Project One

When I started this project, I had so many ideas that I was feeling completely overwhelmed. Being that I had never played any of these games before taking this class, I felt like there were so many aspects of gaming culture that were new to me that I could talk about with this project. It seemed like the perfect assignment for me to use my new gaming knowledge because the “non gamer” world was still so fresh in my mind. Making a project that explained this culture should be easy, right? Wrong. It was awful. As I said before, I was completely overwhelmed by all of the ideas that came to mind. Usually this wouldn’t be a problem, having all these ideas, but none of them really stuck out to me. I began by making lists of different aspects of videogame culture that I am most drawn to, but none of these lists were leading me to any real conclusions. During a discussion we were having one day in class, something made me start thinking about how interesting it would be to see videogames and real life working together. I think it was that Remi Gaillard youtube video that we watched, where he’s dressed like Mario driving around the streets of France. Again, I started my lists. After these lead to boring idea after boring idea, I knew I needed to come up with something quick. The next time class met, we were discussing how life is a kind of game because there are very specific rules that we have to follow if we want to be successful, just like with digital games. In this game of real life, people are constantly trying to be better, have the better job, make more money, the same as gamers try to make it to the next level of the game. It was this discussion that really sparked the idea for this project. I began thinking of life as a game and became curious as to what that game might look like to the person playing it. Would all different games come together in this space? Or would they stay separate like they do in the gaming world? I came to the conclusion that I would leave the characters in their own separate lives while bringing them into ours. I decided that I wanted to combine real life photographs with the heads up displays from video games, making my own virtual reality. And so began the task of choosing which games I wanted to use and the realities in which I would place them. This may have been the most difficult part of the decision making process because I wanted this series of photographs to be fun and relatable for non gamers, but I didn’t want them to be cheesy. I chose places like the dump for Katamari Damacy, a busy interstate for Mario Kart, and a library for The Sims.

Then the editing began. This was the most time consuming and patience testing portion of this project for me. Each photo took anywhere between 2 and 3 hours to edit from start to finish. This may be because I become crazy when I’m using photoshop and can’t stop until the photograph achieves my definition of acceptable. I faced tons of problems during this project, as I’m sure every did. Most of my problems were due to not being able to find high resolution shots from the games that I wanted to use so this made me change the games that I was planning on using. Making sure I had enough information in each photo so that people knew what they were seeing was extremely important to me, but I came to the conclusion that if I couldn’t keep everything, it would be alright. Overall, I’m very pleased with my finished pieces. I think they all came together very well because they’re fun like I wanted them to be, but I don’t think they’re overly cheesy. I’m ready for critique because I want feedback on what people think I should add to them. I would love to continue working on these and adding to the collection because I want a lot of them. So far, I have five, but I’m hoping to have ten or so by the end of it. So what does everyone think? I want lots of feedback because I really hope to make this a large collection! BAM!