So, I've been spending more time than I probably should lately browsing Reddit. In particular, r/worldbuilding and other worldbuilding communities. I haven't been posting there; I still don't have a reddit account. I am considering making one, though, and creating a Wongery subreddit. (Well, as I said in a blog post last year, I did create a Reddit account for a part-time job years ago, but I never logged into it and don't remember the password and while I'm sure there are methods of resetting the password (assuming the account still exists—does Reddit purge inactive accounts? Honest question; I don't know), I wouldn't want to use that account for Wongery-related things anyway). I've resisted doing so, but mostly I think out of, well, inertia; after going this long without a Reddit account (not counting the aforementioned never-used account created years ago), I didn't want to, uh, spoil my track record of not having a Reddit account by creating one. But really, that's a stupid reason, and there's no good reason not to create one. I mean, sure, there are some pretty awful people on Reddit, and its management has done some stupid things... but then, there are some pretty awful people on Tumblr too, and its management has been downright awful lately, but I'm still active (or active-ish) there. And of course Facebook and Twitter are even worse... social media networks, none of you are free of sin. But anyway, if I'm willing to post on Tumblr despite its flaws, I suppose I have no good justification for eschewing Reddit, and there do seem to be some decent communities there. Granted, if I do create a Wongery subreddit, it means yet another social media account I will largely not get around to doing anything with except to make a perfunctory announcement there when I make a blog post or create a new article that I think is especially notable, and that will languish unseen and ignored by the userbase at large, but, eh, I don't know, still feels like something maybe I should do...
But that's not what this blog post is supposed to be about. Surprise! I have begun the blog post by rambling at some length about a matter irrelevant or at best tangential to what's supposed to be the main topic of the blog, something I have never, ever done before! (If I used tone indicators in my blog posts, which of course I don't, this is where the "/s" would go.) No, the main point of this post is... something I'm still not going to clarify quite yet, but I'll use the rest of this paragraph to transition into it so it will become clear by the end of the paragraph. See, in the r/worldbuilding subreddit, most of the posts have some sort of image, be it a map of a world or continent, an in-universe poster or piece of propaganda, or an illustration of inhabitants of the world under discussion. In a reaction to the "disproportionate amount of upvotes" that posts with images accumulated, some users created a separate subreddit, r/goodworldbuilding, in which posts with embedded images were not allowed, the idea presumably being that this would allow quality text posts to rise to the top and not get unfairly overlooked just because they lacked images. The extent to which this worked may be debatable; despite the names of the subreddits it seems to me that overall the posts in r/worldbuilding tend to be more interesting than those in r/goodworldbuilding, though that may be just a function of the greater population—r/worldbuilding has more than a thousand times the members that r/goodworldbuilding does. Still, the reason I bring this up is because, well, it shows just how important images are to catch people's interest.
Although now that I actually look at the numbers, I'm not sure the posts with images really do get the most engagement. Of the last twenty posts in r/worldbuilding at the time I'm writing this, eleven of which have images and nine don't, the posts with images have an average of about 522 upvotes and 24 comments, while the imageless posts have an average of about 44 upvotes and 46 comments. So sure, the posts with images do better with upvotes (at least according to this admittedly limited sample), but the imageless posts actually have more people interacting with them. (I thought maybe the upvote discrepancy was due to a few outliers, but using the median instead of the mean gives 73 upvotes and 11 comments for the image posts and 31 upvotes and 35 comments for the imageless posts, so even by that metric the image posts are still ahead in terms of upvotes, albeit by a much smaller margin—though the imageless posts win in comments by an even larger ratio.) So, uh, huh, that actually kind of... works against the main point of this post. I mean, sure, I guess the r/goodworldbuilding moderators are right about the posts with images getting the most upvotes, but if the posts without images get the most comments, then, well... one could argue that the number of comments is a more important metric, since it shows people actively engaging with the post, so by that criterion the posts without images actually come out ahead. But I've already written a lot of the rest of the post (I don't always, or even necessarily usually, or even necessarily ever, write these blog posts in order from beginning to end), so I guess I'll... go on anyway and kind of pretend I didn't see that.
(Okay, I just decided to look at a slightly bigger sample size and analyze the last fifty posts, and in that sample the imageless posts are still ahead in number of comments, but just barely (35 to 32 by mean, or 13 to 11 by median)... and the image posts' lead in upvotes is even larger (382 to 33 by mean, or 66 to 8 by median). This still isn't a huge sample size, of course, and it's still entirely possible that it's unrepresentative and that with a larger sample the posts with images would pull ahead in terms of comments as well as upvotes, but... there's only so much time I'm willing to spend on this, and I've already spent more than I probably should have.)
(Okay, okay, I totally should not have done this, but I went ahead and analyzed the last hundred posts, and the same qualitative relationships still hold: posts with images win in terms of upvotes (225 to 26 by mean, 46 to 5 by median), and imageless posts win in terms of comments (29 to 19 by mean, 11 to 3 by median). That doesn't prove, of course, that an even larger sample size wouldn't give different results, but... I'm going to stop here. For real this time.)
The worldbuilders I follow on Tumblr—@blinkpen, @dimetrodone, @jayrockin, @spookygibberish, et al.—all constantly post (skillfully portrayed) art of their creations. Are there worldbuilders on Tumblr who don't post art and just describe their worlds in text? Maybe, probably, but if so I haven't come across them, because their posts haven't crossed my dashboard—which is another illustration (uh) of the problem. Art attracts attention. Prose people pass. The old maxim says that a picture is worth a thousand words; there are certainly contexts in which that isn't true—there are some things that just can't be conveyed pictorially—but when it comes to catching people's interest, it's probably a severe understatement.
If the Wongery is ever going to attract much attention, it needs art. It also probably could use someone running it with a larger social media presence and a better knack for self-promotion than I have, but it definitely needs art. People like art. People are much more likely to check something out if it has eye-catching illustrations than if it's just a sea of unillustrated text.
I mean, this is something I was already aware of. It's something I've even written a blog post about before. And, as I said in that post, the reason the Wongery doesn't have art is not because I'm unaware of its importance, but because I have no artistic skills myself and I don't have the money to pay artists (yet; I hope that will change eventually).
But, even though I've already kind of covered this in a previous post, for some reason I felt like expanding on it again. And in particular on my own artistic inabilities. I wish I could draw. I would love to be able to create art even half as good as that I see online prolifically produced by people less than half my age.
It's not for want of trying. It's not like I haven't practiced drawing. It's not that I don't like drawing. I've loved to draw since I was very young. I said in my previous post about (the lack of) art in the Wongery that I had "even tried making my own webcomic in the early 2000s (though I didn't keep it up for long, and it's not currently online)". This isn't entirely true, however, or rather while it was technically true it's not the whole truth. The truth is that I have, in fact, at various times had five different webcomics (under four different names for some reason), none of which lasted long, and all of which were, let's face it, terrible. I also had a DeviantArt account I've posted some (poorly-drawn) art to (though honestly not for many years), and an Instagram account I still post (poorly-drawn) art to... not daily, but at least semi-regularly. (I just posted some art to my Instagram yesterday.)
I like drawing. I've done a lot of drawing. I'm just very bad at it. I wish that were not the case; I would very much like to be able to draw well; but alas...
I've seen a lot of posts online, in response to questions about how to get good at art, saying that there's no such thing as artistic talent, that it's just a matter of practice, that if you just keep drawing enough you'll naturally develop good artistic skills over time. While those posts are no doubt well-intentioned, I'm afraid that I serve as a glaring counterexample to the claim therein. I have been drawing as far back as I can remember; I have filled numerous sketchbooks; I have drawn well over a thousand pages of comics; and my art is still embarrassingly bad. Just godawful. Yes, I guess it's improved, sure; looking back at things I drew twenty years ago and comparing them to more recent drawings I can see that my current drawings are... not quite as bad as my drawings then; but "not quite as horrid as these absymal attempts at artwork" is still a long ways from "good". But then if I have improved with practice, isn't it still possible that if I keep at it enough I will actually be a halfway decent artist someday? Eh... okay, sure, I guess, but I mean given how long I've been drawing and how slowly I've been improving, I figure at this rate my artistic skills may actually be good enough to be presentable if I live to be, oh, maybe four hundred or so.
(To be fair, it is of course possible that it is true for most people that with enough practice they will develop professional-level art skills (within a reasonable time frame), and I am just uniquely antitalented.)
Am I being too hard on myself? Am I underplaying my artistic abilities? I really don't think so. I mean, obviously I wouldn't think so; I cannot simultaneously believe something, and also believe that I am wrong about that thing[1][2]; but I think there are some solid reasons for believing that's not the case. For one thing, well, I'm not generally prone to understating my abilities. Quite the opposite. I mean, I've spent thousands of hours developing a website devoted to showing off my worldbuilding, with the vainglorious expectation that other people are somehow going to find my constructed worlds interesting enough to want to use them for their own projects. That is not the act of someone with a stunted self-image. So if I say I'm very bad at something, I think it's pretty safe to assume it's true... and that in fact I'm probably even worse at that thing than I'm making myself out to be. But also, I think, well, my lack of art skills is pretty objectively apparent. Sure, æsthetics may be largely subjective, but there are aspects of art that aren't—perspective, anatomy—and I am clearly objectively bad at those things. (Well, okay. Maybe I'm not totally incompetent at perspective. Anatomy, on the other hand...)
(Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've seen that graph of skill of making art vs. skill at evaluating art and the explanation of how artists go through cycles of perceiving their skill level as low even as they're improving because they've also become more adept at evaluating art and are better able to see the flaws. That doesn't apply here. First, I don't go through cycles regarding my judgment of my art skills; I guess when I was very young I didn't realize how bad my drawings were, but once I did realize it my feelings never changed, except that if anything I've come to better appreciate over time just how incompetent I am as an artist. Second, I've never been good at evaluating art, either; my art is bad enough it doesn't take much skill to see how bad it is. And third, like I said at the end of the last paragraph, there are objective criteria by which my art is bad. It's not a matter of seeing vs. drawing. I just can't draw.)
In any case, at some point in the hopefully not too distant future, you may be able to see some of my art (or "art") and judge for yourself, I guess. I am not going to try to illustrate the articles on the Central Wongery myself. I want the illustrations there to be of a level of quality which I am utterly incapable of producing. I do intend, once I have the money for it, to pay artists to illustrate those articles. But... while I haven't put in time on it lately, I do want to fill out the CCG space with cards based on Wongery worlds, starting with cards for the Strike Engine. (I want to get some content up in the RPG space first—and I've detailed in a previous post what has to be done before that happens—but once that's done, the CCG space is my next priority as far as the subspaces go.) And when I do finish making some cards for the CCG space, those cards will need illustrations. And, well, the bar is lower for those than for the mainspace; I'm not going to be quite as picky about the quality of those illustrations, or at least I'm willing to have lower-quality placeholder illustrations for them until I can pay for better ones. So those, maybe I can illustrate myself. They won't be good illustrations; they won't be nearly up to the standards I want for the mainspace; but they'll be good enough for that purpose, at least until I can afford to pay a decent artist to do a better job of it. (Plus, while I want the illustrations of the mainspace articles to have a naturalistic, quasiphotographic look, for the card illustrations I'm okay with some stylization, which... I feel like maybe I'm somewhat more capable of than realistic illustrations.) So, yeah. Once the cards are finally up, unless I unexpectedly come into a lot of money between now and then, you'll be seeing my art on them... for better or for worse. Okay, definitely for worse.
Oh... and, a bit further down the line, when I start to fill out the Asset space, I guess you may end up seeing some of my art there too, if I don't have the money to hire artists by then. Among the many Udemy courses I've purchased is one on pixel art; I haven't started that course yet, but I plan to do so as soon as I finish the course I'm currently taking on Blender; and I plan to put what I learn in that course to practice for the Asset space in the Wongery. For that matter, I plan to put what I learn in the Blender course into practice in the Asset space in the Wongery, and in the 3d Buildspace, too. I don't expect my pixel art and 3d models will be good, but... well, at least they'll be something, until I can hire artists who can do a better job of it.
I apologize in advance for inflicting my artwork upon you. My rationale is that, at least for some of the subspaces if not for the mainspace, even my atrociously amateurish art will be better than nothing, but... honestly, I'm not completely sure that's true.
- ↑ The late logician Raymond Smullyan, in an essay in his book What is the Name of this Book?, proposed that every person who is not conceited knows that they sometimes make mistakes, and that not everything they believe is true, and that therefore "a reasonably modest person has to be inconsistent". However, setting aside the dubious question of whether or not I qualify as "reasonably modest" (I mean, probably not, but in any case Smullyan never said you couldn't be both inconsistent and conceited), Smullyan's argument was only that a (non-conceited) person would believe that something they believed was untrue, not that they would believe that a specific proposition that they believed was untrue, which would be a different and much more blatant level of inconsistency.
- ↑ This is the first time I have put a footnote in a blog post. It may not be the last.