The Xbox Generation

Xbox Children

Once again the Media points its shady finger at gaming for once again doing something awful to children. The gaming world is now finding more problems at the worrying change in statistics that a child is more likely to get repetitive strain injury playing games then breaking a wrist due to falling out a of a tree.

My personal view on this subject is although it is a shame that kids aren’t frolicking about as they used to be I don’t actually believe that playing games has everything to do with that. I men sure there is a small percentage of children that are addictive and those problems need to do dealt with, but surly the parent must notice that the child is spending way too much time on a console and should try and get them a bit more interested in something else. I think it’s all too easy to blame a computer game for problems, as it seems like such an easy target.

The problem seems that there is a breakdown of family homes; the household is a lot different to what it was about 50 years ago. The standard nuclear family household (Father, Mother and children and probably a dog.) is not as dominant as it once was. Single parent families are becoming more and more popular and the last thing a single parent would want is for them not to know where their kid is when they are at work. Games and the TV are often used as mechanical babysitters, an endless supply of entertainment whilst the parents are away or busy and every parent will plonk their kid in front of the TV just to catch a break from the hectic struggle of life.

The increase in cars on the road have increased in the thousands over the past few years, I can’t help but think that some of these people that point the blame to games are thinking in the past. Let’s face it life isn’t as safe as it used to be 10 to 20 years ago. There are more cars, housing estate are built next to heavy roads, kids are becoming prime targets for mugging since technology is trendy to have, nearly every child will have a mobile phone on them or an iPod or a DS. Some kids get bullied, mugged or happy slapped so home becomes safe, games become comfort. Both parents and children are constantly bombarded with the media displaying terror stories of child abductions and children bringing knifes to school. This world is a terrifying place to live. I grew up in a fairly small town in which life was pretty normal and nothing out of the ordinary happened till a girl about my own age at the time was raped and killed. You just can’t trust anything anymore.

I think the main difference between now and 20 years ago was that places were a lot smaller and more people had access to a supportive community, which is dying out as more and more people shut themselves off from everyone else. Sad to say is that people don’t really need each other anymore, real life communities have been dropped in favor of online communities so people are still connecting with each other but doing it in different ways then before.

Anyway the point I’m trying to make is that the media is using gaming as a scapegoat to cover some more serious problems to do with upbringing and community in the 21^st century.

Good and bad Art

Time to have another stab at the subject of Good or Bad art, which is a real tricky subject since there isn’t really a proper answer to this as not everyone is going to have the same opinion on the same piece of material.

However I do think that people who have been trained up in any visually creative field would have a different approach to looking at a piece of art as they would have more of an idea about the creative process in general. I would say that I do judge art very quickly because I know about the gruelling hours that you put into a piece of work and all the hard work like perspective, colour theory, composition etc etc. However that only applies to certain types of art.

The internet makes artist much more able to showcase their work without paying for gallery space or planning exhibitions, many artists have their own websites showcasing themselves. Many use the really famous art site Deviant art. However this also means that anyone can use these sites and the amount of bad art you find on Deviant is a tad disturbing. For an example I searched for Fat Pikachu on Deviant art and hundreds of badly drawn pokemon flood the screen, so I click on a random one and it has about 51 favourites and over 1000 views with comments like.

“ I really like this! You drew and colored the Pikachu so well”
“Wow. Very awesome. Fav.”

A fat pikachu is not good art, but there are tons of badly drawn pieces of “art” strewn about on this site with people commenting about how great it all is. Ask them who Kandinsky is and they probably wouldn’t have clue. I believe the problem is that people get too wrapped up in the subject matter and the style (American Manga for example) to even care about if it was drawn well or not.

I do think site likes this are great for the artistic community since everyone has a fighting chance of being seen and noticed, but the point that I am trying to make is that I don’t like that piece of art, as I do not see that as art, however many other people do. Seeing a piece like that evoked a negative reaction from me and a positive reaction from others and that is what art is about, your reaction to it?

You can’t really judge art, there is no fundamental law that says this piece is good and that piece is bad. It really depends on the person that is engaging with the art. When judging a piece many things come into account such as skill, perspective, colour theory and subject matter. Like I said I judge art pretty quickly since I know what I like, I know what I like to see in art and what I don’t. It’s not that I hate the piece of art it’s just that it doesn’t do anything for me.

I’m a fan of the old masters work, like Da Vinci, Raphael, William Holman Hunt and Bouguereau and I love Art nouveau and Pre Raphaelites. I’m not a fan of the Dada movement and I’m not particularly fond of Minimalism. These are choices that have shaded my liking for certain styles of art and shaped how I see the world of art. What does it say about my general taste in art. I like art that I can see the skill and hard work that’s been put into it. I like complex subject matter with symbolism (William Holman Hunt’s, The Saviour had tons of symbolism to do with Christ.)

I don’t like art that looks like it was done in an hour or artwork that doesn’t have much depth, I can’t really see the artistic depth to a matchbox stuck on the wall and someone says that art. To me it’s a matchbox stuck on the wall. I don’t like squiggles that look like they were painted by a two-year old, I personally don’t see this “art”, it’s a type of art to someone but not to me. This brings me to my next point.

Click Here.

Does that mean that it’s “bad” art. Well no since I don’t really think there can be such a term as bad art. I think art has different categories that they fall into and I think that certain types of art get more respect then others. Art is something that’s free and it seems that anyone can do “Art”. Art is product of creativity, so does that deem everything creative as art? Well in some sense I agree however there are so many different levels and meanings to art that it gets harder to pin point “bad” art. There is art that I don’t like but other people do, there is badly drawn art which people still like and think is amazing. If it came down to skill level then there would be thousands of pieces that fall into the bad art category however it doesn’t boil down to that. At the end of the day it’s your opinion that makes the choice between bad or good.

Click Here

And just to see how much you know about art.

Click Here

Well I believe I'll stop babbling on now.

A SpeedPaint

Um..I'm not really one for posting my work, but I guess I need to get round to it sometime.

Anyway. This took just under two hours in painter. It's not really what I was going for but I guess it's alright.

A Moral look

I’m going to look at good and bad but more at a moral level.

I’m fully aware that I’m entering a career, which has a whole lot of bad publicity surrounding the products that get produced. Through the press, games have been associated with obesity, lack of social skills, death and even murder.

It seems that the playing video games have been blamed for causing a lot of problems in modern society like increases in violence and crime and now with many addictive games available to everyone such as mmo’s that games are also being connected with symptoms of Autism and Asperger’s syndrome. Click Here

Firstly it gives me mixed feelings towards this statement since I’ve grown up with games and so have a lot of other people that I’ve known through out the years and they’ve turned out fine. The problem with articles stating that games cause crime, cause obesity and death is that they all they do is concentrate on the extreme negativity that comes with playing games and not the positive and good points of playing games.

Some of the friends that I’ve made over the few years have been strengthened because of games. The way I think about it, I could be going out and staying out late and doing all sorts of crazy stuff except that I’d rather stay in and play a game. One thing that my mom has always said about my brother and I when we would play games till the early hours in the morning is that “At least I know where you are.” Some parents have no clue where their kids are at 2 , 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning.

Gamers have there own secret society which is theirs and people that don’t play games can’t relate to what they’re talking about or what they mean. Me and my brother can just talk about a certain game and it something that only we know about, it like talking in Morse code to some people. Some people strive to fit in and have some sort of community, which they can relate to people, some people can’t do that in “Real Life” and resort to games and Internet for social acceptance.

Games offer people more chances to be themselves as you are more known for your personality instead of your looks, race or class. It makes being social more easier and less daunting. People have made friends, formed relationships and even have had marriages because of the social networking due to online gaming.

However games still get bad publicity, it causes deaths – allegedly. I’m sure everyone knows about the manhunt incident, the World of Warcraft death and the Legend of Mir 3 murder. Click Here.

All I really say is that these are very special incidents and the choices were because of the individual not because the game influenced them to resort to these actions. Think of just how many people play games worldwide and that a very small proportion has incidents like these. Death and murder happen all the time and everyone regardless if that person has played GTA or manhunt, if a person has the mentality to harm someone then it will happen anyway.

The media blames a lot of things and contradicts itself on many occasions. For example, health specialists say that drinking bottled water has no benefits over regular tap water, yet health specialists also say that drinking tap water contains estrogen (due to women taking the pill) which is lowering men’s sperm count. So each view just contradicts itself over and over again.

The media is very willing to point blame wherever it feels like, so games get a heavy share of bad publicity. However when games help a disabled kid feel like they’re playing sports once again it doesn’t go as noticed. Click Here.

When I read these negative articles it makes me challenge my moral standpoint on games, but I’ll always go with my gut and remember just how much fun I had growing up because of games.

A review of sorts

I finally got round to finishing Okami this week and all I can say that it is a truly awesome game, so if you haven’t played it then you don’t know what your missing. It’s got an truly outstanding art style, and the game play works with such fluidity with the style that it was a really good game, also it had really humorous parts in it- I love games that have a sense of humour to them.

It’s also expected to come out on to the Wii soon I believe. I think that it would work well on the Wii since the game play involves a celestial brush in which you draw your moves out, so I think it would be a good transition form PS2 to Wii, shame I don’t own a Wii – yet.

I’ve been playing more lost Odyssey over the past few days and it’s a really good, fun game to play. I do like playing turn based combat games from time to time as it always has an organised retro feeling to them. It reminds me heavily of the Final Fantasy series but that hardly surprising considering who worked on it. It has the standard male protagonist (Kaim Argonar ) who is solemn and doesn’t say much, however the game gets more interesting when Jansen Friedh, a womanising drunk, enters your party. Some of the scripts on the game really crack me up, its funny bits are sometimes hilarious with this guy, however it’s sad parts, are well… that brings me to the downside of the game.

This game seriously tries its hardest to make you well up and crumple into an emotional wreck. It takes itself so seriously with all the grief and turmoil and dead people throughout the game. Anyone who has played the game would understand, you get to read these memories of Kaim in the game and the first one you hear is about a little girl dying (sorry if I spoilt that for anyone), but either way it’s not heart lifting stuff. Problem is that the memories are all in text with some sound effects and maybe a background or something, I would of liked to of seen the memories in CG as having them in all text kind of disrupts the flow of the game as their not even short, it’s like reading a chapter in a book – but I guess that’s what they wanted.

Two other things slightly irk me about the game, firstly is the voice casting. In the English version they have Kath Soucie voicing a little girl called Cooke. Well Kath Soucie is better known for voicing Cubert Farnsworth out of Futurama so this gets on my nerves since I’m so used to hearing her voice portray a clone chubby boy that I can’t get used to her voice fitting a little white mage girl. However this is really minor and I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

Another really slight thing is Kaim’s run, I mean his super fast turbo boosted run. He can just zoom level to level with this run that in my opinion is way, way to fast, it doesn’t really fit. But again this is just me whining I guess.

Little things with the animation sometimes bug me in games like the double jump in God of War, y’know the one where he pelvic thrusts himself higher into the air.

Well I just needed to get a few things off my chest. I guess that’s all I have to say on the matter.

Rabble Rabble

I’m not quite sure what on earth to write on this blog anymore, but I’m starting to get guilt tripped into paying more attention to this blog, I’ve kind of completely ignored it since we started the group project, but that’s going to change now.

I hoped I would be a bit more driven this Easter break to really knuckle down and just throw myself into doing work, but I guess the temptation of chocolate and games proved a bit too appealing over the last two weeks. I recently bought Guitar Hero 3, Beautiful Katamari and Lost Odyssey, all in the same week- so I’ve been a bit busy “researching”.

However I haven’t been completely devoid of artist thought of the weeks, I visited an Arts and crafts show and got to meet one of my favourite landscape watercolour artists, Keith Fenwick. We had a discussion about the teaching of art and how it was handled in schools, so I found that pretty interesting to listen to.

It got me thinking about why I wanted to create art in the first place and what aspect about art that I had always liked. I had pretty much made up my mind that I wanted to do something creative and had always strived to do things my own way. One thing that I continue to worry about is my failure at taking criticism, I overly criticise my own work however if anyone else criticises it then I get overly defensive about its flaws, this is one thing that I struggle with in art, that anything you create will never be perfect and that someone will dislike it. However if someone dislikes your work or finds mistakes with it then surely it must encourage you to become better and iron out those little flaws with your work. Although it’s necessary to listen to criticism to become better, it’s is still one of the hardest things I find about art, it’s even harder to listen to the little critic in my head which will find flaws that no one else sees, as it makes making the first mark on paper ever more harder then it was in the first place.

However I do believe that one of my greatest weaknesses is also one of my strengths since I won’t get complacent with my level of work, so I’ll keep pushing my standard, which is a good thing.

I love creating things, thinking up ideas or a cool concept, I like having the freedom and imagination to produce paintings, drawings and models from thoughts that I’ve had, I have many outlets to show people my ideas which is something I’ve always loved about art. However the more I think about that, then the more I think of art as one big ego trip, am I drawing because I want to draw for myself or am I drawing because a small part of me wants people to think that I’m creative and imaginative and I want to show off. I think that I’ve probably just contradicted myself in saying that I have not enough pride in my work yet I have just enough pride to want to show it off. I guess these thoughts plague every artist every now and then, everyone that has to rely on talent and ability for their career must have thoughts like “What if I can’t do this.” Or “What if it’s not good enough.”

I spoke to comic book artist John McCrea a while back and I guess one of the most valuable things that he thought me was that as an artist you are always going to have your bad days where you’ll think that you are the worst drawer in the world and then you’ll have your good days where you think you’re better then everyone, but the key is to never actually believe any of them because you’ll always find that someone is better then you and that you will be better then someone else eventually, so don’t let it get to you.

Another piece of good advice I heard was that “For every good drawing you do, you’ll produce 1000 bad ones.” It’s not the most hopeful pieces of advice I’ve been given but it keeps things in check.

Well I guess I’ve rambled on a fair bit, but at least I’m not neglecting my blog, and now for some more “researching” on Lost Odyssey.

A Creative Summery

I decided that it is finally time to draw my thoughts about creativity to a close. Over the past few weeks I’ve tried to break the huge topic of creativity down into smaller more digestible chunks so that they make more sense to me.

The first question that I thought was how do I know that I’m creative? I couldn’t really answer that, as I just knew that I was creative. My interests have always leaned towards more creative pursuits I never really wanted to do anything else. I didn’t strive to be athletic or academic but I always knew that I wanted to do something creative with my life. However that didn’t really answer my question to why I, personally was creative. How was I creative?

I would constantly draw, I would write and did some acting, and if there was ever a project at school I would always make sure that I was head of its art direction. Being creative was something that I was proud of and enjoyed. I guess I was creative in a linear way, as I wasn’t really creative in a logical way, I didn’t like maths or science, I enjoyed history but only because I could doodle in that class and no one would really notice. When I think about my whole life, I’ve always been that way. In my other posts I stated that creativity could be linked to the things. It can be linked as being something new or solving a problem. My own personal creative stems from my life choices and my interests, I fit a creative type.

Creativity is one of those funny words that have so many meanings and guises that I can’t really say that Creativity = X, it’s more like Creativity = X+ Y with a bit of Z. It can’t really be defined with one word. It’s just a very vague word that could mean one thing but also mean a completely different thing entirely. However since it stems from the word create, creativity will always mean to create. Being creative means having the drive, will and passion to create something that been nestled in your thoughts for some time, to produce something that you and others haven’t seen before.

Although it stems from the word create, Creativity is not bound to that one word alone. Creativity is the form of fun, enjoyment, emotion, interactivity and productivity. Creativity is constantly around us in every little detail. On my desk is some Cadburys Digestive biscuits, now somebody had the thought of the biscuit, someone had the thought of chocolate, then somebody had to have the thought of combining the two. Why are the biscuits circler, why aren’t they square, why aren’t the biscuits thicker or thinner? Who made the decision to have the packet purple, who is the company called Cadburys? Just in one packet of biscuits, which seems so trivial, has so many creative decisions involved, and this is only the one packet of biscuits that we see that made it to the production line, imagine all the designs that were made but never used, the designs that were thought but never placed on paper.

My other point is the creative process, since our thoughts move so quickly and we have so many of them at what point to we decide to follow on with some thoughts but let others slip and forget them. What makes us decided to make the creative decision to draw something one-way and not another. We don’t really question our own thoughts as we just go with them as we trust them, listening to other peoples thoughts makes you question your own thoughts in comparison and judge them more, which is why setting a task where everyone has the same word (like what we have been doing in Art with Chris.) however nobody has the same result. Everyone has a different creative process that they go through to reach the final design. I like to think of it as a thought tournament of some sort, where at the very top, the winner is the final design. There were loads of very small quick thoughts that were creativity dismissed and the winner would have much more thought put into to it.

The creative process can be just as important as the final creative product since everyone handles it differently; everyone has different taste and experiences to draw their inspiration from, since no one shares the same memories or ideas the chance of having an exact copy of someone else product is pretty much impossible. People can have very similar ideas considering how they have been brought up, for example most people have the same conception that sharks are powerful, ferocious and frightful creatures so would be good as a villain. So coquencidences like that are bound to occur.

I think that humans had to be creative to survive, if you think of how many different cultures have formed with different style of art, music and speech. I think that it is only human nature to strive to be creative to set themselves apart from others, to seek individuality as part as a group. Many things are based on circumstance, such as expansion of a colony, invasions and resources to have things are done and how we speak and interact with each other. If humans weren’t naturally creative then there would only be two or three names for everything that existed and the wheel would never of been created. It was creative process as names were something new and the wheel was solving a problem.

However humans aren’t the only things that are creative, I also believe in creative design. That everything on this planet has been shaped to intelligent and creative design. Early man had many forms, however some early designs were flawed and therefore died out leaving only the intelligent designs to keep evolving. Everything fits in so well, like a perfect jigsaw puzzle, that everything has been evolved to solve a problem, such as our eyebrows, which keep the sweat out of our eyes, I believe that it is intelligent and creative design. The African lions are coloured so they blend in with the grass, male birds are more colourful and elaborate to attract females. Creative design has shaped the planet and humans being the more dominant species is shaping it to suit it’s own need. The planet is seeing natural creativity and man made creativity all at once.

Well I’m tried to summarize my thoughts on creativity. The journey has been long and tiring. I’ve tried to keep it varied and interesting and I’ve hoped that you have enjoyed reading my blogs.

The future of creativity

At the moment Britain seems to flagging behind as a creative power in the world, gone are the days of the British Empire where we use to export useful materials such as iron, coal and china and be known for it. Now we just import pretty much everything we use, do you remember the last time you saw something that said, “Made in Britain”. We aren’t really leading in anything like education, medicine, transport or technology or even art, in a way I just think it’s kind of sad that Britain is really producing any pioneers in the fields anymore.

I was just thinking about the future of creativity in Britain since more and more games art courses are cropping up throughout Britain to try and keep up to date with technology. I believe that I read something ridiculous something that Britain is about 13 years behind Korea in terms of technology. However, industries that Britain was famous for such as the industrial revolution is slowly fading away. For instance I live in Dudley also know as the Black Country because it was covered in black smog from the working factories however the government is slowly investing money into the area to bring new business and higher-class families into the area. I believe the same can be said about Tesside University getting tons of funding into their game design course since they have lost one of the biggest industries that they had, so the government is placing more money into a new technology.

If I think about where this industry is going then I kind of worry, as Britain doesn’t house that many game developers and it seems that I might have more chance of getting a job elsewhere. However the fact that Britain has any game developers is quite hopeful.

I do think that we were promised at lot of new gadgets to improve life such as the flying car, jetpack and robots where creative technology hasn’t really gone that far that and is still slowly catching up with our creative ideas. However as long as Britain recognizes that it needs to put funding into new technology such as game design then only then are we going to keep up with the rest of the world.

In terms of creativity I do think that we are on a par with the world, I wouldn’t say that our creativity is stifled be where we live however there isn’t as much opportunity to work on huge blockbusters or really expensive projects when mostly things like that happen in America where most big budget studios are formed.

However one thing that I really hate being exported into Britain from America is Political correctness and I do think that is stifling not only creativity but also freedom of speech. I do think that a lot of projects are only given the thumbs up from officials if they tick all the boxes. Such as children’s programs have to have morels and can’t really be just a fun program. If children aren’t learning from it then it isn’t any good. Same can be said for movies, it’s like they have figured out a formula that works and makes money so just keep making the same movies over and over again till all the movies are just a remake of a remake with some new fancy title and just another overpaid actor that funnily enough can’t really act. The same thing with games, I wouldn’t really say that sequels are made to expand the story anymore they are just a tool to keep growing the title and suckering more people to keep buying. Such as the final fantasy series, it’s great that with every new game they make a new storyline and new characters as well as trying to expand on the gameplay however there is also Final Fantasy X-2, a horrid sequel only getting sales because of it’s predecessor Final Fantasy X. Also let us not forget Dirge of Cerberus and how it rode on the white horse of Final Fantasy 7 and Advent Children to gain publicity for this shoddy title.

Anyway the point that I am trying to make is that creativity is slowly being dwindled from the industry from fat cats that only wish to fatten their wallets and therefore will just stick to the same old patented formula and produce meager titles. However there are those ingenious titles that occasionally get through however when they do, everyone seems to realize this and then whore it out.

Brooding = Creativity

I had meant to include this in the last post that I did but I felt that it would just be easier having a blog of its own. The Topic that I kind of want to touch upon is the misconception that every artist is this broody self-loathing, body-scarring manic-depressive. Personally I’m not a tortured soul and I yet I do art, surely not!

What I am going to explore is creativity darker side since all artists, poets and writers have this stereotypical view of being sick twisted individuals and I would like to know why this is so. Many scientists believe that individuals with complex brain habits such as bipolar disorder, TB and epilepsy have a more heighten sense of creativity.

Creativity and bipolar disorder

There is a common belief, although without empirical basis, that many famous historical figures gifted with creative talents have been affected by bipolar disorder.^[1] Many of these have been retroactively "diagnosed" as suffering from bipolar disorder after their deaths based on letters, correspondence, contemporaneous accounts, or other material, most notably in Kay Redfield Jamison's book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.^[3]. Touched With Fire presents the argument that bipolar disorder may be found in a disproportionate numbers of people with creative talent such as artists, comedians, musicians, authors, performers, poets, and scientists, and some credit the condition for their creativity.

Several recent clinical studies have also suggested that there is a positive correlation between creativity and bipolar disorder, although it is unclear what the relationship is between the two.^[4][5][6] Temperament may be an intervening variable.^[5]

A 2005 study at the Stanford University School of Medicine showed for the first time that a sample of children who either have or are at high risk for bipolar disorder score higher on a creativity index. Children with bipolar parents who were not bipolar themselves also scored higher.^[7]

As Quoted by wikipedia .

So is this where creative types get their dark stereotype? That the most talented of all artists were very deep and disturbed? Surprisingly it reads true as most of the most the most famous artistic names such as Van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Monet all had such problems that affected their personal lives as well as their art. Monet had failing eyesight that caused him being one of the leading artists in impressionism. Munch was surrounded by death and therefore most his paintings surrounded that topic and yet Van Gogh was so caught up in his own depression it eventually drove him to suicide.

http://student.bmj.com/back_issues/1201/life/471.html

So our greatest painting minds are tortured souls that lives are strife with depression and death. Is that why they can paint so well? My belief is that to have an emotion to tap into whilst working can bring a lot more personality to whatever your working on but to go so far and torture yourself for the sake of your art is completely another thing entirely.

Someone told me that going into Art will never be much personal satisfaction into my life as I would be my own worst enemy and worst critic. After finishing a drawing I am never pleased with it and always strive to do better although doing this means that I will constantly try to improve it also means that I won’t get any satisfaction or pride finishing a piece. Perhaps that is what these artists also went through.

Perhaps leading a life of happiness of personal fulfilment would mean that these artists wouldn’t have been as successful as they were when they were brooding and miserable. Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime so he wasn’t exactly a popular artist however what is fascinating about him is the tragedy that surrounded his life. I don’t think the story of Van Gogh would be quite as interesting with a “happy ever after” added to the end of it. I think secretly people love the idea of a tortured soul and a grim tale. This also reminds me of Nirvana whose front man Kurt Cobain whose rising success and drug use pushed him to take his own life. However since he took his life at the height of his fame he will always be known as a musical genius where as most musical talent have their 15 minutes with fame and then disappear out of the spotlight and get forgotten.

I think the idea of a dark brooding artist is a romantic idea but not that close to reality since everyone has their dark moments but won’t really put any energy into it to creative something out of it like a artists, writer or poet would. The only reason that they probably come across so dark is that at the end of it you can see the product of a deep emotion.

However I think that in this day and age that too many have cottoned on to this idea of a deep brooding soul and decided to make a new trend of it. Being labelled “Emo” isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it stands for emotional.

In recent years, emo, in the popular media, has been associated with a stereotype that includes being emotional, sensitive, shy, introverted, or angsty.^[18][19][20] It is also associated with depression, self-injury, and suicide.^[21][22]

As quoted by wikipedia

However since it has became so popular it has became common belief that you have to act that way to fit in with that crowd. I can’t imagine acting suicidal being good for anyone. However not only is it associated with depression and such it is also associated with art and music. However type in Emo art in google image search and you’ll see that emo art is becoming more of a movement in art as well as music.

Any the point that I am trying to make is that an artist is often that off as a dark brooding soul as the French romantics saw it that way but also now in our day an age the new movement of emo also adds fuel to the fire of this misconception with emotional music and art. However all I can say is that I don’t really know any dark emotionally scarred people and I’ve been on many art courses…

And now for some uplifting entertainment of a game (which is named Emogame funnily enough). You play as Alkaline Trio vs Hell, and you get to fight Hitler so it’s all good. Click Here

Front Line Creativity

I thought that for this blog that I would a little bit more about different types of creativity as I feel that I’ve only kept close to the kind of creativity that I’m involved with and wanted to stray from this and do some further exploring on the topic.

Shall I start with the obvious types that stem from the typical sort such as Art, Music and Drama which in most people’s opinion are the most creative, I would agree since creativity can be defined as “something new” which all those subject exhibit. New Art is made everyday which hasn’t been seen before, music gets made which hasn’t been heard before and films get made which haven’t been seen before. So what is my point?

Well creativity is also pinned down as “solving a problem” so does this also reach out to other topics such as Maths, Science and Medicine since they all solve problems albeit that those problems have cropped up time and time again only to be solved using the same creative solution. The question is that is that really even considered creativity since it isn’t something new, since there is already a solution to most problems in these fields. A mathematician is going to know that the answer to 10 + 10 will always equal 20 no matter how many times he repeats the problem, the solution is stable and never changing. Ask an artist to paint a flower everyday the outcome will constantly change as the solution is dependable on variables such as the artists ability, the mood, the atmosphere, the weather and lighting and on time. The point that I am trying to make is that as creativity is defined as being

• Something New
• Solving a problem

So if I’m looking at creativity in that light then isn’t only fair to say that anything has an air of creativity since it can be based on different variables and yet at the same time a stable solution to a problem. There are many problems that surround the topic creativity such as are we born creative? Can we be taught to be creative? Are people only creative in one aspect in their lives?

I do believe that people are born creative; everyone is creative however some are more liberal to how and where they apply their creativity in their lives. Life choices may shape how they choose to be creative but I do honestly believe that everyone is creative as is it evident in speech, letters, homes etc. However I do also think that once it goes past a certain point some people rely on so called “creative types” such as artist, writer, actors etc to be creative for them as they don’t believe that they a creative type themselves. I also believe that some people have better skills and are more suited to doing some things then other people are such as some people are more logical and practical minded and would make a much better scientist then say an actor and would probably enjoyed that type of field more. That is where that individual would spend his creativity, just because he isn’t in the typical “creative” field doesn’t mean that he isn’t creative.

The word creativity is derived from the word create so does this mean that people who create something new such as inventors, artists and writers are the only truly creative people? I surly doubt it, as I think that people that create are more “spontaneously” creative and that people that solve a problem with a creative solution are more “logically” creative. I imagine it that if it was a creative war then all the artists, poets, writers, actors, musicians and photographers would be at the front line taking the hits from the enemy as we are all on show displaying how creative we are and then just as we are about to get our asses kicked the cavalry ride in which are made up of Teachers, Scientists, Chefs and Programmers to save us as the enemy didn’t expect them (not sure why I decided to add this but just summarized what I was thinking about at the time.) . That probably made much more sense in my head then out in the open like this.

Anyway I thought I would leave some links on truly amazing creative things.
Proving that it is good to play with your food. Creating chocolate sculptures. Click here
Check Out this Nathan Sawaya's Lego Sculptures : Click here

Refrain from going to the water cooler..

Just a cool video on creativity which I thought I would share.
Makes a lot of good points, and has a great backing beat.

Just some quick links

Just thought that these might be useful to some people.

Since we are going to be tackling a group project soon I thought that this article would be fairly interesting as these students were going though a similar situation. Click Here

Since it is the new year, this articles gives some hints and tips for some resolutions regarding game design. Click here.

Something for the girls regarding the 360 and the male population. Click here.

Interesting and a rather bitchy post about game design, worth a read if you haven't got nothing better to do. Click here.

A great site for Art called Character designs, an Artists resource - don't really need to say much more. Click here.

A site which hosts monthly 3D competitions, worth a look. Click here.

Well that's about it, if I see anything else more interesting I'll be sure to post them.

Games – The ultimate in creativity?

I wonder how my life would have been in I never discovered games? I wouldn’t be University doing this particular course and perhaps many people would simply scoff at the sheer amount of hours that I’ve “wasted” playing games. Simply put if I was born say 15 years ago I wouldn’t of really had the opportunity to do what I’m doing now, I wouldn’t have been able to put my faith into a university course to teach me the fundamentals of game design.

Game design courses are becoming more and more popular across the county and more tailored courses and campuses are cropping up such as DigiPen, a campus dedicated to creative technology - http://www.digipen.edu/main/Main_Page . Since this a fairly new career the hardest part would perhaps be finding lecturers that have had enough experience in the field to teach young and new hopefuls.

Having is picking Game Design an easy career choice, is it taking the easy way out? Since doing art the attitude that I always received was that it was an easy choice after all drawing is surely easy, right? It’s not like I was doing “real” work such as maths and science. This attitude towards the creative industries in my school such as Art and Graphics ensured that so many students enrolled in those classes expecting an easy ride and once things got that bit harder stopped coming or simply dropped out. It exactly the same with this course I feel, the class started with about 48 and now we are down to just 30? I think that some people thought that they liked playing games and thought it would just been 3 years of doing just that. Once some people figured out that it was a bit harder then they expected they stopped coming.

Now this brings me off the point slightly and might sound a tad superficial but when having my hair cut at the hairdressers they always ask me the same questions, if I am going on holiday and What course I’m doing at University, and for some reason I never say Game Art Design since saying this it just brings a lot more questions and most people simply don’t know what the hell Game Art is. One of the girls thought it entailed making board games and stated that she loved monopoly.

For some reason saying that you’re doing Game Art doesn’t really get as much respect as say doing Graphics simply because it’s such a new course. People just think I’m just doing an “Arty” course, which obviously has no work and no deadlines, yeah right. It’s hard work and time consuming and not just an easy choice. I don’t think that anyone on this course has found it a cakewalk and if they have then they should already be in the industry.

When I look back at starting that god damn wheelie bin and how hard it seemed at the time and take a look at what I’m doing now in comparison then it brings this into perspective, at times I do wish we had a lot more input from the tutors to prepare us for the second year and third however it pushes me to learn it for myself. I just think that with the rise of popularity of gaming over the years that it should be a bit more recognised as a creative industry by now instead as the “fun, slacker choice”.

For example here is the infamous Westwood College advertisment, showing off their game design course in rather bad taste. It’s really badly acted too…just plain awful. LoL tighten up the GRAPHICS a little bit…because making games is just that easy don’t you know.

Game design should start being seen as an educational progress instead of just something recreational. Something that was interesting to read was this article on game courses, at least worth a good read

http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/469/innovation_or_vocation_the_.php?page=2

Well this turned more into a rant then a post.