Xaxi is a virtual memory place apparently designed to teach Aliceffekt's Conlang Traumae which is a kind of language with 27 root words which go together in different ways to create different meanings. Despite having played the game I don't really understand it, however it was a very interesting looking space to explore. After an hour or so messing around with that last image I had this: I really like this as either just a beautiful sphere thing or perhaps as an analogy for our digital age or similar.
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Another unusual one, like the last few from Itchio games. Loop the loop seems to be a surreal art garden of sorts.
The swirls came from an area where the entire landscape suddenly started curving around you as you walked, they remind me of waves. The hand image strongly reminds me of the image I made in first semester in Thomas Was Alone, perhaps I'll try presenting them together at some point. Glitchhikers is a game in which you drive down a highway having conversations with rather maudlin and surreal hitchhikers. You can choose what you say to them, but mostly the game knows what it wants you to say so gives you near identical options. I wanted to make something about this frustrating mechanic, how it reflects some conversations in real life, but I couldn't get it to work. Station Fantome involves standing at an underground station watching trains go by.
If there's more I couldn't find it. Although the reflectiveness is interesting, I'm reminded of the philosopher who once said "art is the taste of reflection" and "popular culture is the taste of sense" or pleasure. I think this definition of art vs pop culture is really relevant to my work, I do not only enjoy the games I play I take time to reflect on them, their implications etc. Outer Wilds is a space exploration game, with a plenty of humour and a dash of mystery. Haven't seen too much of it yet (as I accidentally sent myself spiraling off into deep space) but what I have seen looks very interesting. I particularly like the mechanic where you can launch a satellite and take pictures from it, I suspect I shall be using this quite a bit. Satellite Images:
Very interesting visual style on this one, reminds me of cheap film grain or my somewhat dodgy attempts at film photography prints in first year. I really like this first image, not as sure about the other ones, but this first one works really well. The game originally had a little bit of colour highlights, like a soft 3D edge around stuff, but I removed it because I wanted that film grain look. That "You Died" image really reminds me of the Barbara Kruger Your Body is a Battleground.
So I think this was meant to be a sort of parkour game, in the vein of Mirrors Edge, but as soon as I fell off the first building I couldn't work out how to get back up again.
So not a brilliant game but I like the starkness of the procedurally generated city. Saints Row: The Third has a big world and some lovely depth of field effects but is third-person and has really big HUD (on-screen health bars etc.) which makes taking large images difficult. I might be able to find a mod to fix that but until then all the images have to be a cropped sub-set of the whole shot, resulting in small file size and not much space for enlargement. Still think I got some interesting images though. Just an example of what I was talking about before: So the first image is sorta what I was going for, but as you can see the map is massively in the way and getting that to look right through photoshop was just too difficult. But you can see how much space the player character and HUD takes up.
(The image didn't turn out how I wanted anyway, when I was lining the picture up she didn't have her gun out but the policeman was still aiming at her, she automatically got the gun out before I could take the shot though, slightly spoiling the image.) Bit of a strange mix of styles on this one, but I really got to liking the female figure. Took quite a few portraits of her, these being my favorites.
So I recently discovered Itchio Games, a website that sells all kinds of interesting games.
It also features quite a number of free titles, many of which have really interesting art styles, environments and ideas behind them. I've just been on a bit of a downloading spree and will probably be investigating these games one by one over the next few weeks. Hopefully I'll be able to get some interesting images out of them, I'm keen. Another one with a very unusual art style. Return of the Obra Dinn features a 1-bit white and browny-green colour scheme, due to the 1-bit style the detail of objects and environments in the game increases and you get closer and decreases as you move farther away.
As the game is only in a prototype stage there aren't many different environments to explore, just the exterior and interior of the captains quarters and deck really. |
AuthorMy name is Sarah Lawson, I am a final year student in the bachelor of Visual Arts Photography at UniSA Archives
November 2015
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