HA1 Task 2 – Artistic Styles

Create an illustrated report that explores these four different artistic styles found in games:

Photo-realism

Photo-realism the process in making something appear realistic and life like, to a point where it is virtually similar, this was primarily done in art work in the late 1960's to early 1970's. The gaming industry has adopted this tactic when creating the graphics for video games. For instance; games such as Destiny have incredible modern day graphics, Bungie have attempted to create a more real aspect to the game, attempting to emerge the player into it's content, such as the vast detailed environment. Personally i feel as though photo-realism is an important concept to development when creating a game. In my opinion, photo-realism can be important when creating a game, although it is not necessary, for instance, Minecraft has done tremendously well for a arcade style game with using blocks as terrain. 

http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/53a71963eab8eafc47d1c073-1200/but-some-of-the-best-visuals-were-seen-in-the-setting-sun.jpg

Cell Shading

Cell shading (or toon shading) is the art concept behind modern day games. These games include cartoon like graphics to bring forward a games sense of animation and virtual reality, or in some cases humor and exaggeration. For instance; cell shading has been used in games such as borderlands. The reason for it being used in an FPS game is to give it a unique taste of game play, the cartoon style of borderlands allows it to come off as a really funny and twisted game. It also gives the game a possible unique style, practically 90% of all modern day shooters have very detailed graphics, where as borderlands used cartoons to create better game play.

http://international.download.nvidia.com/webassets/en_US/shared/images/guides/borderlands-2-tweak-guide/4_1_TextureQuality_Low.png

Abstraction

Abstraction is the basic art concept based around 3 main factors. Movement, shape, and colour. A great example of this would be the well known arcade game "Tetris". Tetris (usually) includes a set of 8 different shapes that are used to create lines to score points. It's a very similar cocept, yet higher addictive to some players of the game. The abstraction of the game really helps think about the shapes structure instead of focusing on details to the game.

http://opentoadventure.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/tetris-blocks.jpg

Exaggeration

Exaggeration is the art of making something seem far more visual than it actually is, or to make an effect hugely stunning and very artistic, for instance, the dragon ball Z games use exaggeration when showing some of the moves they use. This is because the game was based on a very exaggerated anime and manga series and it has since then copied the moves from those and used them in the game, but to re-create them in the game would need alot of animation and graphical work. Exaggeration can also be used to just generally make a game look appealing, so an enormous city with much larger towers than would ever exist in real life would make the player feel incredibly small and fragile when playing the game due to his surroundings.
For example, in the dragon ball z games, they use exaggeration with all of the animations and graphics to show the power of the characters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WAyObBjnqU

Illustrate as required, ideally drawing on your own experience and remember to cite any sources you have used in your research, both written and visual.

Remember that you are trying to comprehensively explain the theory and applications of digital graphics used for computer games with elucidated examples and consistently using subject terminology correctly.