The art for collectible card games has always bugged me a little, but I only recently figured out why.
Most CCGs—and all of them that I’ve played—have different card classifications as a core element of their gameplay. By “classifications,” I mean groups of similarly functioning cards like “characters,” “stuff,” “environmental effects,” “resources,” and so on.
The thing that bugs me is that most CCGs approach card layout—and thus card art’s composition, size, and placement—in more or less the same way across all classifications. A “character” card allocates the same area for art as a “stuff” card.
Worse, the way most CCGs I’ve experienced are art-directed, there’s no game-wide compositional difference between a character card illustration, an M-16 card illustration, and an illustration for a card that depicts the nebulous concept “the dude to which this card is attached is pretty good at violence.” For all three of those, you’re equally likely to see a picture of one to three guys firing guns while standing in a nondescript environment as anything else that might make more sense given the particular classification of the actual card in question.
So is that a problem?
Hell yes it’s a problem!
It’s true that lots of games do vary their cards’ superficial graphic design dress between cards of different classifications. However, I’m not aware of a game where the card’s main illustration is not the absolute graphic focus of the card, much moreso than the graphic design that’s literally the illustration’s window dressing.
Focusing the design on the art isn’t bad. What’s bad is that I’m not aware of a game that varies the subjects and compositions of its art to reflect the classification of card that the art illustrates. How much more profound a graphic design no-brainer could there be than drawing a massive visual distinction between major card types based on the most prominent graphic element on the card?
Most games are pretty good at making sure that cards of classifications that describe characters (or monsters, or whatever) feature a picture of that character (or monster, or whatever). But I’m not aware of any that are rigorous about framing all the illustrations for cards of that classifications in the same way, or placing them in or out of a scene context in the same way.
And where are the card games that vary their card classifications’ graphic design based on the gameplay fact of the way different card classifications attach to each other during actual play? Doesn’t it make basic common sense that when you attach the M-16 card to the dude who’s going to fire it that you can still see the relevant portions of each of them?
I’m a damn utopian, is what I am.
Where the rubber hits the road, I imagine that a great deal of the problem stems from the sheer volume of art that’s required for your average set of cards, and the way that art is assigned. Although some games make an effort to assign all of the cards related to a given in-game faction to the same artist (for example), I’ll bet that it’s very rare that an artist’s availability to create art corresponds directly to the breakdown the set requires.
The obvious objection to a rigorous approach (in composition, framing, etc.) to art direction is that it might make the cards boring if they’re approached similarly. If every equipment card boils down to a context-less pictures of some damn thing… well, blah. I’m not claiming to have all of the answers, but I think there’s a compelling argument to prioritizing in-game utility over your ability to create a pretty panorama when you lay out your collection of cards on the table. But frankly, I think that to pretend it would be impossible to have both is ridiculous.
But what do I know?
I actually wanted to do something like this for the card game I designed over the winter. Certain types of cards would only have images of just the character on them, and other types would have images of the character with another character, and others would just be objects and so forth and so on.
This idea was sacrificed at the altar of the art budget.
Granted our card-types are at least made visually distinct through background colors, but I think that practicality is often the curse that keeps your Utopian ideals at bay.
…practicality is often the curse that keeps your Utopian ideals at bay.
Also, in addition to practicality, ninjas.
Sneaky, sneaky ninjas.
Fair point. There were ninjas in the game. I’d thought they were on my side, but then, isn’t that always the way with ninjas?
Couple things here. Firstly, I wrote a bunch of art descriptions for cards in a TCG and told the Art Folks that, hey, these could all be done by the same artist since they’re all troglodytes (or whatever, pick your favorite trait). And the AFs told me that would be boring. And they were right. (I have had recent success with selling the idea of two cards done as a diptych, but that’s the exception that proves the rule. I hate that expression.)
Secondly, we do write art descriptions differently for persons, places, things, and events. You should be able to take the images for a TCG and divide them into the card types if it’s done correctly. That’s not a hard and fast rule, but I can tell you a few things: If you can’t tell who the character card is about, it’s done wrong. If you can’t tell what the item card is about, it’s done wrong. There has to be focus. The problem is always the item card that shows some hot babe holding the doohickey and it’s hard to crop her out. But now, I’m digressing.
Magic is the biggest offender of this. Way back in the day I remember getting cards and saying “wow, the art is cool, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the card really”. I could give an example from the Dark expansion, but I can’t remember the name.
The thing I thought of that approaches some of your points Jeff is in AGOT, with the plot cards. They are kept separate anyway, but visually, they are very easy to see as plot cards.
[…]and told the Art Folks that, hey, these could all be done by the same artist since they’re all troglodytes (or whatever, pick your favorite trait). And the AFs told me that would be boring. And they were right.
But of course the AFs are going to say that. Such folk generally (a) have an agenda to maintain Secret Art Knowledge as their domain to perpetuate their influence, and (b) are less interested in gameplay—especially across the game as a whole—than they are in making each card into a standalone work of artistism.
I call On the Edge to the stand. The unifying artistic styles brought to, for example, the different street gangs by Greg Houston and Roger Raupp is useful in card recognition (and therefore gameplay) without being boring whatever.
The thing I thought of that approaches some of your points Jeff is in AGOT, with the plot cards. They are kept separate anyway, but visually, they are very easy to see as plot cards.
AGOT’s plot cards are a great example of graphic design used well distinguish card types. Even though they’re kept in a distinct play area, if it were not for their landscape orientation and very distinctive stat areas, I think they’d pretty frequently be mistaken for discard or dead piles in actual play.
(Does the art itself, past its overall orientation, do much to distinguish plot cards from other cards in AGOT? That might be another question.)