brionysblogsblog

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What she says: I'm fine

What she means: In the original plan for the live action Scooby Doo movie, Velma and Daphne were going to have a romantic side plot. The movie itself was originally intended for an adult audience, but then Warner Bros decided that it should be more accessible to a “family” audience, so part of their editing involved getting rid of that romance. But in the final production of the film you can still see little bits that could have led up to a romance between the two. For example, at one point Velma tickles Daphne, and Velma also refers to Daphne dreamily as “the coolest girl at Coolsville high”. However at the end of the film Fred and Daphne kiss, and that relationship is so out of nowhere. It is built from nothing. If anything, the most developed heterosexual relationship was that between Fred and Velma because of the scenes where Velma shows jealousy of Fred choosing Daphne and of being overshadowed by Fred. But no, they choose to put Fred and Daphne together. We could have had canonically gay Velma and Daphne, but instead they give us another heterosexual relationship, and they don't even do that right.

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The Dark Tower by Jordan Grimmer

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Tourmaline is done! 😊 Made her ears more elfin like cause why not 😁 Oh and her hair was sooo much fun to paint!

Karla Crome as Tourmaline Lacrou in Carnival Row

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Art by Felicia Chen

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Here’s some more homework that I did back in Trimester 1 at uni. I don’t usually do line work so the owl was a bit challenging but fun all the same. The scene was hard composition and perspective wise, overall an ok painting for what it was.

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Queen of the Night by Marta Nael

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This was a concept car that I painted for an assignment back in trimester 1, it’s a single person, three wheeler convertible.

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The controversial Dwarf Fortress

Imagine my surprise when I was told we were to be playing and then reviewing a game for this weeks blog post. The excitement slowly faded when I learnt just what game we had to play, Dwarf Fortress. A  procedurally generated fantasy game where the player is in control of a colony of dwarves. 

I had seen images of just what this game looked like, and for whatever strange reason, my friend was absolutely enthralled with this game. To set the scene, Dwarf Fortress’s interface and artstyle is entirely made from coloured numbers, letters, basically any kind of symbol that can be created from a keyboard. That being said, you can install mods and tilesets that make it look good and generally more enjoyable.

This game was widely confusing and extremely hard to get used to or even understand what was going on, I had to watch a couple tutorials (this series was good - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e82cu_G3aw) to set up my world properly. My overall opinion was that the game was amusing, if only for the fact that you’d see graphics like this in old 70′s arcades (and this game it still being updated monthly! Why stay with the symbols?!). In all honesty I did not get very far in this game, the appeal to games like this for myself is quite limited, when I do play a game like this it’s almost always because the artstyle. However Dwarf Fortress does have a certain charm about it, perhaps the artstyle has grown on me.

Watching the playthroughs was certainly more entertaining for myself (instead of just bumbling around trying to get it to work) and while an interesting game, I can say with certainty that I will never willingly play this game again. Don’t let that discourage you however, I think everyone should have a go at this whacky and intriguing game, Dwarf Fortress.

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Video Game Narratives

As I’ve come to understand, narratives in video games largely differ from that of literature and film. I believe this is because games are so incredibly interactive, you can become so immersed in the narrative that you don’t realize what’s going on around you. Game narratives can also be classified into two ways, mimesis and diegesis, which while an uncommon term for most, hold a very import role into how a game is played/perceived. For example is the game narrative re countered or presented to you? In Ian McCarmant’s article (https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/IanMcCamant/20160303/267101/Between_the_Lines_Games_and_Diegesis.php#comments) explains this idea more in depth.

Bianca Batti’s response (http://www.nymgamer.com/?p=13239) gave me a lot more to think about between the boundaries of both narrative techniques and how often the distinction between them becomes blurred in games. A confusing thought to try to wrap my head around myself, I personally see how the narratives can coincide in some games, The Moon Sliver was a great example of this (just watched a play-through of this game thanks to McCarmant). All in all, the idea that games had two widely different narrative techniques was a bit mind blowing, but now I can understand how while separate techniques games find a way to kind of blur the lines in all things. After all it is an ever changing industry and I think that our understanding of it will continue to shift and take new directions, which is all the fun of it.

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Finished this fanart for my favourite podcast -Screaming into the Abyss ( @manyteethandeyes ) - in between uni and work (wow surprising, I know). I had a lot of fun painting this, Teya’s face is looking slightly demonic but we’re gonna roll with that (call it her chaotic gay energy). Nemo was interesting because...draping fabric? Never painted that before and finally we have The Boi. I now have a furby search history on my computer (idk how to feel about it). ALSO how does one draw a TREE?!??? 

ps. I had no idea what font you use for the logo so....

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The people behind the game...

I listened to one of Tone Control’s recent podcast with Siobhan Reddy (https://www.idlethumbs.net/tonecontrol/episodes/siobhan-reddy),  who is the  co-founder and studio director of Media Molecule which created Little Big Planet. I found it quite insightful, especially what the life of a game developer/director is like. Siobhan went on to explain about her early life, particularly working in her parents shoe shop as a child/teenager and how that prepared her for managing big projects/people and communicating well with people. Which are pretty important aspects for anyone deciding to work in games. Reddy went on to say about the importance of proper industry language and being able to communicate the mood/idea that you want for a particular scene or game. Not only that but for a game developer you must know what ‘finished’ looks like, (ie. is this game ready? Does it need something more?) and being able to make a good co-operative team for projects.

To summarize, developers need to know the ins and outs of creating a game but also take the next step above and creating a team and managing the whole thing. 

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Games - Culture and Identity

I’m sure you’ve at least heard someone say “hello fellow gamers” and while I try not to cringe at the term, it certainly makes me question and contradict myself on where exactly I identify with games and game culture. Now, when I say identify I’m not talking specifically about my sexual/gender/cultural identity (THAT happened in high school), no I’m talking about whether people who play games would consider themselves as ‘gamers’. But where is the definition between a ‘gamer’ and just someone who plays games, when is it chosen as an identity, when does it become an identity for people? 

Adrienne Shaw’s article (https://adanewmedia.org/2013/06/issue2-shaw/) tackles this idea from a definitive feminist agenda, which, if it wasn’t exciting for you, it definitely was for me. She debates in what ‘gamer identity’ is and how it is defined in a social space with people outside of the hetero-normative group. 

For myself I’m stuck in a loop where by all intentions and purposes I believed I’d be considered a ‘gamer’, however the term has become so ingrained in pop-cultural memes that it’s enough to make we want to wrench myself away from such a term. Even if it is where I’d belong. This isn’t much of a surprise seeing as games, game culture and pop culture naturally coincide with one another. It is with a begrudging acceptance that I identify with the term ‘gamer’, this is certainly cannot be said for every person who plays games, and it is a big hope of mine that the term falls out of pop culture so that I might not be so embarrassed referring to myself as such.

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Context in games.

Coming at ya’ with another hot topic, I delve into context and how it can play a massive part in a game’s fictional world. When we talk about game contexts we are talking about the fictional world, the contemporary world, politics, industry, culture, history and all that jazz. For my specific take on this, I’m going to be focusing on the fictional context of Horizon: Zero Dawn. The game which everyone was buzzing about, has a major flaw that needs to be addressed. Such as the cultural appropriation of Native American and Indigenous tribes in the fictional world/context of this game. Now I don’t want to be that ‘white girl’ that thinks she knows everything about Native American and Indigenous communities plight, so I implore you to read Dia Lacina’s article (https://medium.com/@dialacina/what-we-talk-about-when-we-dont-talk-about-natives-60f4af9ef675#.a6uiuomwd) that properly explains the problematic nature of the fictional context in Horizon: Zero Dawn. Mike Diver also commented on this discourse here (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z4kxk4/horizon-zero-dawn-writer-responds-to-criticism-of-native-american-appropriation).

Context in video games seems extremely broad because it covers a lot of important topics in games. In particular I believe that you need to do proper research (and maybe actually work with someone in whichever minority it is that game developers always want to exploit) into the history of said communities and understand why it is an overall bad idea to steal a culture and appropriate it  even if it’s in a fictional context. I think the gaming community as a whole, especially developers, need to take more responsibility for their actions and certainly start educating themselves on the improper use of Native American and Indigenous communities/tribes culture and other minorities (see my blog about Transphobia in CyberPunk).

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Why don’t we archive games?

As you can guess by the title, the topic of this weeks blog discusses the idea of archiving video games. It’s certainly something that myself or anyone in the ‘gaming community’ has ever spoken about, which I find quite devastating. While games as a whole are relatively new in terms of only being created in the last 70 years (OXO - developed in 1952 by Alexander S. Douglas and Tennis for Two - developed in 1958 by William Higginbotham), there is a history that is almost lost due to the inability or thoughtlessness of game archiving. 

Gita Jackson’s blog(https://boingboing.net/2015/05/28/the-vast-unplayable-history-o.html) is enlightening and insightful, not only is this same problem occurring in film but there are also games that seem to have just been wiped from existence. Its especially devastating to see this because companies like Konami see games as technology, entertainment and profit rather than a story, rather than literal history. 

It has definitely come to my attention  now that games need to be preserved and archived properly otherwise we are losing valuable pieces of history, after all games are an artform. Technology is progressing and so should our mindsets, more money and education should go into game archiving/preserving so that younger generations can understand where it all began and what it’s come to now.

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Subjectivity

An interesting topic was brought to my attention the other day and it was, subjectivity of player experience. To sum this up it is how the individual, the player, is subject to their own thoughts and emotions that create a unique experience of a game. 

This article (http://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm) by  Richard Bartle explains this topic in more depth and how players can be sorted into four different sub categories (achievers, explorers, socializers and killers) due to how they play the game. 

Subjectivity has also been brought up in the debate between objective criticism and subjective criticism in game critiquing. I happen to agree with this brilliant article I read on Ludogabble (https://ludogabble.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/why-we-need-more-subjective-games-criticism/) that explained a bit of the discourse in this on-going debate. After reading this it is to no ones surprise that I believe that subjective criticism is needed in games, every player has a different experience, different thoughts, emotions and interactions when we play a game. As soon as he individual enters the “play” space, it is subjective. The outdated idea that objective criticism should be the only form of critiquing is whack, players are not all the exact same code in an algorithm, players are the audience with their own voice.

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Art by Liang Mark

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Ludonarrative Dissonance in video games???

What is ludonarrative dissonance? Its the “conflict between a video game's narrative told through the story and the narrative told through the gameplay”, but is it a useful term? Yes, absolutely! Ludonarrative dissonance is an exceedingly helpful term in game criticism and critique, this is because we finally have a clear way of describing the warring intersections between ludic and narrative elements that take place in some games. If you’d like a more in depth understanding of what this term means check out this blog that explores ludonarrative dissonance, particularly in Bioshock ( https://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html?fbclid=IwAR2pK7HcraE6vSslv_eleuCXuhtTv_D8FUDv-IHVmeESH4UNvTFxPvlM-Iw ).

You might be as surprised as I am but just recently I started playing through Tomb Raider, now for all intents and purposes this game is incredible, however there is a ludonarrative dissonance between the mechanics and the story. By this I mean that Lara Croft, a young archaeologist stumbling through many adventures, goes from an absolute killing machine with a bow in gameplay to a frightened woman almost unwilling to kill for food in cut scenes. The contradiction between gameplay Lara Croft and story Lara Croft is so glaringly obvious to me now that I wonder how I missed it before, but its a great example for ludonarrative dissonance.