designated writer

I’ve been wanting to dissect some Warframe character design, but a lot of the designs, especially for the frames themselves very much require textual knowledge of the story in order to understand what their going for, and I wonder if that’s a mark against them.

Well, I mean, ALL design needs context in order to be understood, always. Genres and forms of media all have their design conventions, which are readable and understandable mainly to the audience of that genre. Think of the ahoge hair strand poking up from an anime character's head to indicate that they are an airhead or stupid in some way, for example. That's not a visual signifier that can be understood intuitively, it requires a contextual understanding to parse.

So it's not really a matter of "if you need context to understand it, the design is bad" so much as you, as a critic, have to form your own critical opinion of how much context is too much context to ask of the audience.

For example, if a Warhammer 40k character is designed with a bunch of design elements that only make sense if you've read fourteen books of the Horus Heresy series AND several army books and codexes (or w/e they're called) and you have to have played a AA licensed video game that came out in 2009, then I think a reasonable critique to make is that that is alienating and hostile to a general audience. It is design which is uninterested in communicating its meaning to anyone but the hardest of hardcore fans, it is design which is inward-looking and insular.

But things look very different from the perspective of the hardcore fans to whom this insular, inward-looking design is pandering. To them, it might be absolutely fucking awesome and deeply evocative or even emotionally engaging.

Both things can be true at once. It's a matter of where you stand.

So the Warframe designs being hard to parse from outside is ABSOULTELY a valid thing to critique them for, but in order to make that critique you have to take the standpoint of an outside audience, and be able to defend that standpoint.

Personally, I share your feeling that Warframe designs are hard to parse from outside. To me, knowing nothing of Warframe lore, they all just kinda look like all flash and no substance, they look like designs which are first and foremost concerned with looking like cool badass robots, and don't seem to be trying to communicate anything else.

But I also don't know very much about them. I've not engaged deeply with them, and I haven't looked at very many Frame designs except whatever shows up in trailers and advertisements, so from me, that critique of Warframe's design wouldn't be particularly strong or well-founded.

ISAAC "FELIX" GATES from Red vs. Blue

i promised you 🦋

— Ganymede, Jericho Brown, in '100 Queer Poems, an anthology' (2022)