Blog Work.
Chris Goodswen, a professional 3D character artist gave a lecture to us game art and design students in the lecture theatre, Friday 8th of October 2010. His lecture covered his path through university to his current career as a freelance artist. For the blog report we were told to take one thing from his lecture and make a comment on it, therefore I have selected his love and inspiration from Del Toro, the famed movie director. During the lecture, Chris showed us an image of an Ogre he produced during his university course that was inspired by a historical story of an ogre that ate children. The image was inspired by the dark style of Del Toro, and similar to that of the monster used in Pan’s Labyrinth during the banquet challenge. (See below)
The body structure of the ogre was very similar to Del Toro’s monster creation, in that it appears thin except for its swollen belly, also the appearance of an excess of skin makes the creations (both Chris’ and Del Toro’s) appear disgusting and deformed. Not only in Chris’ earlier work but also in his later artwork, his passion for Del Toro’s dark and unnerving style becomes apparent, even in his lighter character assignments. For example, his concept artwork for the Mount Dash
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This image of a boy scout may not look at first sight like that of any Del Toro works, however, the construction of the face gives a slight suggestion of a darker style influence, notice the widened eyes with the slightly dilated pupils. This along with the wide grin gives the impression of a ‘creepy’ child; only the colourful and childish clothes dull the character into looking presentably ‘cute’.
The task for this written piece was to study an aspect of the lecture Chris gave and then give a comment on that study. As a result, I will now give my opinion on his ability to take another person’s style and yet still make it unique to his own artwork. I believe that Chris’ inspiring relationship with Del Toro through his artwork is a wonderful connection through art and has allowed me to understand that a person can gain artistic influence from another artist or person and still manage to keep their art style original and ground-breaking. His lecture has given me confidence to take influence from my artistic idol, Tetsuya Nomura, a Japanese artist who worked on the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts series’. (See example below)
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My personal history of gaming:
This section is focusing on video games that I have played in the span of time from birth to the present day. My first memories of video gaming were of the ‘Playstation’, I remember my mother taking my sister and me out and buying a ‘Playstation’ when I was about six years old (1998). I remember my mother having an argument with the shop clerk about buying ‘Spyro’ with it in a package deal, in the end of course my mother won! We took it home and set it all up, and I played my first video game, ‘Spyro’. Of course soon following ‘Spyro’ was ‘Crash Bandicoot’, which had come out two years earlier (1996), and which I soon became a fan of the ‘crazy, lab experiment bandicoot, Crash’.
My next memories of video gaming were from Christmas 1998, when I got my first ‘Gameboy’ (the ‘Gameboy Color’) and played the hit retro game ‘Tetris’ for the first time. Also that year, I received a copy of ‘Tekken 3’ which had come out only a month earlier and I have been a major fan of even to today. After that I played various games for ‘Playstation 1’, including some of my favourites, ‘Tomb Raider’, ‘Driver’, ‘Gran Turismo 2’ and ‘Pandemonium’. For the ‘Gameboy Color’ I played ‘Pokemon Red’ for the first time and quickly became a fan of both the anime and the video gaming series.
My next console was the ‘PS2’ which came out in 2000, I got it for my birthday with my first aerial simulation game, ‘Ace Combat: Distant Thunder’. I collected a mountain of games for it including some of my favourites, ‘Dark Cloud’, ‘Shadow of the Colossus’, ‘Soul Caliber 2’, ‘Persona’, ‘DMC’ etc. But my all time favourite game series was only introduced to me at the beginning of high school (2003), I began with the epic ‘Final Fantasy 7’ and throughout the rest of high school and after have been a dedicated fan to the ‘Final Fantasy’ franchise. This passion continued into the ‘Kingdom Hearts’ series (‘Square-Enix’ and ‘Disney’). Along with the ‘PS2’, I continued to keep up with the ‘Gameboy’ releases (the ‘SP’ and then the ‘DS’), and in terms of games I like ‘Final Fantasy’, ‘Kingdom Hearts 358/2 days’, ‘Dragon Quest IX’, ‘My Sims’, all of the ‘Pokemon’ Games (From ‘Ruby’ through to ‘Soul Silver’) and of course the updated version of ‘Tetris’.
Then of course, in 2006 the ‘PS3’ first came out. I didn’t get my own until much later due to the price, but now I enjoy the ‘PS3’ as much as my ‘PS2’. I play all of my old favourites (‘FF’ and ‘Tekken’ etc) whilst picking up a few new titles, for example, ‘Elder Scrolls IV’, ‘Fallout 3’, ‘Resident Evil 5’ and ‘Silent Hill Homecoming’.
Text Book Study: Rules of Play, Game Design Fundamentals, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman.
Chosen Section, ‘Defining Culture’ (Unit 4: Culture, pg 505-513).
This section of the book explores how games inspire culture or culture influences games. It begins with a few quotes from various people examining basketball. Through doing this the reader gains perspective of how much culture influences a typical game. In this context the authors try to simulate the events leading to basketball, for example; ‘The model for football is the drama of the adjacent nations at war. The model for basketball is the polyglot choreography of urban sidewalks.’ If we examine this statement we discover that ‘football’ is the fight between two teams (or ‘nations’) to win in the guise of a game, simply football could be looked at as the cultural development of wars between nations. The basketball version is that it is a ‘polyglot (A person having a speaking, reading, or writing knowledge of several languages.) of choreography’ taken from ‘urban sidewalks’, meaning that people have developed the game basketball from merging dance and language in somewhere like the streets of New York to create a game that expresses this.
The next part dives deeper into this theory, introducing concepts such as the Olympic Games being ‘not just a series of sporting events’, but also a creation that changes throughout global politics. The games origins themselves (a Greek Competition) are a reflection of Greek culture and inspire today political debates and even national disputes and friendships. For example, during World War 2, Nazi Germany hosted the Olympic Games and only allowed one half-Jewish person (Helene Mayer) from their country to attend the games! This meant that the Germans were willing to sacrifice potential gold medals because of their vendetta against the Jewish populace. This caused disputes between countries and of course, religions across the world. This is a prime example of games influencing culture. Not just aspects of countries, but also gender and class positions within cultures became apparent through games. For example, the much loved Lara Croft in Eidos’ ‘Tomb Raider’ was a display of women’s rights, women in the west had become applicable to become a ‘Heroine’ in a video game. However, the display of a female character as thin, sexy and having large breasts may say the opposite in terms of women’s rights. This is also a display of how culture affects video games and how video games can cause disputes!
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Rebekah Towler (Blog Work)
Fnd Games Art and Design, Year 1, Norwich University College
