New Computers, Painting, Academic Wankery
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New Computers
We got some new computers, one of which arrived today the other of which shall arrive tomorrow. It's amazing, really, that my computer is 4 years old and I never particularly noticed while in school. I recall now why - it's because I stopped playing computer games while in school! Wow, I really did that?
It has blown me away how good a computer can be, how good a computer can be for so little cost, and how good a computer we have gotten for what seems like little cost compared to my last golden age of computer building and LAN partying 6 or 7 years ago. I can actually play games at above the lowest settings again! I can play games that have graphics beyond ASCII characters! (But do not worry Dwarf Fortress, my love, I shall ever be true to you.)
This was prompted, I should add, because Laura's computer failed to meet the minimum specs for Mass Effect. My box has a generation better graphics card but a not-as-good processor. ... I know, 'eh! I don't even want to think about how much smoother Photoshop is going to run. It's like how we didn't replace a faulty router for a year and a half out of shear inertia even though DNS service would fail and require a reset if any stress was put on it at all; A bizarre hardware failure, I know; Sheer intertia.
Digital Painting
Crowd scenes I said? Maybe next week.
I think my problem is totally that I'm trying to be macho by drawing from my head but I pull from the same old set of habits and symbols to draw people rather than from what people actually look like. My habits and symbols may be trained to more closely resemble reality through the practice of figure draw from actual people. I shall have to take that approach.
Right, so I read Iain M. Bank's SF novel Matter and thought I'd do fan art.
Djan Seriy Anaplian & Turminder Xuss
tyl Loesp
I ought to regret posting whatever I draw because it can possibly reflect poorly on me as an artist and therefore as a freelance artist. Too late, though! Or I'm just being a whiny possibly pseudo self-effacing perfectionist. For attention? For honestly? But in retrospect I've gotten phenomenally better at digital painting than I was less than a year ago, when all I could do was flail about feebly with the airbrush tool. Either way, keep clear!
Warning: Total academic wankery follows.
The Quality of a Game
In art school a prof. of mine suggested an assignment in the upcoming "Show and Sale" event (at which students can sell artwork) each student would try to sell a piece of artwork. Whoever sold their artwork for the most money would get the highest grade, the next amount the next highest grade (perhaps following a grade curve).
So the instigation is this: Is the artwork sold for the most money the best piece of art?
(Honestly, the point was that he was fed up with students skipping class and assignments to do Show&Sale stuff. We could get into ever-rising tuition fees, high even though it's cheaper in Canada than in the US ... ) ... but the point I'm making is that I deny that sales indicate quality. Sales indicate the quality of marketing, of running a business, sure, but do not necessarily reflect positively on the critical quality of something. Like a game. Oblivion*. What?
But everyone reasonable knows this, right?
- Maybe. People have a funny way of coming up with theories that legitimate their economic well-being. In our case as small to medium sized game-makers, entrepreneurial types will want to advance a sales-centric theory of game quality while artistic types, being generally awful at making money and popularly accessible works would advance a theory which rejects sales as a quality indicator.
Perhaps I can be dismissed on that point as an artist taking the artist's side.
Some arguments on quality:
1: A buyer can never know the quality of a product without buying it, and a seller will often do all they can to manipulate the pre-purchase perception of quality.
2: Even worse, expectations and perception of quality can itself be induced! What if we lived in a world in which all games were tedious so we had no way to gauge how bad they were? That world was the 80s. No, I kid! But all knowledge of what quality is, "taste" (if you will), is learned/socialized/brainwashed into us observers. This can be done for commercial gain, or for some other kind of elite artistic prestige (which is what most of Fine Art is, I'd say).
This is getting to be a bit much. One could argue that because perception of quality is so manipulated, quality is unknowable, and/or all we can do is use a limited and flawed metric of quality (eg. sales). I say not! Knowledge is not a boolean state: we do not either know or not-know. This sort of critical engagement is both accumulative and a dynamic process rather than a static being. The complexity of the issue is a challenge which ought to provoke all the more critical rigor toward engaging with it ("solving it" would be too strong a description of possibility). The quality of games, then, is a question that can and should be discussed.
So this raises two points I'd like to get into:
1: How can computer games be art? That's right Ebert! (The quick answer: it's a matter of prestige, tradition/institution, and academic/ideological backing)
2: How form and content of a game can be determined by the economics game-selling; What does this do to games? (The quick answer: games are cast into commodities, which they theoretically might not otherwise be, eg. I'd argue that Dwarf Fortress is a non-commodified game, which is part of what makes it so interesting to me.)
3: Aesthetics and responsibility in games. (Or if you like: "Realistic" isn't realistic.)
But that's all for later.
*[With my aged computer, the graphics were not my primary focus; I saw the point made that graphics removed, the gameplay of Oblivion is actually somewhat less than a number of mature roguelikes. Damning, no? But there's no need to get into a full discussion over a throwaway line just yet..]
[Confession: Sometimes I write stuff just to be clever to myself. I think to myself, Self, I just contrived the most tortuous sentence full of ridiculous and (intellectually) offensive statements, what a laugh, ha ha!. The incidence of such writing increases with the incidence of me having a brew before writing a post. Given enough time it is likely that I may degenerate all the way into concrete poetry written in a personal constructed language about meta-themes. I bet I could get a grant.]
We got some new computers, one of which arrived today the other of which shall arrive tomorrow. It's amazing, really, that my computer is 4 years old and I never particularly noticed while in school. I recall now why - it's because I stopped playing computer games while in school! Wow, I really did that?
It has blown me away how good a computer can be, how good a computer can be for so little cost, and how good a computer we have gotten for what seems like little cost compared to my last golden age of computer building and LAN partying 6 or 7 years ago. I can actually play games at above the lowest settings again! I can play games that have graphics beyond ASCII characters! (But do not worry Dwarf Fortress, my love, I shall ever be true to you.)
This was prompted, I should add, because Laura's computer failed to meet the minimum specs for Mass Effect. My box has a generation better graphics card but a not-as-good processor. ... I know, 'eh! I don't even want to think about how much smoother Photoshop is going to run. It's like how we didn't replace a faulty router for a year and a half out of shear inertia even though DNS service would fail and require a reset if any stress was put on it at all; A bizarre hardware failure, I know; Sheer intertia.
Digital Painting
Crowd scenes I said? Maybe next week.
I think my problem is totally that I'm trying to be macho by drawing from my head but I pull from the same old set of habits and symbols to draw people rather than from what people actually look like. My habits and symbols may be trained to more closely resemble reality through the practice of figure draw from actual people. I shall have to take that approach.
Right, so I read Iain M. Bank's SF novel Matter and thought I'd do fan art.
Djan Seriy Anaplian & Turminder Xuss
tyl Loesp
I ought to regret posting whatever I draw because it can possibly reflect poorly on me as an artist and therefore as a freelance artist. Too late, though! Or I'm just being a whiny possibly pseudo self-effacing perfectionist. For attention? For honestly? But in retrospect I've gotten phenomenally better at digital painting than I was less than a year ago, when all I could do was flail about feebly with the airbrush tool. Either way, keep clear!
Warning: Total academic wankery follows.
The Quality of a Game
In art school a prof. of mine suggested an assignment in the upcoming "Show and Sale" event (at which students can sell artwork) each student would try to sell a piece of artwork. Whoever sold their artwork for the most money would get the highest grade, the next amount the next highest grade (perhaps following a grade curve).
So the instigation is this: Is the artwork sold for the most money the best piece of art?
(Honestly, the point was that he was fed up with students skipping class and assignments to do Show&Sale stuff. We could get into ever-rising tuition fees, high even though it's cheaper in Canada than in the US ... ) ... but the point I'm making is that I deny that sales indicate quality. Sales indicate the quality of marketing, of running a business, sure, but do not necessarily reflect positively on the critical quality of something. Like a game. Oblivion*. What?
But everyone reasonable knows this, right?
- Maybe. People have a funny way of coming up with theories that legitimate their economic well-being. In our case as small to medium sized game-makers, entrepreneurial types will want to advance a sales-centric theory of game quality while artistic types, being generally awful at making money and popularly accessible works would advance a theory which rejects sales as a quality indicator.
Perhaps I can be dismissed on that point as an artist taking the artist's side.
Some arguments on quality:
1: A buyer can never know the quality of a product without buying it, and a seller will often do all they can to manipulate the pre-purchase perception of quality.
2: Even worse, expectations and perception of quality can itself be induced! What if we lived in a world in which all games were tedious so we had no way to gauge how bad they were? That world was the 80s. No, I kid! But all knowledge of what quality is, "taste" (if you will), is learned/socialized/brainwashed into us observers. This can be done for commercial gain, or for some other kind of elite artistic prestige (which is what most of Fine Art is, I'd say).
This is getting to be a bit much. One could argue that because perception of quality is so manipulated, quality is unknowable, and/or all we can do is use a limited and flawed metric of quality (eg. sales). I say not! Knowledge is not a boolean state: we do not either know or not-know. This sort of critical engagement is both accumulative and a dynamic process rather than a static being. The complexity of the issue is a challenge which ought to provoke all the more critical rigor toward engaging with it ("solving it" would be too strong a description of possibility). The quality of games, then, is a question that can and should be discussed.
So this raises two points I'd like to get into:
1: How can computer games be art? That's right Ebert! (The quick answer: it's a matter of prestige, tradition/institution, and academic/ideological backing)
2: How form and content of a game can be determined by the economics game-selling; What does this do to games? (The quick answer: games are cast into commodities, which they theoretically might not otherwise be, eg. I'd argue that Dwarf Fortress is a non-commodified game, which is part of what makes it so interesting to me.)
3: Aesthetics and responsibility in games. (Or if you like: "Realistic" isn't realistic.)
But that's all for later.
*[With my aged computer, the graphics were not my primary focus; I saw the point made that graphics removed, the gameplay of Oblivion is actually somewhat less than a number of mature roguelikes. Damning, no? But there's no need to get into a full discussion over a throwaway line just yet..]
[Confession: Sometimes I write stuff just to be clever to myself. I think to myself, Self, I just contrived the most tortuous sentence full of ridiculous and (intellectually) offensive statements, what a laugh, ha ha!. The incidence of such writing increases with the incidence of me having a brew before writing a post. Given enough time it is likely that I may degenerate all the way into concrete poetry written in a personal constructed language about meta-themes. I bet I could get a grant.]
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