"We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new
beauty..."
These words from the Futurists manifesto were written at a time when the world was becoming familiar with the last new art-form, moving pictures. The earliest surviving moving picture is a scene of people walking in a garden, and was created a mere twenty years before. By 1909 more than 100 commercially produced movies were released worldwide.
Movies were a natural extension of the technology of photography, itself an entirely new art-form, and the first of any significance to emerge since the development of oil paint revolutionised the graphic arts in Europe in the fifteenth century. Entirely new ways of expression, new vehicles for creativity don't come along very often, nor are they spawned unbidden from the ether, they usually grow from an existing technology as moving pictures, (and in this I include both cinema and television) grew out of photography. The same is true of our newest art-form, the interactive 3D world.
Interactive worlds have a direct heritage in the mechanics of film, theatre and television. Unless you are watching news footage, anything you experience through these media takes place against a background specifically constructed for the purpose. Someone has designed, built and dressed the space in which that action takes place. Set designers, carpenters, props managers and a whole raft of creative and skilled people make the settings for the dramas we enjoy everyday. And you needn't think this doesn't apply to location settings either...
There is a concept in the performing arts called the "Fourth Wall". It goes back to the convention in theatre of the stage being made up of three "boundaries" or walls, the wings on each side and the back wall of the stage. The "Fourth Wall" is transparent and faces the audience, but still in most cases separates the audience from the action. It is this "Fourth Wall" that prevents film, TV and theatre audiences from interacting with the narrative. This changes when we come to address computer games. In a computer game there is no longer a "Fourth Wall", the audience is not longer separate from the narrative, but an integral part of it. This was the beginning of the interactive world.
The development of computer games had been following its own trajectory alongside improvements in personal computer technology and graphics processing. Through the earliest 2 dimensional games like Pong and Pacman, to the sleight-of-hand false 3D of isometric games like Super Mario. The first commercial releases to enable any sort of immersive experience were from Id Software whose ground-breaking DOOM still has its fans in the gaming community. The "first-person" viewpoint of DOOM brought the player right into the game world...and that is exactly how things were to develop.
All of this was happening in the early 1990's, by 2000 the "Game World" was increasingly being recognised as a creative "thing" in its own right. In 2004 the first book on the topic was published. "The Art of Game Worlds" (Morris and Hartas, Ilex 2004) legitimised what I now believe was a newly emerging art-form, but there was still much more to come.
Progress is often about congruence. This is increasingly evident in the modern world where the technologies of camera, cellphone and personal digital assistant have converged in the Smartphone, to give just one example. So it is with the development of interactive worlds. Of course not everything you see in film or television is "real" in the strict sense. CGI, or "computer generated imagery" accounts for a surprisingly large proportion of what we see in film and television and it's in this area that things start to get interesting, when film quality CGI combines with gaming culture.
Game worlds were a step in the right direction, but even though we were now on the other side of the fourth wall, the player was still restricted by the games narrative. At best a player could ignore the game requirements and "go rogue" exploring the game's environment just for the sake of it, Another restriction was that these worlds were designed and crafted by specialists, graphic designers, modellers and developers. What was needed was a plot-less, flexible space that could be built and furnished by its users, a space that could also be social, after all, you would want people to see what you'd made, wouldn't you?
There were a few false-starts in the early 1990's. Superscape was launched as an accessible 3D environment platform, Worlds Chat went live as the first multi-user 3D space and Moove's Roomancer offered user-definable spaces. For a time, VRML seemed to offer an accessible platform for user-defined spaces and, built on the VRML protocol, Cybertown, which went live in 1995, offered users the one of the earliest immersive worlds. Though flawed each of these represented a step in the right direction on a journey that brought us to the launch of Second Life in 2003.
That is the how far we have come, and now ahead of us is an opportunity to create, interact, explore, celebrate, experience and run amok with one of the most exciting developments in technology and art and design. Tangerine is going on her travels!!!!
beauty..."
These words from the Futurists manifesto were written at a time when the world was becoming familiar with the last new art-form, moving pictures. The earliest surviving moving picture is a scene of people walking in a garden, and was created a mere twenty years before. By 1909 more than 100 commercially produced movies were released worldwide.
Movies were a natural extension of the technology of photography, itself an entirely new art-form, and the first of any significance to emerge since the development of oil paint revolutionised the graphic arts in Europe in the fifteenth century. Entirely new ways of expression, new vehicles for creativity don't come along very often, nor are they spawned unbidden from the ether, they usually grow from an existing technology as moving pictures, (and in this I include both cinema and television) grew out of photography. The same is true of our newest art-form, the interactive 3D world.
Interactive worlds have a direct heritage in the mechanics of film, theatre and television. Unless you are watching news footage, anything you experience through these media takes place against a background specifically constructed for the purpose. Someone has designed, built and dressed the space in which that action takes place. Set designers, carpenters, props managers and a whole raft of creative and skilled people make the settings for the dramas we enjoy everyday. And you needn't think this doesn't apply to location settings either...
There is a concept in the performing arts called the "Fourth Wall". It goes back to the convention in theatre of the stage being made up of three "boundaries" or walls, the wings on each side and the back wall of the stage. The "Fourth Wall" is transparent and faces the audience, but still in most cases separates the audience from the action. It is this "Fourth Wall" that prevents film, TV and theatre audiences from interacting with the narrative. This changes when we come to address computer games. In a computer game there is no longer a "Fourth Wall", the audience is not longer separate from the narrative, but an integral part of it. This was the beginning of the interactive world.
The development of computer games had been following its own trajectory alongside improvements in personal computer technology and graphics processing. Through the earliest 2 dimensional games like Pong and Pacman, to the sleight-of-hand false 3D of isometric games like Super Mario. The first commercial releases to enable any sort of immersive experience were from Id Software whose ground-breaking DOOM still has its fans in the gaming community. The "first-person" viewpoint of DOOM brought the player right into the game world...and that is exactly how things were to develop.
All of this was happening in the early 1990's, by 2000 the "Game World" was increasingly being recognised as a creative "thing" in its own right. In 2004 the first book on the topic was published. "The Art of Game Worlds" (Morris and Hartas, Ilex 2004) legitimised what I now believe was a newly emerging art-form, but there was still much more to come.
Progress is often about congruence. This is increasingly evident in the modern world where the technologies of camera, cellphone and personal digital assistant have converged in the Smartphone, to give just one example. So it is with the development of interactive worlds. Of course not everything you see in film or television is "real" in the strict sense. CGI, or "computer generated imagery" accounts for a surprisingly large proportion of what we see in film and television and it's in this area that things start to get interesting, when film quality CGI combines with gaming culture.
Game worlds were a step in the right direction, but even though we were now on the other side of the fourth wall, the player was still restricted by the games narrative. At best a player could ignore the game requirements and "go rogue" exploring the game's environment just for the sake of it, Another restriction was that these worlds were designed and crafted by specialists, graphic designers, modellers and developers. What was needed was a plot-less, flexible space that could be built and furnished by its users, a space that could also be social, after all, you would want people to see what you'd made, wouldn't you?
There were a few false-starts in the early 1990's. Superscape was launched as an accessible 3D environment platform, Worlds Chat went live as the first multi-user 3D space and Moove's Roomancer offered user-definable spaces. For a time, VRML seemed to offer an accessible platform for user-defined spaces and, built on the VRML protocol, Cybertown, which went live in 1995, offered users the one of the earliest immersive worlds. Though flawed each of these represented a step in the right direction on a journey that brought us to the launch of Second Life in 2003.
That is the how far we have come, and now ahead of us is an opportunity to create, interact, explore, celebrate, experience and run amok with one of the most exciting developments in technology and art and design. Tangerine is going on her travels!!!!