THE INFLUENCE OF WELL-KNOWN ARTIST WORK ON GAME DESIGN | Page 12

The online video From Botticelli's Venus to Super Mario: The Evolution of Art History and Future of digital games by Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). The description of the video is about artist/game designer Chris Solarski who demonstrated the gaming's limitless potential to produce emotional experiences that rival the traditional arts and engage players in meaningful new ways (Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), online video, 2012). The video is very interesting because it has referenced artist’s work used in the designs for games such as the Preparatory Sketch by Lucas Cambiaso and Diana and Companions by Johannes Vermeer (Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), online video, 2012). Chris Solarski explained the communication between sketch techniques to game designing developments for composition over details to equal to emotions (Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), online video, 2012). Chris Solarski had mentioned the quote in a book Point and Line to Plane by Wassily Kandinsky and it says “The Content of a work of art finds its expression in the composition […] in the sum of the tensions inwardly organized for the work” (Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), online video, 2012). Chris Solarski explained that his quote is very important to game design because it's very difficult to transfer the classical concepts to the composition in digital games. Meaning when the players are playing a game they are in control and most cases of where they look where they move (Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), online video, 2012).

Both videos were made by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, but different, the first video was more about the personal inspirations of game developers and it had mention about treating digital games as art. However, the video had not made it relevant to my research because there are no art references. Whereas the second video is more interesting than the first one because the author Chris Solarski talked about using traditional art technique that continued into the digital art development in digital games. It had mentioned artists such as Johannes Vermeer, and how the existing artwork to communicate to digital game development through emotion.

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FIGURE 8 (Gamasutra, 2010)

Chris Szkoda