Fragment - Artistic Representation

The 4 fragments required of us for our thesis are the following

• Artistic Singularity
• Artistic Representation
• The Technique/The Art
• Commercial Art vs. Contemporary Art

The first of the four that i would like to go over is that of Artistic Representation. Being a game designer and working alone in my project (along with Tiago Fernando, a programmer from Brazil,) i have a certain lack of REAL talent for the artistic aspects of my project, but i have found a style that i believe will serve it's purpose in bringing out my Game Design, and my mechanics. I'll Explain further.

First, i would like to present my Fragment for this part of the project:

"The structures that comprise an instance of a videogame are various kinds of graphical, aural, textual, and even tactile representations on a display device, because it is these things that a playing has the role of rendering from the game’s algorithm. Furthermore, given that these representations are almost always of fictional events, in depicting situations with an imagined existence only, we might in a Waltonian sense say that the structure that is being determined by the interactor’s choices is a perceptually modal “prop” that depicts a fictional world (Walton, 1990: 21). Hence, videogames may be “interactive fictions” in a theoretically robust sense (Tavinor, 2005)"

- http://aesthetics-online.org/articles/index.php?articles_id=44

Essentially, that which engages the player through visuals, sound, and touch can be considered art in the same way a movie, or a painting could be. It is not art in it's traditional sense, but Game Design is represented through how the player will interact and engage with the Product, and a Game designer's job is to try and convey specific feelings and reactions in the player with engaging, attractive, fun mechanics, the same way an environment artist would with a beautiful landscape, but the Game Designer must (most of the time) do so without the visual aid and without the help of sound. A Game Designer who has set out to make the players of their game get excited trying to do manage 3 or 4 things at once, and ends up getting the desired effect is an artist in his own right.

What I set out to do with my artistic choices is to employ a minimalist style visually, so that a person playing my game is more engaged in the mechanics and the gameplay than they are with the mind-blowing visuals, and incredible sound. I made this choice so that the visuals do not take away from the mechanics, but also so that their simplicity (hopefully) doesn't make the player want more to look at. Obviously, a player will also only be engaged into a game that they find visually stimulating at the very minimum, so i decided to employ brighter flatter colors into the gameplay so that the game would still be visually attractive (if screenshots were to be seen on the app store for example). I also chose a simpler route visually, to really emphasize that the simplicity of my game is spread throughout every aspect (from the controls, to the other mechanics, to any other aspect).

Here are some examples of how I am currently employing my visual aspects (actual ipad screenshots):

These are evidently all screenshots of a WIP visual representation of my project. They are in no way final, but serve to show the simplicity of the graphics and visuals.