hollowminds

2 comments by hollowminds on Apr 3rd, 2011

Im just going to make my blog posts on this based off of my actual blog (hollowminds.com/blog) so if theres any formatting issues please give me a yell (i copy and paste.)

In my animation class there is a woman who is a good deal older than myself, exposed to an entirely different generation of views on so many things such as mediums to deliver narrative. This morning we we’re talking about our current assignment (On semiotics) and i began to explain what i was going to talk about, a videogame called Silent hill 2.Now me talking about games isn’t really anything new, I’ve been talking about them all my life. However to my classmate this was all new, she didn’t actually know that video games could be used to tell a deep story and before you all react to this in shock and anger its really a nice thing. You see the thing is she was genuinely interested in this, that a game can deliver the narrative of a book, the visual lanuage of a film and the interaction of a whole medium of its own.

Anyway back to Silent hill 2 and what we were talking about, because even in the discussion i got a little off topic about the medium of interactive media. I decided to show her my notes on the construction of the ‘monsters’ in the game, i think the first thing she noticed was the bubble headed nurse, she assumed the image wasnt what it would look like in the game (due to the scratchy texture, if you’ve played silent hill 2 you know what i mean, if not go play it.) I went to explain how older hardware couldn’t handle large amounts of data to render and then shown her some images to explain the use of fog to hide background polys.Anyway, long rant short. It was interesting to see how people from other demographics saw things, probably due to the difference in upbringings with the medium. To her credit when she was a child and if she ever was exposed to video games they were more than likely a child’s plaything, as much as we hate to admit it we did somewhat grow up with this medium. It did start off like that for us. We also explored educational games and games to help the brain, she had an interest in stroke victims and the use of interactive media to help retrain their brains. Its all very interesting, and all the more reason for me to study this field and medium.Oh and we also touched on characterization in games when i decided to show her team fortress 2′s meet the sniper. Though im not a massive fan of the game anymore if theres one thing i need to give Valve credit for there is how well they made the characters for each class. She asked me if i have any characters, and i suppose i kind of dont… i never looked far into that… to me i always saw myself placing the character around the situation and not the situation around the character… i suppose i should work on that!