Interested in Virtual Vistas and Carefully-Crafted Character Designs? I Might Have Just The Thing for You...

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

I don't usually like to promote my own little projects on New World Notes, but today I'm making an exception that I hope a fair number of you will enjoy. I recently started a Tumblr called SingleFrameVideoGame, with a very specific purpose in mind: I wanted to finally make use of the thousands of video game screenshots I've accumulated over the past few years.

And no, that number is not an exaggeration.

Second Life definitely started me down a path of over-enthusiastic virtual photography, but as games get prettier and prettier I find myself mashing the screencap hotkey more and more. This has left me with folders and folders of gorgeous (or ridiculous) scenes from many amazing (or appalling) games. For example, I've kept over five-hundred screenshots from Bioshock Infinite (out of approximately one-thousand that I took at the time), and until now they've been little more than five-hundred desktop backgrounds.

It always felt like a bit of a waste, but I couldn't bring myself to just delete them. More to the point, I've always liked seeing other peoples' screenshots of games, beyond the press images that get scattered and reposted everywhere. I wanted to share mine, too, ideally so that it would be easy for current fans and curious newcomers to stumble across something that might interest them.

Of course putting something like this on Flickr felt sort of wrong. These games were created by teams of incredibly talented individuals. They spent months, even years perfecting every scene and angle... All I'm doing is lining everything up as best I can and mashing a button, maybe cropping and resizing the results at most. Sharing them on a site meant for "real" photographers and artists, Flickr or otherwise, didn't feel right. Tumblr however is a haven for sharing and attributing work from all over, so it seemed like an ideal place for this kind of project, especially since people already share this kind of content there all the time.

Currently SingleFrameVideoGame is alternating between some jaw-dropping content from Remember Me (a game I wrote about here a couple weeks ago) and significantly more ridiculous content from Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Though the games will change over time, I plan to balance serious and not-so-serious content, since there are plenty of less-than-pretty games that still have their moments of charm.

... But don't worry; true afficionados only interested in ogling stunning virtual environments and characters can stick to the "beautiful" post tag to filter out all that undesirable humor.

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Iris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[Arcadia Codesmith]

"All I'm doing is lining everything up as best I can and mashing a button"

That's the art of photography. A photographer (generally) composes elements that were created by other people or by nature into an original work. The art is in the perception and composition... and maybe a wee bit in the darkroom or digital editing suite.

A good screenshot is nothing more or less than a digital photograph of a digital environment. Yes, the environment is 100% man-made... which is just a few percentage points removed from Rome or Manhattan. But how you perceive and present that environment is YOUR art, nobody else's.

Modesty is a fine and wonderful thing, but not when it dimisses the artistry of the medium.

Sorry, I don't mean to lecture, but it's a pet peeve I have with artists who don't think they're artists.

[Iris Ophelia]

@Arcadia I do generally agree with you, and I'm sorry if I came off dismissive of the medium as a whole. I would say that virtual photography (as I'm used to it) often involves more staging and post-processing than I'm doing in most of these shots, including modding and world customization along the lines of Jay Faircloth's Skyrim photography (http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2012/09/amazing-skyrim-photography-by-jay-faircloth.html).

When it comes to the world of in-engine game photography there are a lot of people really earning the right to call their work art. My shots for this blog are going to be pretty vanilla by comparison, highlighting the designers' work more than my own, so I hesitate to hold it up alongside what others like Jay are doing in the same area. Sort of the video game equivalent of a tourist snapping photos on a disposable camera during a bus tour compared to Ansel Adams.

That's my personal view of what I'm doing specifically, not a blanket judgement I want to cast over the whole field... Maybe that makes it worse, but I hope not. ^^;