Art Lecture

Game Art lecture by  Dr. Henry Lowood

         

             Mr Lowood presented to few people during this lecture, but that did not stop him from explaining the huge impact the life of computer gaming has had on his life. He presented his lecture through many different images and a few videos kind of explaining the works of computer gaming. His main focus was documenting digital worlds, and without documenting them, they do not matter or exist. What is the point of our gaming world if it is not kept safe in our archives?

He explained that there are three mechanics to game design, its players, and basically documenting it.

The first was code capture: which he explained to be demos and replays.

The second was screen capture: most any online player should know what this is. He explained that capturing video was more important than capturing pictures of game play.

The third thing was asset capture: Lowood explained that this is compositing scenes. It was not much elaborated from that.

      With documenting activities in the digital world, you basically have software preservation. So with this, people in the future will understand how it worked back in the day and how exactly we played with it. Lowood explained this with an example of World of Warcraft a.k.a. W.O.W. And how exactly will the future be able to understand this game without documenting every bit of it?

     Documenting is really history of people playing the game, which is where the screen capture really comes into play. He eventually showed us a video of people played a quest in W.O.W. and how it was captured and documented.

Besides explaining documentation, he also explained the virtual world and the whole 3D aspect of it. Lowood also mentioned exploration: which is to discover places in the virtual world where people are not suppose to actually access. He also showed a video of people climbing a mountain sideways ending up in this abandoned area of the game. Obviously not something player could normally do. He also showed videos of 3D characters outside their game play and into the life of music. People actually took these models and had them play to a real life song.

      Overall the lecture was interesting and I learned a lot about online game play then I actually wanted to know!