It’s the time in the winter term where final projects are coming in, and with that comes the time for me to repeat a normal refrain: when creating new media, there’s a difference between showing talent and using a complicated set of tools.
For example, you can create a website with something like Weebly or Wix. You can also hand-code a website in a simple text editor. There are tools all in between. It’s a spectrum of automation and assistance.
Now on the most basic level, there’s an ethos as a creator that a person instantly loses if they choose to use Weebly or Wix. Because those sites make it easy to do “something” with a website. And I point that out to students. In a design class, you can get an F on a project pretty easily if it’s just three or four text pages assembled with a Wix template. That’s… lazy, and it doesn’t show any level of skill.
Theoretically, however, from a design standpoint you could develop a robust and highly skillful website using Wix, if that was the tool you chose to use. The tool itself doesn’t dictate that you do lazy work or make something basic and less-than-engaging.
And I’ll openly admit, I am sometimes a tool snob. For example, I’ve taught workshops on WeVideo because that’s what my employer at the time wanted. But I think people who use WeVideo to create videos are handcuffing themselves without need simply to use a free web-based tool. It’s not better than any platform’s built-in free video editor. I can do better video edits on my iPhone. Likewise, I know a whole generation was all about GiMP instead of Photoshop, but GiMP is clunky and obtuse. There are better free editors, but if you’re going to be a person who works in design, just pay the money to get the Adobe cloud and start learning it. There is power there you will need later that you aren’t going to get from freeware.
Likewise you can use the most hardcore of tools– you can create a video in Premiere with After Effects and 3-D animated models from Mya or 3D Studio Max. If they’re assembled in a rush, they can still be just as bad as a video made by splicing together public domain footage in WeVideo.
I’ve had this same discussion with people about the software RPG Maker. It’s software that– guess– lets you create a video game RPG. You can make things as soon as you install, with the included assets. But it will look generic and like hundreds of other people’s creations. It can be a cookie cutter development software that leaves you with pixel art sprites and a FFIII-esque world.
On the other hand, there are games like this. And alterations can be made on several levels– from custom art and custom maps to changing combat and exploring mechanics. There’s an iPhone game I played for a while– the title escapes me on a Sunday night– that was made entirely in RPG Maker.
The software ALLOWS for the creation of an incredibly generic game experience, but it also allows for deep levels of customization by the designer who isn’t interested in building quest logic and combat but rather wants to tell a story and/or create retro art (not that pixel art video games are hot now or anything).
Another piece of software that belongs in this discussion is Prezi. Prezi can do some awesome stuff, and if you are creative and develop solid content, you can really wow someone with a Prezi based presentation. In fact I have a former student who got her job because she was able to on-the-fly create an awesome Prezi in an interview. But Prezi can also create what is basically an automated PowerPoint presentation. Just using Prezi doesn’t make something more or less awesome than it would be as an MS Word document.
What we have to remember is that what matters, in the end, isn’t the tool but rather how that tool is utilized. Even as technology has started to stabilize over the last decade, we still outgrow versions of software and basic development tools at an alarming rate. Being a master at using an editor or an engine is useful, but as someone who used to teach classes in Dreamweaver (lol) and Flash (which I have even started to forget myself), I can attest that learning to use one of those tools without understanding the underlying design methodologies would leave someone woefully unprepared in the world.
So when someone asks me if they can use X, Y, or Z, I always remind them to look at what their end result is supposed to be then t0 ask themselves if the tool they’re trying to use can make that end product.
It doesn’t matter if you make the next great VR game in a WIX shell (not sure how you would even try, but still). What matters is that you understand how to make what you’re making.
it’s about the skill, the active innovation. I don’t care what tools a person uses. I care that a person can make stuff.