In the meantime, I’m keeping myself busy by wrapping up work on my MFA Thesis, which has occupied most of my focus and energies this year.  While this blog hasn’t seen many updates since January, I’ve been regularly updating my Thesis blog in recent months, and I encourage you to review my entries there to gain an understanding of my recent endeavors.

The following Zbrush renders represent April’s current state of completion (which is to say that she is still very incomplete).

And here’s a closeup of April’s bust (in progress):

Her hair is obviously very incomplete, and even after sculpting detail is added, it will really begin to come to life once I add alpha planes in Maya.  That’s all for now.

April is envisioned as a major non-player character in a disaster survival game, which revolves around the idea of a series of successive, catastrophic terror attacks in downtown Boston, Massachusetts.  As a medical student at Boston University, April is on the T when the first disaster occurs.  After tending to her own wounds following the train’s derailment, April retrieves medical equipment from an overturned ambulance, and begins to treat the injuries of as many victims as possible.  By virtue of story events, April becomes companion to a detachment of National Guard troops dispatched to the city (representing the player entity).  April’s medical background and ‘healer’ disposition incite her to encourage the player to seek non-militaristic solutions to game challenges, adding an additional layer of design complexity.  As such, this role is ideally poised to benefit from the persuasive aspect of the attractiveness bias, whereby the character’s attractiveness will facilitate empathetic connections with the player, and increase his/her propensity to heed April’s advice.

A major thrust of my thesis work has been focused on subverting prevailing female stereotypes in modern video games, and April’s design was largely influenced by these concerns.  While presenting my thesis research, I’ve frequently criticized the portrayal of female characters clad in attire inappropriate for their role within the story context.  Look at the female characters in any fighting game, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.  Their armor seems to cover as little skin (and as few vital organs) as possible.  So when designing April, I challenged myself to eliminate as many gratuitous manifestations of her sexuality as I could.  In doing so, I began to define (if only for myself) the hidden boundary between sexual objectification and the necessary visual markers indicative of femininity.

To this end, I resolved to equip April with a kevlar vest (these are included in some EMT gear packages), thereby hiding her breasts, which are arguably the most steadfast visual indicator of sexuality in female video game characters.  The challenge, however, was that breasts are also one of the most obvious markers of femininity, as well.  In order to compensate for the suppression of this feminine feature, I was required to amplify the appearance of other (less overtly sexual) indicators of femininity.

Click the image to see a larger version:

Such “indicators of femininity” refer mostly to her facial features, hairstyle, and body proportions.  My guiding principle was to not allow these concerns to compromise the appropriateness of her attire, considering the story premise.  Aside from the emergency gear she has collected, April is wearing clothing typical of a graduate student, and believably appropriate for class, a day at the library, or running errands.  My focus on practicality necessitated the absence of apparel designed to enhance the sexuality of the female form, such as high-heeled shoes (apparently the footwear of choice for many female game characters).

While working on these drawings, I received a rather surprising amount of feedback with regard to April’s apparent ethnicity.  Nobody could tell which race she belonged to.  Admittedly, the relationship between attractiveness and multi-racial heredity is a topic that intrigues me, but it had not been my deliberate intention to produce a racially ambiguous character.  The fact that this occurred nonetheless could be a testament to the universality of beauty, or a consequence of the ‘prototypical’ appearance I had intended, or simply a result of insufficient facial topological information contained in the 2D drawing.  Whatever the case, I’ve decided that I’d like to preserve that quality in the final character model, and I’m interested to see whether it requires deliberate artistic direction, or occurs naturally.

I’ve included an initial color treatment below, though I confess I’m not entirely pleased with it, as April’s skin tone seems to betray the ethnic ambiguity that existed in the line drawing.

I hope to have some Maya screenshots available soon.

I’ve watched as impassioned readers, ranging from the obtuse to the articulate, have written in defense of video games.  Some have styled their arguments as sarcastic tirades, while others have offered gentlemanly concessions in the hopes of having that respectfulness reciprocated.  Of course, neither strategy will convince Ebert to reconsider his position.  The former merely strengthens his resolve, while the latter goes wholly unnoticed.  Meanwhile, in the midst of this outcry, Roger Ebert spent last weekend at his self-aggrandizingEbertfest (yes, you read that correctly), no doubt meditating on ways he can achieve still greater modesty.

Yet despite the busy schedule of his eponymous film festival, Ebert has generously found time to respond to some of these writings by way of his Twitter page, in the form of blatant ridicule.  The arrogant attitude revealed in these comments betrays a completely inexplicable and otherwise hidden disdain for gamers.  His self-satisfaction is clear as he responds to commenters with statements such as:

I’m not too old to “get” video games, but I may be too well-read.

Really?  He’s arguing that, while he admittedly has had next to no experience playing games, he believes that he’s more knowledgeable about this topic than the demographic that it defines (and whom he is so publicly demeaning)?

Or perhaps Ebert means to say that he’s too well-read in art, and is somehow more of an authority in defining its boundaries than anyone who would be so uncultured as to include games within that definition.  Obviously, he’s regrettably unaware of the various game-related academic curricula at numerous art schools and universities across the world that require their students to study art history, art theory, and game theory.

That’s right; modern universities are still teaching the old classics that comprise Roger Ebert’s expert knowledge, in addition to the newer theories, philosophies, and attitudes which the date on his diploma has necessarily robbed him of.  And that’s the point, really.  Ebert fails to realize that the development and creation of video games comprises not only an industry, but a field of study, for which people like myself have expended a great deal of resources and countless hours of work, in order to acquire an academic literacy that wholly escapes him.

I’m inclined to suggest that Ebert is neither too old to “get” games, nor too well-read, but rather too closed-minded, obstinate, and — as increasingly evidenced — too narcissistic.  I suppose such vices are the predictable outcome of having one’s opinion so highly lauded for so many years, but Ebert would do well to temper his authoritative self-assuredness with a dose of modesty every now and again.

Weary of having their well-formed rebuttals ignored, a number of respondents have argued that the game community should treat Roger Ebert with equal disregard.  Indeed, some have raised the question, “Why should gamers care what Roger Ebert thinks?”  In fact, Ebert himself asks this same question within his article, though the subtext of his query reads more like “why not allow the ignorant gamers to continue deceiving themselves that their pastime is art?”

Should Ebert’s opinion matter?  Probably not, but the fact is, it does. Sadly, a great many people do care what Ebert thinks.  Through habit, these people have trained themselves to consider his advice when contemplating the value of a film, and are thus more inclined to  adopt his published opinion on things with which they have little personal experience.  Without passing judgment on these inclinations, one must concede: With the words of Roger Ebert, so sway the opinions of many.

And that’s why Ebert’s opinion matters to me; because, by disseminating his uninformed pretensions in the guise of cultured affluence, Roger Ebert is perpetuating outdated, dogmatic prejudices that only serve to suppress video games’ maturation into a full-fledged dramatic medium.  The fewer people there are willing to take games seriously, the longer interactive artists must wait for their work to wield the cultural impact for which it was so meticulously created.

The solution, as I see it, is to proclaim the case for ‘games as art’ as emphatically as possible, so that it outweighs Ebert’s rhetoric.  And in the absence of a dissenting voice as loud as his, we must employ as many humbler voices as possible in order to drown out his noise.  It is in support of this endeavor that I write.

Now, to be fair, a great many video games on the market today probably should not be called art.  And video games suffer the injury of commercialism as greatly as does the film industry.  But Ebert’s claim is that games can NEVER be art.  If such a grandiose conclusion could be reliably determined through a priori means, I too would probably be inclined to disregard games without playing them, as Ebert has done.  But, of course, one cannot reasonably pass judgment on an artform without experiencing it, and since Ebert would have a LOT of video game playing to do to attain a truly representative sample of the medium, I’d like to point him in the right direction:

Brenda Brathwaite’s board game Train is, quite possibly, the single best example of something that simultaneously fits prevailing definitions for both games and art.

Ironically, Train is a game that Roger Ebert will likely never have an opportunity to play (which seems to fit his established style of critique).  That’s okay.  I haven’t played Train either, and I’m not sure that I’d want to.  Train is a board game about the Holocaust, which may sound callous, but only when operating under the preconceived notion that games are necessarily a form of entertainment.  Train’s intended purpose, however, is altogether different.

Gameplay focuses on transiting passengers from one end of a railway to the other, and seems straightforward enough.  But once an unwitting player has reached the end of the track, it is revealed that the train’s destination was one of several Nazi extermination camps.  Through this shocking revelation, the players (previously unaware of Train’s hidden premise) suddenly acquire a new and inescapably more profound connection to the true horror of the Holocaust, conditioned by the nature of their personal investment in the game.

As I said, I haven’t actually played Train, so rather than take my word for it, I suggest that Roger Ebert (and anyone else interested) learn about it from the artist herself.  Brenda Brathwaite recently gave a lecture on Train at the 2010 Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, and a video recording of her presentation is available for free on the GDC website.

The video can’t be linked to directly, so to watch it, go here, and enter “Brathwaite” in the search bar.  Then click on the lecture titled Train (or How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design) in the search results.

I really can’t say enough about the emotional depth of the topics Brenda discusses, and I’ve never witnessed another lecture that has had such a profound impact on my senses.  But to stay on point, Brenda’s GDC lecture seems the perfect rebuttal to Roger Ebert’s argument, despite the fact that it was conceived of and presented before his article was even published.

Train, like Brenda’s other work, is very clearly a game (in every formal definition of the word), and also draws on the artistic foundations provided by Jackson Pollock and Marcel Duchamp.  As Brenda discusses in her lecture, Pollock was adamant that the true ‘art’ he produced occurred during the act of painting itself, and that the resulting images on his canvases were simply a record of that experience.

Similarly, Duchamp sought to redefine art as an ideological pursuit, rather than a visual one.  Seeming to posit one of the earliest arguments for interactivity as high art, Duchamp once wrote that art exists ”at the juncture of the artist’s intention and the viewer’s response.”  It might also be relevant for Roger Ebert to note that, like himself, Duchamp was an avid chess player, eventually abandoning his artwork in favor of the game. Lending his voice to the present argument from across time, Duchamp insightfully suggests that, ”while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”

Thus, in a certain sense, when Ebert argues that games can never be art, he’s not only opposing the bratty teenagers and commercialized designers whom he seems so eager to denigrate; he’s also combating the insight of the heroic figures of ‘high art’ — Marcel Duchamp included.

I wish him luck with that.

I passed my 45-hour review in February, which gave me academic approval to pursue my thesis project.  And while the work I presented was considered ’sufficient’ by my professors, it did not necessarily align with my own standards of quality, so I chose to refrain from actually starting work on my project until I worked out some weak points in my research.  While the intense desire to quickly complete my degree requirements made this delay extremely frustrating, it ultimately paid off, culminating in a rather significant revision of my topic as recently as three weeks ago.  The product thereof is represented by my working thesis abstract, which I added to the Overview tab two weeks ago.

With a solid foundation in place, I’ve begun work on my thesis project proper, in the form of concept art for my first character.  The stated intent of this character (codenamed April) is to investigate the feasibility of incorporating neotenous physical features in the design of a female character, in order to maximize her physical attractiveness.  I do not intend to test whether or not these features result in an attractive physical appearance, as a great deal of research has already confirmed that fact with surprising certainty.  And while the quality of my execution is by no means assured, my research goal is more directly concerned with the effective impact that an ‘archetypal’ neotenous face will have on viewer/player affect, and how that methodology may fall short of providing the character design with a sense of individuality.  In other words, how does an archetypally neotenous, anthropometrically accurate female face fail to describe a character’s disposition?

I predict that the neotenous ideal will simply act as a shell — a prototype that can serve as the foundation of a character’s face, but one that will require further manipulation to impart a particular personality to the character and distance its appearance from stereotype.  If this proves true, my next character project will attempt to skillfully and deliberately alter the prototype to more greatly infuse a sense of individuality and originality in the character.

But first, we require a prototype as a starting point.  To that end, I’ve drafted the facial orthographics shown below.  The features seen here were derived by compositing the feature proportions of a number of fashion models, celebrities, and local reference models that exhibited a high degree of neonatal facial proportions.  These were conformed to standards of anthropometric measurement and then subtly exaggerated on a per-feature basis (eye size and distance, lip size, etc.) to form one possible manifestation of an ‘ideal face.’

Naturally, there exists a great deal of room for artistic discretion, and by no means am I claiming that this is the pinnacle of attractive facial neoteny.  And while many of you will undoubtedly perceive a resemblance to any number of actresses, I do believe that the image shown here provides a genealogically-nonspecific facial prototype that can be used as a reasonable starting point moving forward.

As a preventative disclaimer, I’ll simply point out that hairstyle is vastly important in defining femininity, and while cultural associations tend to vary, April’s femininity is inescapably lessened by her current lack of hair.  Further, without discouraging feedback, I must point out that the image you see above is still very much a work in progress, so additional changes are most likely forthcoming.