Beggar's Belief Sketchbook

Croquet Challenge is an interactive artwork about Reconstruction-era America, games as analogues for social structures, and how we frame those structures. It’s also a video game in which you can play croquet and ignore all that noise. The artwork is released as part of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum’s exhibition Peer-To-Peer, the first survey of blockchain artists organized by a major American Museum. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan, and can be experienced online at the ‘related project’ link below.

AESTHETICS

I started by creating “rough sketches” of shaders from scratch, and after I felt like I had a good direction for visual style, I’d then go and find more robust code examples and assets that I could hack and modify to achieve that style I’d developed.

I WANTED VIEWERS TO FEEL THE ARTIST’S TOUCH IN EVERY FRAME OF BEGGARS BELIEF, SO I CREATED MOST OF THE TEXTURES BY HAND AS WELL.

Early versions of the software used hand-drawn cross-hatching textures in shaded areas. For the Beggars Belief Demo that went live in June of 2022, I was heavily influenced by the Canadian painter Christopher Pratt, whose style oozes an eerie banality. I created a little Processing sketch that outputted randomized, non-intersecting dots to simulate a “stippling” or pseudo-pointillist effect. (Note: There are little instances of generative art all throughout this project. It’s not a big deal.) I applied that as a texture, and wrote a script that would zoom the texture in and out depending on how the camera was composing the overall shot.

For Winslow Homer’s Croquet Challenge, I decided that the shader should emulate Homer’s quick, plein-air painting style and sharp contrasts. I set hard boundaries between lit and shaded areas. I painted rough brushstrokes in a digital painting app and used those as textures on the characters and trees.

VISUAL STORYTELLING

A typical video game gives the player an extremely wide field of view. If you’re creating an action game, this makes sense: The player needs to be able to see as much of their environment as possible. But if you’re creating an artwork, it just doesn’t work. Perspective gets distorted, and it’s impossible to edit superfluous elements out of the shot. You can’t really compose an artful frame. So I had to set up my in-game cameras like a cinematographer, rather than like a video game developer.

The camera’s focal length, positioning, and framing gives the viewer subtle cues about how they should relate to what they’re seeing. For example, in early drafts of WHCC, the dialogue scenes between Arthur and Benjamin were presented in a framing similar to what you’d see on most TV shows: The characters’ heads take up the full screen in a medium close-up, so the viewer feels like they’re in the conversation. Ultimately, I decided to pull the camera back and use a zoom lens. Framing the shot this way establishes the player’s relationship to Arthur and Benjamin: The player is way outside the conversation. They’re excluded from the decision-making and power-brokering that happens on the field, and the camera is the only thing allowing them to eavesdrop.

I also learned to use the camera settings to control the pace at which the artwork reveals itself. A lot of the most important ideas in this work are only hinted at through visual “easter eggs.” Some are more obvious than others. The camera’s narrow field of view ensures that these elements don’t show up all at once. They slide in and out of the scene if – and only if – the viewer takes the time to look around the environment.

ALL THE ARTWORKS IN THE BEGGARS BELIEF SERIES WILL TELL A STORY. IN WINSLOW HOMER’S CROQUET CHALLENGE, A LOT OF THAT STORY IS BEING TOLD BY THE WAY THE GAME FRAMES YOUR VIEW.

BUILDING PLATFORM-AGNOSTIC ART

Here’s a core principle of my approach to art-making: Meet people where they’re at, then invite them to come someplace new. I learned to do that by creating art for public spaces for over 10 years. In that time, I also learned that you can apply this principle to the aesthetic, intellectual, and practical levels of an artwork. I’ve covered my approach to the aesthetic layer of the artwork in other sections, so let’s talk a bit about what this means practically.

You can play through the entirety of Winslow Homer’s Croquet Challenge through the thumbnail panel of an OpenSea asset page. Even on the mobile version of the site. I’m really proud of that. Is that the best way to appreciate the artwork? Obviously not. But it’s a really common way that people browse an art collection. Therefore, it’s an important exhibition space, and I want my art to engage people there.

I’m always thinking about all the different ways that people consume art -– about where they’re physically at when they engage with it – and trying to offer up a good experience in all those scenarios, even if I have to prioritize some of those scenarios over others.

I made the decision that it would be foolish to make Beggars Belief NFTs as ownership passes for downloadable apps. That would have been too prescriptive – it doesn’t meet people where they’re at. So it had to display in as many different contexts as possible, even at different aspect ratios, and even if some of those contexts were less flattering than others. Thus, Winslow Homer’s Croquet Challenge is a platform-agnostic artwork.

THE BEGGAR'S BELIEF SERIES

Winslow Homer’s Croquet Challenge is the first piece in a series of projects that I’ve committed to undertaking over the next few years. (Yes, I’m a long-term thinker.) I’ve even posted a release schedule for the next four pieces. The individual artworks are grouped into series, and each series explores a different theme. I’ve announced that the first series of Beggars Belief explores the theme “Sports” and will encompass five artworks, the remaining four of which will be released in quick succession in the summer of 2023.

All these artworks feature different game mechanics. They’re not really games per se – they’re visual artworks that use game mechanics (OK, I admit that is some very pedantic splitting of hairs. You can call them games if you want.) Each piece will expand on ideas and concepts that are presented in the others.