Master studies
A while ago on the Between Two Cairns podcast a listener asked a really interesting question about, essentially, doing master studies of games and modules in order to develop their own game design skills. The discussion was a little lost in people not knowing what master studies are. But I thought it was a great idea. Why not.
Writers do it: copywork. Copying out passages as a way to study the piece. Especially writing by hand. It really gets you to slow down and consider and appreciate every little decision the author made. Every little quirk of punctuation your eyes might gloss over in reading. When I have to put that comma there it really makes me think about that comma.
So much of history is only available to us from copywork - passages from the Ancient Greek and Roman plays, oratory, books, only exist from students copying them out as practice in their workbooks. Not even people copying as an archival or reproduction function. Just boys copying and learning.
Master studies is the art technique of doing a study of the old masters. Like an apprenticeship learning directly from their work. Even more so than writing an artist's technique can be understood by replicating it.
Museums are still full of people huddled in corners with their sketchbooks doing this. There are also official copyist programmes for people going big and actually painting. The whole thing has a long and fascinating history. Professional copyists need a deep knowledge of historical styles and materials. Reproduction or copyist work is its own rabbit hole I'm not going down right now.
Painters would have students working in their studio, copying their paintings. That was how you learnt. Anyone who could afford it went off to Italy to study the old masters. The big museums and galleries were full of students and copyists.
Look at them go. This is literally called 'Art students and copyists in the Louvre'. Also, observe: women. Copying was seen as being better for women, if they must do art at all. Not too taxing on their delicate little brains and sending their wombs a-roving.
This picture proved hard to find! I knew I wanted it to pair with this post but I couldn't remember the artist or name. I thought I'd just be able to go "painting of everyone painting in the Louvre" into search. But no. (It's not a painting, admittedly. But it doesn't show up under "illustration" either.) "Paintings of paintings" just seems to confuse the Duck (DuckGo) also. I'm going to start my own list. Paintings of paintings.
Master Class from the Smithsonian is a great article about the people studying paintings at the Louvre throughout time, the whys and wherefores.
“The Louvre is the book where we learn to read,”
says Cézanne in the above article.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is attributed to Bruegel. But it is not in fact a Bruegel. It's an early copy and the original is lost. Without the copy, we wouldn't know. We wouldn't have this. (There's also a cool Google Arts and Culture story with Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.)
So, I think a master study could absolutely work with games - rewrite and redesign an exact duplicate of something I admire. The writing, the layout, the design, the art. It forces a completely different level of engagement.