NEW MEDIA & GAMES: The Path
Excellent post from Tale of Tales on the history, the rise and fall, the pros and cons, of producing a “new” style of video game not for the gamer perhaps as much as to reach and appeal to the non-gamer audience.
I found it interesting for many reasons but basically two: 1) a high degree of interest in the game once I saw the trailer and the exquisite graphics and work that went into this, and 2) I’m facing the same dilemma in literary hypertext. Shall I continue to bother “breaking into” the reading audience that chooses romance, sci-fi, or whatever’s trendy and appeal to their interests which I’ll try to appease, or do I write for the experienced hypertext reader, i.e., the academic, the new media or contemporary literature professors, or the coding folk.
This also caught my eye within the article:
But all the modelers we tested just couldn’t get the style right. To create stylized characters for a horror game that are not cartoony but still attractive, is apparently a skill not taught in 3D academies. Part of the reason probably was that we only got male candidates. Our experience with finding our wonderful animator Laura Raines Smith had taught us that it takes a woman to animate girls properly. Maybe it takes a woman to model girls as well. We don’t blame the men. We blame the fact that more women don’t choose 3D modeling as a career!
Ah, but there for the span of thirty years, would I be.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology