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.