Building the Picture: Visual Environments

In this short essay I will discuss one of the five videos that are assigned. The video that I will be talking about is named Peter Gornstein: Virtual Environments. In this video Peter Gornstein talks about the similarities between the virtual environments that are created for the video game Ryse Son of Rome and paintings from the Renaissance Era. In his speech about visual environments Peter Gornstein talks about how they have used the techniques that are abundantly used in renaissance paintings to create a better visual world that gives direct and compact messages and feelings to the player. Although they did not mention it Alberti calls this “historia”.In their game Ryse Son of Rome. They tried to create visual environments with historia by using techniques from Renaissance painters. Additionally this speech also explains the creative process  behind creating a visual environment.

In this video they explain how they acquire certain effects they wanted to create. Peter Gornstein states that they use depth, space and light just like a renaissance painter would do. He further states that they used smaller objects to tell the tertiary story, background characters to tell a story or to guide the eye. By doing these he states that he can keep the attention of the player and tell the story of the game properly. This feels like this isn’t a controversial argument and it’s how video games should tell their secondary story. This is most of the things that are stated in the video are what Alberti actually wants the painters to do and the things that will make a pretty good painting. Alberti supports background characters and their usage to guide the eye while talking about historia, he talks about the importance of light and shade in the third part of his book about using black and white and finally, depth and space is talked about in the conscription part of the book. The problem however is the fact that a game and a painting are different from each other. You look at a painting to admire its beauty and understand the story that it tells. But in a game you look for much more that a story and beauty. You look for many different things like gameplay and freedom. Even though Peter Gornstein starts the video with the sentence:  “Virtual worlds have no limits, right? You can go anywhere, it can be any kind of environment. Only the imagination basically sets boundaries.” This is wrong because a lot of the time there are certain places that the players are not supposed to go because of the constraints of the game engine or simply poor design choices (for instance invisible walls or barricades of velvet rail to cut off places). Because of these differences  most of the time you don’t even need to capture the attention of the player to something because In any given level of gaming the player looks for things other than the main thing that the player is supposed to look to find Easter eggs and/or collectibles and they are encouraged to do so in the way of gaining points and achievements. So whatever that the game designers wants the player to see they will probably see it. Furthermore in gaming there is a concept called immersion. Immersion is the feeling that the player is living inside this world that is created. It is one of the main reasons that you continue to play a single game till its end even though you have 70 other games that you didn’t really open . This is completely different than how painting wants you to look at events. In paintings you look at the events from a window but in gaming and in a game that is significantly immersive it feels like the event is happening where you are. Because of this it feels like taking a painters approach to creating visual worlds is not the most reasonable and the best thing and this might be true because most of the games that really caught our attention in storytelling and beauty did not use any of these techniques that the visual designer mentioned. Binding of Isaac, Undertale , Five Nights at Freddy’s, Bastion and even Life is Strange did not use the things that are mentioned  and got awarded for their art design and their stories, meanwhile Ryse the Son of Rome had mediocre reviews.

In this video they also mentioned how they built the environments. In order to build their environments they sketch, brainstorming, talking through the ideas. Then they do loose concept sketches where we kind of sketch out and feel for it. This was a really interesting part of the spreech because it shows the effort that goes behind creating places. These sketches have almost no significance because they will not be able to use it while creating the world in the computer. But it shows how world building and regular painting is not really different. Altough they had a classical approach in lighting and depth and historia, After these sketches they went with a unique approach that will upset Alberti and anyone who is very invested in naturalism because they decided to merge art deco style with traditional roman style to create a unique look that has almost no historical basis. After that they do something called whiteboxing. This is something almost completely different that painting because in order for this to work the person who must appreciate the beauty and the story must be inside of the painting. This again kind of solidifies my idea about paintings and games aren’t really same and Alberti’s instructions should not exactly be followed while building worlds. Although whiteboxing uses many things related to perspective to fit everything in a harmonious way. Then they pretty much paint these whiteboxes and add light and  polish it. The entire process felt like how Alberti wanted the painters to paint. (For a human, first bone, then flesh and then skin/clothing) It kind of drew a parallel between painting and game design.

In conclusion these are the ideas that have popped into my head. It seems that game design and Alberti’s ideas on painting and the techniques used in paintings have many similarities such as the usage of secondary characters, using light and shade, perspective, the general creation of  a level and creation of the historia but just using these techniques does not create beautiful and well-designed games. This is because of the difference of perspective (the player is inside the game but the audience looks from outside),the concept of immersion, and the culture of gaming (people looking for easter eggs and achievements).