Aesthetics: June 2007 Archive Page

When the steam train roared into history, hissing smoke and howling into the night, it was an awesome beast, adorned in the finest woods, ivory, gold, and intricate inlays, like some Serpent King on a sacred tapestry. The automobiles of the 20's to 60's, each was a work of art. The television and radio affected the world in more ways that can be imagined, changing the entire dynamic of human social structure and communication. They were both appropriately gifted with the most lavish of hand tooled, wooden scrolled cabinetry, housings which borrowed architectural details from the grandest schools, churches and banks.

Sadly, the personal computer, which has impacted the world more profoundly than probably all of the previously mentioned inventions put together, never recieved the same kind treatment. It went from a buzzing beige cube, to a buzzing white one, to the garish space-eggs you see nowadays. --"Datamancer"

--The Nagy Magical-Movable-Type Pixello-Dynamotronic Computational Engine (Datamancer)

--How NOT To Use Powerpoint By Comedian Don McMillan (YouTube)

--IF Comic (David Garcia's Blog)

I am an animator and concept artist by trade. However, I don't think my art is really so great that it deserves a "how to". My devotion to my live steam hobby however, lends my steampunk designs a level of authenticity that often lacks in steampunk art. Therefore, this is just a quick explanation of parts, and how to draw and design a machine that "looks" convincing.

Please keep in mind that these are super simple explanations of different components of live steam, and steam buffs will probably will tear these descriptions to pieces :) I feel that it is important to get the basic idea without having to go into dry and boring detail. By no means am I an expert in steam engines. This info is taken from my personal experience working on small scale live-steam engines. Most of the examples below are found on model engines, which works off of the same basic principle as the big ones. This is also just a guide. There are no set rules for concept art. You just make whatever appeals to you. In other words.... this is steam for artists, not really to educate you in details of steam power! :) However, it is important to understand some fundamentals of steam power, in order to make your drawings look believable, as something that could have been built in Victorian times.

First you have to understand steam, and how it works by looking at each part of the machine. --How to Draw SteamPunk Machines (www.crabfu.com)

"Looking at this brochure, it's obvious Paul just wanted to use the 'wave' frame effect from that new PhotoFrame 2.0 software package we got last week," fellow Blue Moon graphic designer Jared Mahaffey said. "There's whacked-out, psychedelic edges all over the place--on the photos, on the floor-plan charts, even on the text boxes, for God's sake." --Graphic Designer's Judgment Clouded By Desire To Use New Photoshop Plug-In (The Onion (Satire))

BioShock will be Ken Levine's magnum opus. It will be his career defining game. It's ambitious, unusual and aggressive, mixing the high polish expected of a "next generation" shooter, with equal parts storytelling, politics, and philosophy, all wrapped up in a bloody, underwater, 1940's bow.

[...]

The most prominent character in BioShock -- Andrew Ryan, Rapture's founder -- is an embodiment of a self-centered, free-will political ideology called Objectivism. Objectivism is the brainchild of 1960s author Ayn (rhymes with mine) Rand. She defined it thus: "Man as a Heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason his only absolute." Put more simply, an Objectivist says "the world is what it is, my place in it is important, the only way to know anything is to use your own head, and the best political system is one that leaves me the hell alone. "Andrew Ryan is Ayn Rand meets Howard Hughes," explains Levine.

The initial plot of BioShock -- the founding of this utopia -- mirrors the plot (albeit through a glass darkly) of Rand's 1960's epic book "Atlas Shrugged." In "Atlas Shrugged" the worlds elite -- the "atlases" -- stage a minor rebellion and remove themselves to a better place: a valley where they can be free of the eye and hand of the world's governments and those who would leech off their talents. While the rhetoric of Rapture's founder, Andrew Ryan (an anagram of Ayn Rand with an extra "rew" thrown in for obfuscation) sounds like a Randian polemic, his nemesis is ambiguously named "Atlas." To figure out which one is really the good guy or the bad guy, we'll all have to play the game.

BioShock's story -- for those who wish to stop blowing things up to delve into it -- is about translating this Objectivist ideology into the real world. "One of the things that's very appealing about Rand to me, and about Rapture, is at least in the beginning they're driven by reason." Indeed, this is what attracts most people to Objectivism: it's based on rationality above all else. By both highlighting and skewering Objectivism, Levine's on the warpath against zealots. "I'm trying to write about what happens when real people try to do things," he explains. "The characters in Ayn Rand's books are paragons." But paragons aren't real people, and Levine has written his characters to be as real as possible. They may be drawn in broad strokes, but they're human. "Real people aren't perfect. That's the problem with ideologies. Real people carry out ideologies. So even the best of intentions gets screwed up."

To attempt to do this in a game -- not a college art project, but an actual commercial blockbuster game -- is phenomenally ambitious. "You don't elevate the discussion by saying 'listen to me!'" says Levine. "You get it by saying 'look this is awesome, oh and by the way we're also talking about being a human being. We're also talking about power.'" --BioShock (Gamers with Jobs)

You may or may not be familiar with V-Tech Rampage, a flash game created by Ryan Lambourn. True to its title, the game allows the player to take on the role of Cho Seung-Hui and re-enact the fateful school shooting of April 16th. The game drew hatred from the mainstream media and gamers alike; many feel the game to have no ultimate purpose other than allowing players to kill simply for the sake of killing.

Similar complaints have been lodged against Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, created by Danny Ledonne. Like V-Tech Rampage, SCMRPG allows the player to take the roles of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on the day they massacred twelve of their peers.

In an effort to get Lambourn's side of the story and answer some nagging questions I had for Ledonne, I interviewed these two frequently despised, often applauded game creators about the possible importance of their games. --Virtual school shooings: interviewing two of the most hated game creators alive (Destructoid)