Saturday, December 31, 2011

Of art and limitation

It seems that the more limitated are your resources, the better is the reception of your audience if you manage to overcome such limitation with your creativity. And it truly seems to me that the limitless that technology brings can sometimes damage this purity of art as humans overcoming limitations when expressing themselves.

Technology can so much bring new forms of art. I think video games are definitely art, and the graphic limitation of the consoles back then made gems to be created when there were challenges to breakthrough. For instance, blocky 3d is what makes Grim Fandango to have such identity in its aesthetics. And I don't mean it's so cute and charming as it tried to do its best with its poor ugly graphics, but rather the it has its identity because it was molded specifically over this poligonal limitation. Or take Silent Hill, and know that we wouldn't have that amazingly terrifing foggy city if the Playstation had the capability to allow us to see far way in the scenario. The fog was the trick invented to overcome this limitation, and nowadays one can't see a foggy street and feel the terror as we think we there.

Nowadays graphics can create ultimate realism, but so what... all those first-person shooters with realist generic soldiers aren't doing me good. Where are the characters created around the limitation of the 8-bits, like Mario having his mustache for us to see there was a mouth behind the pixel supposed to be his nose, and his hate because the pixels didn't emulate the hair properly. Or Metroid designers who wanted the players to know she had an upgraded armor, and colors didn't exist in the first game boy, plus as a side-scroller you couldn't show much of her chest and helmet, so there you go, Samus, happy with your ballsy shoulders?

As I said priorly, too much technology and too few technical limitation can make art look bland, as sometimes human creativity arouses in the facing of challenges, and there's a lesson that art, throughout ages, has taught us well.

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