Horrible Pain

I saw someone asking about the convention of red vs blue in videogames so I ended up looking up some stuff.

I guessed there would be precedent in wargaming, and I found that red and blue armies are mentioned in H.G. Wells’ Little Wars, in Charles AL Totten’s Strategos and the earliest example I find is in Georg von Reisswitz’ rules for Kriegs-Spiele.

Accordingly we decided that if a blue force, for example, has one or more men isolated, and a red force of at least double the strength of this isolated detachment moves up to contact with it, the blue men will be considered to be prisoners.

Little Wars by H.G. Wells link

Military Pieces (corps). -Two sets of men slated (red and blue), each containing the following :

Strategos by Charles Totten link

Die beiden entgegengesetzten Corps unterscheiden sich durch die Farbe; die Truppen des einen sind roth, die des andern blau gemahlt.

(Rough translation: The two opposing corps are distinguished by color; the troops of one are painted red, those of the other blue.)

Anleitung zur Darstellung militairischer Manöver mit dem Apparat des Kriegs-Spieles by Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz link

In this Super Bunny Hop video, he attributes the use of blue and red to Napoleon, which seems plausible, but I don’t have the primary source for that.

Kriegsspiele was intended as a military training exercise, so it would make sense if Reisswitz adopted a colour convention directly from the military rather than from any preceding game. And it post-dates the Napoleonic wars.

Some diagrams with the Kriegssiele rules include illustrations of blue and red pieces with different symbols to indicate unit types. I haven’t seen anything indicating how much if any he was drawing the symbols from existing military conventions.

Napoleon

I’ve found references to Napoleon using coloured pins to mark positions on maps, but which don’t specify the exact colours of the pins.

He was content to use variously colored pushpins to represent units
on his maps. There is, for example, the well known account from the Italian campaign of 1800 of Napoleon lying on the floor and pushing colored pins into a large map, plotting how to bring the enemy to battle on the plains of Scrivia, which is where he eventually fought and won the Battle of Marengo.

I have tracked down what’s probably the account they had in mind, from Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, where the pins are described as red and black:

On the 17th of March, in a moment of gaiety and good humour, he desired me to unroll Chauchard’s great map of Italy. He lay down upon it, and desired me to do likewise. He then stuck into it pins, the heads of which were tipped with wax, some red and some black.

French version is here. I’ll accept the translation of “cire rouge et de cire noire” into red and black wax.

Puis il piqua avec une sérieuse attention des épingles dont les têtes étaient garnies de cire rouge et de cire noire.

Red and Blue Ink

I could imagine a switch from red and black to red and blue could arise from writing things down. If the map itself is drawn with black ink, it would make sense to use red and blue for special markings. Black pins were able to be distinct from the black ink on the map, but if they need to be written down, on the paper, that could be when they start using blue?

I tried finding some info on inks to get an idea of what red and blue ink would have been made of in the early 19th century. This page talking about Regency ink lists some examples of what would be used for red, blue, green and yellow ink.

I also went through a bunch of the illustrations from Alfonso X’s Libro de los Juegos, looking at what colours are used on pieces for games illustrated there. In a moment of serendipity, I noticed also that the text would use black, red and blue inks. Of course, there’s 500 years between that and Napoleon, but it shows there’s precedent for that being the three most common colours of ink. (And of course nowadays will ball-point pens, those are the three most-common colours. The BIC four-colour pen is black, red, blue and green, and if you look for individual colour pens, green is probably the least common of those four.)

Compare inks to the materials used in a board game, where they could use lighter and darker materials. Wooden chess pieces are often made of light and dark woods, like mahogany and maple. Ebony and ivory. Marble and slate if you want to use stone, maybe? If you’re looking for naturally-occurring red and blue materials, you’re much more limited than you are with light vs dark.

When I do try to track the use of red vs blue in military conventions, I haven’t found every detail. This source attributes printing the troop positions directly on maps as a post-Napoleon idea, so if red vs. blue comes from Napoleon, maybe I can’t attribute that to ink on paper. But maybe it helped lead to wider adoption of the convention.

By Lee and Grant’s time the main combat arms, still largely unchanged
“on the ground” from Napoleon’s day, were beginning to be illustrated
directly on maps. … It took place throughout Western militaries during the decades after Waterloo … The symbols used consisted of partially or fully colored or shaded rectangles indicating cavalry and infantry …

That page only mentions red and blue when noting the British and French had adopted opposite standards by the first world war, where British marked friendly troops as red and enemy troops as blue. The British agreed to match the French convention that friendly troops are blue and enemies are red. But at that late of a date, I can’t prove with certainty they used red and blue before Kriegsspiele, rather than adopting the convention from Kriegsspiele.

Before Kriegsspiele

For pre-Napoleonic war games, we can look at Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig’s own *Kriegsspiele* and Francesco Giacometti’s Il giuoco della guerra. In their written rules, I didn’t find any reference to the pieces being red and blue. Which would support the idea it starts with Reisswitz.

Hellwig includes the idea of using chess pieces, and which pieces would correspond with which units:

Mit einiger Veränderung können daher die Köni ginn der Läufer und der Turm des Schachspiels als Cavallerie der Springer und Bauer als Infanterie im taktischen Spiele beybehalten der König aber wegen der im 10 und 11 angegebenen Ursache weggelassen werden.

(Rough translation: You can use the queen, bishop, and rook from chess as cavalry, the knight and pawn as infantry, but the king can be omitted for the reasons given in points 10 and 11. [Earlier, he argued it is unrealistic for the loss of any single piece to determine victory.])

Versuch eines aufs schachspiel gebaueten taktischen spiels von zwey und mehrern personen zu spielen by Johann Christoph Ludwig Hellwig link

Giacometti also makes many references to chess. The full titles of both refer to their games being derived from chess. (“Versuch eines aufs schachspiel …” and “Nuovo giuco di scacchi“) If both see their games as a modification of chess, their choice in colour could reflect that inheritance.

In contrast, I find no use of “schachspiel” or “schach” within Reisswitz’ rules. And mechanically, he breaks from chess by using movement that is not tied to squares and using dice for randomized outcomes.

Alfonso X’s *Libro de los Juegos* does show white and black pieces in use for chess in the 13th century. An interesting note is for a four-player variant on chess, the pieces are coloured white, black, red and green. The description attributes the colours to the four seasons, so green is spring in this case. Other games depicted there tend to also use light versus dark pieces, and none that I saw use blue pieces.

From an admittedly non-exhaustive look at older illustrations of games like chess, nard, pachisi, I think white vs black is common, sometimes red vs black or red vs white. (This ties into what I said about materials, you might have access to a dark red wood but not something like ebony) Since pachisi allows for four players, we often get yellow and green pieces. I came across an Egyptian senet board with blue pieces, but all the pieces are blue and differentiated by shape.

But I haven’t found any game pre-dating Reisswitz that uses red versus blue. So I’m convinced Reisswitz did adopt the convention from military usage rather than any previous game. If that military convention came from Napoleon, that would be the right timing for when Kriegs-Spiele was written. And it would be in character for other things about Napoleon to create a universal standard for something that had previously varied from commander to commander.

Avalon Hill

The first Avalon Hill game, Tactics, also uses red vs blue cardboard pieces but in an article by Charles S. Roberts he seems to indicate he wasn’t really influenced by existing war games:

Since there were no such wargames available, I had to design my own …

In the same article he says he had served in the military (“… some years of enlisted service …”) and so it’s possible he adopted the convention from there.

In Gettysburg he uses blue vs. grey, presumably to match the colours of uniforms, but returns to red vs blue in other 20th-century settings like Stalingrad and D-Day, and even uses red vs. blue for Civil War, instead of the uniform colours. You can also see in Stalingrad and D-Day the use of military unit symbols to designate types of units. (Infantry, armored, etc.)

Transfer to Computer Games

Avalon Hill did publish some computer games. A very early game is the Midway Campaign and it has red and blue to indicate the Japanese and U.S. at least in this Commodore 64 version. Though, the colour appears in text and isn’t used to indicate units on the map.

Conflict 2500 seems to have some colour but again, the map itself is monochrome. North Atlantic Convoy Raider I also only find monochrome footage. Lords of Karma is a text adventure and doesn’t fit. So Midway Campaign is the earliest that I’ve seen them using red vs blue on computer, though not directly on the map.

Legionnaire on the Atari 8 Bit computers has pink vs blue which could just be a matter of needing it to be brighter. An interesting angle here is it’s programmed by Chris Crawford, who had previously made Eastern Front which uses white vs pink. So that shows Crawford did not take red vs blue as a given.

Obviously Avalon Hill aren’t the only developers making war games on computers, and if red vs blue was also well-established in miniatures wargaming, that would probably make the jump to computers through other games as well. But those are the earliest examples I could find.

At the end of an earlier post where I was curious about the history of leading lines, I mentioned I might read The Education of the Eye by Peter de Bolla. I did read it.

I had gone in expecting to focus on the attitudes towards painting, but he also has chapters on English gardens which feel surprisingly relevant to video games and maybe the “leading lines” I was wondering about.

Metaphorics of the Eye

At the start of the Vauxhall Gardens chapter, he refers to “metaphorics of the eye” and gives as examples:

… in the viewing of a landscape, for example, the eye is “thrown” to a particular point, or sometimes it is “drawn” toward an object in the landscape known as an “eye-catcher.”

Which sounds very much what I’m after. It doesn’t specifically say that leading the eye is something that a line can achieve, but it does show the same focus on the location of the eye and the ability of things in front of it to control its movement.

But why gardens?

I wonder if this attitude is here in the gardens, because they are primed to think of it as a sequence. As someone travels along the garden path, they will encounter things in a given order, so does that make the garden designers inclined to also think about what order they will draw your attention?

With a painting you can also step back and take it in as a whole. With a garden, that’s impossible. There’s simply too much over too large of an area for anyone to take it in at once. So a garden’s designers must contend with the idea of in what order will people view it. So I could see directing the viewer’s attention like this being of greater focus in garden design than it had been painting.

De Bolla frames this as the development of a new English aesthetic for gardens. It contrasts with an earlier aesthetic that favoured clearly artificial geometric shapes. And develops in parallel with landscape painting.

So this has all lead me to read 18th century essays on landscape that de Bolla had cited, and summarize the stuff I find interesting from the perspective of 21st century level design.

Essay on Landscape Gardening

First up, John Dalrymple’s Essay on Landscape Gardening.

He starts out with a bit lamenting that the art of gardening is not yet treated as a fine art, even by other practitioners, which might feel a little familiar to game designers.

He then defines four dispositions of landscape. With a passing reference to the four types of guy who like each kind of landscape. Most of the essay is structured around what will get the best use from each kind of landscape.

He doesn’t expressly give each a title, instead starting each section with “First Situation” “Second Situation” etc. So I’ll go with the Highlands, the Romantic, the Rolling Hillocks and the Dead Flat.

Highlands

In the highland landscape, he recommends Gothic over Grecian architecture. Choose few large arches over many small arches. Square buildings more than round.

Although it comes up here in the context of saying the Highlands need to evoke still-living things, he mentions building a ruin or “a temple … to any imaginary deity.” So this shows this kind of semi-fictional construction wasn’t unheard of. Ruins of buildings that were never whole and temples at which nobody has worshiped.

He mentions Salvator Rosa and Nicolas Poussin as possible aesthetics, which shows he does connect landscape painting with gardens.

Romantic

This is more forested regions. The sentiment is “that of composure of mind, and perhaps even of melancholy.”

Here, he also talks about making ruins:

For this reason, the views of ruins are much more proper to this situation, than those of houses intended for use; at the same time, if it necessary to have buildings of the latter kind, they ought to be of the GOTHIC architecture. With regard to the architecture of ruins, they are full as proper to be of the GRECIAN form;

Rolling Hillocks

He also calls this “champaign rich country, full of gentle inequalities.”

The sentiment which it creates is cheerfullness; and therefore in a garden in this country, the disposition and assemblage should be such as may still farther carry on that sentiment.

He favours planting single or clumps of trees at the summits of these hills, while keeping the slopes clear.

Buildings should consist of the CHINESE and GRECIAN architecture; and in this last, the simplicity and elegance of the IONIC order…

Dead Flat

He doesn’t seem to be a fan. (Emphasis mine.)

As such a situation of itself raises little or no sentiment, so the whole fancy of the gardener should be employed in carrying the thought, by the parade of art, from attending to this defect of nature.

Maybe also of note is “carrying the thought.” Not quite about directing the eye, but a similar idea. Drawing attention away from how boring and flat this landscape is, and towards more interesting subjects.

Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening

This is by William Shenstone, from 1764. De Bolla also quotes it in his book. It’s shorter than Dalrymple’s Essays.

GROUND should first be considered with an eye to it’s peculiar character; whether it be the grand, the savage, the sprightly, the melancholy, the horrid, or the beautifull.

Unlike Darymple, he doesn’t get into the details for those listed characters.

WHEN a building, or other object has been once viewed from its proper in point, the foot should never travel to it by the same path, which the eye has travelled over before. Lose the object, and draw nigh, obliquely.

This is also quoted by de Bolla, because he is talking about “the eye” travelling. This might support my idea that garden designers were thinking in terms of leading the viewer along a path.

It also does seem close enough to modern sensibilities, that you probably would see similar advice in a level design book today. Show the player something in the distance, but don’t encourage them to walk straight there, but instead, meander a bit, hide the distant landmark, and show it again from a different angle.

He was responding to an earlier French tradition of making very straight paths with evenly-spaced trees, so it may be worth trying to understand the point of view of that tradition. More geometric, while the later English tradition that de Bolla writes about rejects the artificial feeling of that.

RUINATED structures appear to derive their power of pleasing, from the irregularity of surface, which is VARIETY; … The breaks in them should be as bold and abrupt as possible, …

Here, he also acknowledges you might build pre-ruined structures, giving advice as to the aesthetic choice for what shape to pretend it collapsed in.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38829/38829-h/38829-h.htm

GARDEN-CRAFT OLD AND NEW

On the other hand, John D. Sedding does not like the fake ruins, calling them “sham ruins.”

“Deception may be allowable in imitating the works of Nature. Thus artificial rivers, lakes, and rock scenery can only be great by deception, and the mind acquiesces in the fraud after it is detected, but in works of Art every trick ought to be avoided. Sham churches, sham ruins, sham bridges, and everything which appears what it is not, disgusts when the trick is discovered.”

Party Business Supreme is now available on Steam, itch.io and Gamejolt.

Trailer is up on Youtube. It is cribbing heavily off of Domino’s App Feat Hatsune Miku, plus some cake decorating ideas from Cake Wrecks.

Cubey vs. The Universe is now available on Steam.

A tangent I came upon during my previous attempt at tracing the history of “leading lines” is the “rule of thirds.” I think in general, it appeals to me to ask, “Where do these visual composition rules come from?”

The Origin of the Rule?

The “rule of thirds” is often attributed to John Thomas Smith’s Remarks on Rural Scenery from 1797.

Two distinct, equal lights, should never appear in the same picture: One should be principal and the rest sub-ordinate, both in dimension and degree: Unequal parts and gradations lead the attention easily from part to part, while parts of equal appearance hold it awkwardly suspended, as if unable to determine which of those parts is to be considered as the subordinate.

…

Analogous to this ‘Rule of Thirds’ (if I may be allowed to so call it) I have presumed to think that, in connecting or in breaking the various lines of a picture, it would likewise be a good rule to do it, in general, by a similar scheme of proportion; for example, in a design of landscape, to determine the sky at about two-thirds; or else at about one-third, so that material objects might occupy the other two: again, two thirds of one element, (as of water) to one third of another element (as of land); and then both together to make but one third of the picture, of which the other two thirds should go for the sky and aerial perspectives. … In short, in applying this invention, generally speaking, to any other case of light, shade, form or color,

Note here he seems interested in surface area of the painting, rather than the positioning of points of interest. One or two thirds of the painting should be occupied by one “element” or another. (Water or land.)

He also talks about further sub-dividing areas. Like his example dividing between land, water, and sky: if you give the sky two thirds, then for the remaining third, you could apply the same rule to divide two thirds water and one third land.

And there’s nothing about where in the picture these divisions should lie. Now any indication that the division between these elements should align with vertical and horizontal lines. The division between land and sky might naturally do so on the horizon, but the presence of hills and mountains can complicate that.

(A minor aside: he claims these imbalances “lead the attention easily from part to part” which does nicely tie in with the “leading lines” discourse that directing the attention from one part to another is a thing that is desirable. Though the method of achieving that goal is not quite the same as “leading lines.”)

Modern Times

Wikipedia on the other hand describes the rule of thirds as:

The guideline proposes that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally spaced horizontal lines and two equally spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.

For which it cites a 2003 book, Learning to see Creatively, which appears to be focused on photography. So now I’m interested in where did this shift in meaning occur? Somewhere between 1797 and 2003 gives us a big range.

Why the Shift in Meaning?

This book from 1922: “How to Make Good Pictures” was published by the Eastman Kodak Company and is subtitled: A Book for the Amateur Photographer. It talks about landscape composition on pages 36 and 37. It does not call this the “rule of thirds” but it calls the horizon line “the more conspicuous” and says it should be “one-third from the top or from the bottom.”

So that does place the horizon in the same place that Smith would advise. But it kind of tries to have two reasons behind this. It divides the picture, which feels like Smith’s version, but it’s also about positioning a “conspicuous” object near the “most important position.”

Camera Viewfinders

Was the shift in meaning encouraged by photography? Some camera viewfinders will display grids that divide the view into thirds. It’s a lot easier to tell an amateur photographer to line something up with a line on the viewfinder than require they estimate a surface area.

Here’s a demo with a recent camera, which will overlay a grid that divides the screen into thirds or sixths. (Interesting that they divide the thirds into halves, rather than thirds again. Smith’s original version applied the rule fractally, dividing the subsections again into thirds.) This viewfinder is linked from the Wikipedia entry on viewfinders and has grid lines that align with the thirds.

My own camera (a Nikon D40) does not have such grid lines in the viewfinder, though it marks the auto-focus which does align with where these lines would be if it was divided horizontally. When I searched for this camera, I found people objecting to the lack of grid lines. In a forum here someone asks why the Nikon D40 doesn’t have them, and this review lists grid lines under “what’s missing.” That their absence is noteworthy shows they’re very common.

I wonder if I could find a history of viewfinders that would say how prevalent it really is, and whether it became more common over the years?

A Tangent About the Golden Ratio

The Talk page for the Wikipedia article on rule of thirds also contains a lot of argument about whether to include mention of the Golden Ratio, I guess because a lot people connect that with the rule of thirds? Like, 2/3 is 0.6666 and 1/1.618 is 0.618 which is only 0.048 off, so maybe the *real* reason for anyone to find the rule of thirds pleasing is because it’s *almost* the golden ratio. Though the reverse could work just as well. Maybe people aesthetically like the golden ratio because it’s almost like dividing things into thirds.

The golden ratio is mathematically interesting but I haven’t been convinced that there’s any particular reason why people would be aesthetically drawn to things proportioned off it.

Retroactive Application of the Modern Version

Like the “leading lines” post, it’s very easy to find modern writing applying the current version of this rule to paintings of the past, but I’m interested in what attitudes were contemporary with the painters.

This references the rule of thirds describing a 1770 painting, Horse Frightened by a Lion, George Stubbs. Remarks on Rural Scenery was written in 1797. These ideas could have easily been in the zeitgeist before Smith wrote it down, but if George Stubbs had something like this in mind while painting, I’d argue it would be more like that “balance of elements” approach than like the modern “align with a grid.”

The composition in this painting follows the rule of thirds, with the land in the upper part creating a line, and the horse resting on the crossing of two lines.

Composition in Romanticism paintings – Google Arts & Culture – User-created

What should I take away?

I don’t want to say that the original version of the rule is necessarily better, like the more recent use is some kind of a corruption of the true form of the rule. But being aware of the older use could give you an alternate way of looking at visual composition.

I posted a gist on GitHub where I was playing with modifying the projection matrix for the camera in Unity.

For background, a matrix is basically a grid of numbers. A vector is a series of numbers. And you can multiply a vector by a matrix you transform that vector in some way, as defined by the matrix. For 3D graphics, you can depict a position in space as a vector and use a projection matrix to decide where that position will appear on the screen.

In normal operation in Unity, you set some parameters like the field of view and near and far clipping planes, and it auto-calculates the projection matrix for the camera.

This shows an example of shifting a tilt-shift lens to photograph a building while keeping parallel vertical lines. You can do the same thing with the projection matrix.

I think that would be suited to some games. See here, you could have a top-down camera that’s viewing the floor completely parallel to the screen, while keeping the vanishing point below the screen.

You might also use it in a platformer. For aesthetics, a lot of landscape photographers and painters prefer to have the horizon a third from the top or bottom, rather than half-way. This would allow you to do that, while keeping the vertical and horizontal lines square.

For these scenarios, I made a OnePointPerspective script. I guess I called it that because it made me think of drawing with a single point of perspective. Unity does have a lensShift property that does a similar thing, but my script also offsets position to compensate and keep the camera aimed at a given subject.

I also made a ZoomInOffset script which is geared towards zooming into a particular portion of the screen. Here you can see the original view, one where I rotate the camera to zoom in on the chef, and one where I use ZoomInOffset. Note it keeps the checkers oriented the same, while rotating the camera doesn’t.

I’ve seen people make the incorrect claim that rotating a camera at a single point will be indistinguishable from panning an image. This example shows how that isn’t quite true.

( It does work when viewing with the human eye, because the human eye doesn’t need to be displayed on a flat surface, so you don’t have single vanishing points like you do in linear perspective. But that’s another discussion. )

You can do a lot of other stuff, many of which will be disorienting. You can, for example, make things get larger in the distance instead of smaller, but I find in practice it makes me feel like everything has reversed normals.

( This is maybe where I get into James J. Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception where you perceive underlying 3 dimensional invariants based on correlated transformations. When multiple things on screen transform simultaneously, you respond to how those transformations correlate to one another. What people will probably be familiar with is parallax. Something near the “camera” moves quickly while something far away moves slowly, and that helps you perceive one as near and the other as far. The projection matrix is very much creating these sorts of correlations, so when the correlation was backward, such that distant things were larger, my brain instead perceived them as closer. )

Anyway, towards the end of experimenting with projection matrices, I made some more free-form scripts. ProjectionMatrixExperiments and ProjectionReplace. Both let you apply Translate, Rotate and Scale transformations, but ProjectionReplace also lets you adjust individual elements in the matrix.

Although I described the Matrix as a grid, Unity displays it like this. You can figure out where each number goes in the grid based on the name. E13 would go in column 1, row 3.

So if you play around with that, you too could make cameras like this:

Some recent video game discourse over “leading lines” got me thinking about what is the history of the concept? Obviously it was a thing in photography and/or painting before it was ever used in video games, but for how long?

This reminded me of a quote form Linda Nochlin’s Realism (emphasis mine):

Nobody,’ Perrier insisted, ‘could deny that a stone-breaker is as worthy a subject in art as a prince or any other individual. … But, at least, let your stone-breaker not be an object as insignificant as the stone he is breaking.’ The same point was made by Louis de Geoffroy in discussing the Burial at Ornam: ‘the funeral of a peasant is not less touching to us than the convoy of Phocion. The important thing is to avoid localizing the subject, and in addition, to emphasize the interesting portions of such a scene.’

Not specifically anything about leading lines, but both are about visually emphasizing subjects of the painting. And are prescriptive enough about it to feel Courbet is doing something wrong by not providing such emphasis. The Stonebreakers was painted in 1849 and Burial at Ornans was painted in 1849-1850.

So this train of thought lead to me searching Archive.org for old writing using the phrase “leading lines” in this way. I did find that people were using “leading lines” this way at least as early as the 1800s.

Here I found a book from 1905 that appears meant to teach art appreciation, which makes multiple references to leading lines as an attribute the student should note:

Would it not have been easy to make this a stiff, uninteresting picture? How has the artist avoided such an effect? Does it denote a scientific study of design? Is there an elaborate arrangement of leading lines? Or a brilliant effect from opposing masses of light and dark? Is it conceived in a naturalistic temper?

Outlines for the Study of Art

The Art Journal proved a good source. Here’s one from 1882(?)

‘Merry as the Day is long,’ by Mr. Fred. Morgan. The best picture which we have ever seen from Mr. Morgan’s easel. Three children playing in a farmyard, and climbing about a pair of huge timber wheels, are contrasted with the tired form of an old labourer to whom they are gleefully shouting. The shadows are rather blue, and there is a want of force in the composition of light and shade, but the colour is harmonious and warm, and the leading lines are thoroughly expressive and agreeable.

The Art Journal

Here’s an earlier case where a painting is complemented on its use of leading lines:

In the blue drawing-room are a picture of ‘The Marriage of St. Catherine,’ by Andrea Schiavone, pleasing in the leading lines, glowing in the colouring …

From The Penny Magazine 1840

From 1825 I found an example using it in reference to architecture rather than painting.

The horrible deformities called Steeples, … are unfortunately ever introduced in such situations as to ruin the effect of the porticoes over which they stand, by an arrangement which in most cases interferes with the leading lines of the main feature.

A footnote in Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London (1825)

Though these references don’t necessarily say the leading lines are used to guide the eye. Much of the “leading lines in video games” discourse is about using those lines to draw attention to something in particular, but these old quotes seem to evaluate them aesthetically pleasing in themselves and make no note of what is being emphasized. I start to wonder if they originally meant “leading” as “foremost” and someone retroactively took it to be about leading the eye about the image? A folk etymology that in-turn changes the use of the phrase.

So I search for “leading the eye” and find this from The Art Union Monthly:

A coast-view is somewhat of a trial for a landscape painter; for consisting generally of so little, the want of objects must be atoned for by the finest feeling in leading the eye over the generally flat surfaces of which these scenes are composed.

Art Union Monthly (1842)

So that supports the idea that paintings were considered in that way and there was an expectation that painters are playing a part in leading the viewer’s eye.

Maybe I need to read something like this book? The Education of the Eye by Peter de Bolla.

It claims that at the moment when works of visual art were first displayed and contemplated as aesthetic objects two competing descriptions of the viewer or spectator promoted two very different accounts of culture.

It would make sense to me if the idea of “leading lines” developed in parallel with the idea of the art connoisseur. The connoisseur wants a framework to discuss the painting in more detail than “this is good.”

I’m also interested in how different movements in painting thought about it. From Linda Nochlin’s Realism, as well as some other contemporary criticism of the realists, I get the sense they would paint things that many saw as unpleasing composition, because it reflects what they would naturally see in real life. While the Romantics, for example, I get the sense they were willing to paint what might be “unrealistic” to support the desired composition of the painting.

I got a few people to run a program I made to test their accuracy with the thumbstick on a gamepad.

What kicked off this train of thought, was I was considering radial UI as an interface. How many options could you reasonably include in a radial menu? That would depend on how accurate you could count on people being.

The test showed the user an arrow indicating a direction they needed to match. They then needed to point their thumbstick in the same direction as the arrow and press a button.

I put each used through three phases. The first and last phase showed no visual feedback about the direction their thumbstick is facing. The second phase did show the direction they are pressing as another arrow and they needed to match the two arrows. Repeating with no visual feedback in the final phase was to test whether accuracy would improve after the second phase.

To ensure everyone was tested on a full range of directions, I generated 30 directions for each phase, each within a different 12 degree range, and then shuffled them. So every 12 degree segment is tested once per phase.

The mean average for degrees inaccuracy in phase 1 was 10.9 and in phase 2 was 10.4. Median went from 9.2 to 8.8. So it doesn’t feel like the training phase lead to a huge improvement.

Maybe there’s a small cluster of rightward at the top and bottom right. There may or may not be a slight rightward skew, but it’s a small enough sample it might be a coincidence.

In terms of improving after the test phase, I found as many subjects were worse during the third phase, just as many as improved. For accuracy, if we had a 5-section radial menu, it would require accuracy within 36 degrees, which would fit most of this. 6-section radial would require 30 degree accuracy, which would start excluding a few people here. In practice, I’m sure I’d add visual feedback for accuracy, but it’s an interesting experiment.

Maybe also I’ll try a future test where, instead of arbitrary direction on the circle, visually divide it into segments like a radial menu. Then see how people fare with 5 segments, then 6, then 7 and so on.

A collection of paintings I’ve been doing on a general theme. I figured I’d put them up here.

I hadn’t done much physical painting really. I drew a lot but just with ink or pencil, so no colour. I made some colour images on computer, but the way you choose colours is very different on computer. So the process of mixing colours to match what I’m seeing has been a useful exercise, I think.