Essay

Izzy DeGuero

Art 381

Feb. 22 2017

Gaming in the Real World

Games have many different possibilities and outcomes. Whether it be board games like monopoly where we can pretend to have all the money or end up losing it all, similar to real life; or video games where we can build our own cities and have it all. Games are a type of escape. Board Games allowed people to be someone that they couldn’t be in real life, however now we can go beyond that with video games. We can have anything, any job we want, or all the money we want. We can create any structure, make all rules and even bend the laws of physics controlling time and space; there are no limits with video games. This result leads people to be sucked into a world that is better than the reality that we actually live.

In the book Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark, Wark describes how gaming is a way to disengage from the real world to be taken to a world where there is no sense of concern or trouble.  It explains how video games can be a bad thing for some and a distraction from people living their actual life in the real world. How in games you can always start over, like if you die or lose the level. But we lose sense of ourselves and forget that we can’t just hit restart in our actual reality. Video games have become a world of their own that encompassed the lives of people shaping the way they live in their reality. However, if we were to look at the big picture our reality it is not just video games but phones, T.V’s, computers that are distracting us now.

As I am writing this on February 21, 2017 Katy Perry released a music video directed by Matthew Cullen, to her new song Chained to the Rhythm. Where she perfectly demonstrated in creating a world that she feels we all live in, how we are living in a bubble. I found this video interesting because it showed how we are oblivious to what is happening around us. It starts off with Perry in a futuristic world and highlights the chaos of the world with crazy roller coasters. She also emphasizes the 50’s era by showcasing the ideal family unit and how that symbolized the American Dream. She shows the fact that we stare at our phones and screens all the time and don’t interact with actual reality of the world in front us. The world is not some perfect cookie cutter life, and she tries to grab our attention to look up and notice. However, just because the world may not be perfect does not mean that there can’t be amazing beauty in the world we live in and the worlds that we create.

Since we have the ability to create these worlds we also have the ability to create some inventive and beautiful artwork. We used to just draw, paint, sculpt, then we moved to computers and created this gaming world of art, and now we even have virtual reality where we can paint in 3d. Art used to be restricted but now there are endless possibilities, nothing is off limits. That’s why for the city that I am creating I want to create the impossible. Somewhat like in Katy Perry’s music video I also intend to include the past and future visual aspects into my own city. I want my city to have an unknown feeling of not knowing what time the character is in. Buildings will be from the past, present, and future.

The inspiration for my city came from the T.V. show Outlander. Outlander is about a woman who is from 1945 visiting Scotland and is transported to 18^th century Scotland. When watching the show I fell in love with the small town and architecture in 1945 as well as the architecture in the 18^th century. Which made me want to combine the years and make it into one, include brand new buildings built from the 18^th century as well as the ruins from the 18^th century. Since the show took place in Scotland there was vast amounts of countryside and nature. I wanted this to be a main feature in my city so I decided to have my city be encompassed in nature. The buildings will have vines growing on the sides, trees growing from roofs and a river running right through the city. This is a city that is a dystopia yet a little utopia as well.

            In Gamer Theory, Wark discuses the use of a dystopia and a utopia and how “all dystopian writing is also utopian”(108). When we create a world that is of dystopian form we are thus insinuating that a utopia is impossible to achieve however Wark explains “ the failure of utopia might point to nothing so much as the inadequate properties of the lines employed to make it operational” (108).  That’s why for my city I feel like it resembles a type of dystopia that has reached utopia. It is a dystopia in the fact that the city looks a little in disarray however there is a peacefulness that the city has, there is calming aspect, to feel one with nature.

That is why games are so addicting because they transport people to another world. Whether that is perceived as bad or good depends on the person playing the game. Yet the art of gaming today has created something so vast that it does leave us wanting more. Which is why the overall outcome that I want for my city is to encompass the feeling of adventure, serenity, and intrigue.