network: by rewarding veterans for actively guiding newer players, and rewarding newbies for pairing with veterans, the tender sensitive time may be easier to overcome. Note that this would still come after a period of the newbie learning the basic controls on their own.

Solution Goals

The first test of skill should be for the lowest possible stakes. The tutorial must not allow public failure, and cannot disappoint another player. People who prefer solo play can be lured into cooperation, if they can engage on their own terms, when they are ready.

PROBLEM 4: UNIFORMITY

“Which one am I?”
“It doesn’t matter whether I play or not.”
“I need a new hat.”
“She can do everything I can, but better.”

One of the psychological disadvantages to any multiplayer game, but especially cooperation, is that you can no longer play the part of the all-important, unique, protagonist snowflake. If all players are the same (perhaps to even the playing field for knowledge and skill mismatches), your identity is lost, your relationships to other characters feels shallow, and your immersion is weakened due to feeling like your “role” isn’t really your own.

Transformice is an amazing cooperative game, but if there were no shaman, we’d all lose interest much more quickly.

Concrete Solutions

1. Creative expression: even the smallest avatar customisation helps people feel unique, as does the most basic way to express themselves, such as jumping, movement, etc.
2. Mechanical roles: finding your identity through unique capabilities can be satisfying, too. Although many games (such as Moon Hunters) rely on a rigid “class” structure, if a system is sufficiently complex and/or open-ended, this will happen naturally, as people’s inherent tastes and talents lead them to take on different kinds of tasks.
3. Celebrity: if you can provide a venue for players to be extremely visible, their skill alone will make them feel unique. This has a strong impact, mostly for your most vocal minority of players.
4. Limited population: with only a few players on screen at a time, you may feel more unique, even if you’re identical. Your personality will be more obvious.
5. Recognize behaviour patterns: when a game calls attention to how we are different in playstyle, we feel more different. Try to show when someone is “the most” something, even if it doesn’t mean they are the best. Note due to its emotional self-motivated content, high-value extrinsic rewards will severely limit this kind of system’s value.

Solution Goals

Feeling unique and remarkable is a core social pleasure, especially in anonymous environments. Empower the player to show their personality.

PROBLEM 5: SCHADENFREUDE

P1: “…” (leaves the game)
P2: —“HAHAHAHA! THIS GAME IS AWESOME!”

Our suffering can amuse others, and the more you rely on someone else, the more their harassment can cause frustration, hurt feelings, and resentment. Cooperative games are a unique opportunity for jerks to stab trusting innocents in in the back.

Bartle’s player types theory calls these folks “killers”. They will actively seek out and destroy the happiness of other players. So what can we do about these folks?

Concrete Solutions

1. Limited consequences/rewards. Most obvious, but least effective. By limiting mechanical consequences, you’re also limiting the power of your cooperative efforts.
2. Official peacekeepers: also known as moderators, volunteers can actually be more effective than customer service, though they are often very high-maintenance.
3. Culture pruning/normalize awesome: this is a quest for a holy grail, and more difficult the larger your playerbase is. Find, recognize, and reward standout community members that don’t tolerate jerks and who contribute to the kind of culture you want. The US Department of Health and Human Services has shown that children with problem behaviours can be seriously improved by being near more “socially competent” children.
4. Friends-only: by putting the power in the players to choose who to play with, they can’t really blame the game when they are “griefed”.
5. Unclear win/loss condition: by making a success more about personal expression, and less about strategy or skill, players of “killer” type (who mostly want the feeling of domination and superiority) are likely to to lose interest quickly.

Solution Goals

Sometimes suffering is okay. Identify when and where it’s “fair” for your demographic to encounter jerk behaviour and permit it in those places.

SUMMARY

At their best, cooperative games aren’t just about working together towards a common goal! They’re also about helping every player feel useful, appreciated, and unique. If you can identify mechanics that are interfering with collaborative behaviours, and replace them with incentive to trust or lead by example, you’re on your way to a gratifying experience. Feel free to hit me up on Twitter @kitfoxgames with any suggestions of other unique co-op problems or solutions.