Video Games, Art, Minimalism, and Where the Middle Ground Is - Part 1

Hello! I hope that you're enjoying my Video Games, Art, Minimalism, and Middle Ground series regarding Animal Crossing: New Leaf. If you care to see all previous posts, click below:

Part 1 - Interior Design
Part 2 - Patterns and Designs
Part 3 - More about Patterns and Designs
Part 4 - Introduction to Town Decor
Part 5 - Pattern Design in Town Decor
Part 6 - Gardening in Town Decor

Onwards!

***

I have a confession to make. I have a dirty little secret, you see, and I think it's time I confessed it. Yes . . .

The Main Room - Alpine Series - Japanese 

. . . I am not only a casual gamer, but a lover of Animal Crossing: New Leaf. It's going to open with music, sorry . . .

One of my four mannequins - all the ones you can earn!

Yep, I love New Leaf. For those of you who don't know, Animal Crossing is a life simulation game wherein you are the only human - the major - in a town filled with nothing but anthropomorphic animals. Mice, bears, bunnies, ducks, zebras, monkeys - and those are just the animals in my town! (Actually, my mouse friend moved out. Penelope . . .) It's an incredibly fun game with shopping, interior design, expanding your house, helping your friends, and - for the first time EVER in Animal Crossing - acting as mayor to improve your town with public works projects such as clocks, lights, benches, and other unique additions to your town!

Due to my "Pack Style", as proclaimed by Lyle (a home evaluater), some of my space looks cramped in this room.

Of course, there's so much of this game to be explained, and I don't really have the luxury of talking about of that immediately - today, I just want to focus on something that I've been thinking about for the last few days. So we're just going to focus on the interior design aspect.

Second Floor - Regal Series - Apartment

During the game, you can expand your house from a tiny little shack to a glorified mansion, which costs bells - your in-game currency, of course. It's pretty easy to earn bells through fishing, bug-catching, or fruit picking, but it's HARD to pay off all of your home loans and expand your place to the max - something I only achieved earlier this week with my first player. There are plenty of ways to decorate the inside of your home, too, including many furniture series, sets, and selections. You can even customize your furniture, something I've done in almost every room of my house.

Mother's Day in-game grants you pink carnations! They fit in perfectly with my pink Regal series.

Of course, it's very difficult to fully furnish your house, even to complete just one set. It took me ages to complete the above rooms' series, and that's even saying it with the ease of this game via getting model houses and visiting other friend's towns to buy their stuff from their stores!

Basement - No Series - Surrealism

Anyways, I'm digressing. What I really wanted to talk about today was about my basement room. Well, about all of my rooms, really, but mostly about my basement. You see, your house gets evaluated by a group called the HHA - the Happy Home Academy. They basically tally up your style with use of furniture, etc, and give you a point total that can result in some pretty nerdy prizes. They don't, however, count the basement, so you can do whatever you want with it. Which, of course, is what I've done.

No, you can't jump in the Outdoor Pool. Although I wish I could.

My basement room looks pretty nice, right? It's very outdoors-y, very peaceful. But if you look closely, I have some clocks scattered around. An alarm clock, owl clock, cuckoo clock . . .

A second one of my mannequins. Flowers from the outside . . . and two clocks?

The point of this room is supposed to be like a surrealist dream; it's incomplete, obviously, but it's meant to look like paradise. Safety. Home. Perfection. But here's the problem: all of the clocks are there, all ticking down the time. While you might be in Paradise for a long while, you will never be able to stay forever. You are always reclaimed, either by life or death.

More of my flowers. And a better view of the owl clock!

My making the room had more to do with wanting to mess around with a nice little room I had expanded to its potential, that was all. At least, that was all at first. But then as I began to add onto it, as I began to figure out how many pieces I needed for the wheat field and what clocks I could add to the room or did I really want to add that picnic table in . . . I began to ask myself questions.

. . . could you consider this . . . art?

West Wing - Polka-Dot and Balloon Series - Playful

It's no secret that I'm an artist. I firmly believe myself to be an artist. I write; I sing; I draw. I do these things because I love to create, because I love to see my vision come to life. I make art because I have a vision in my head that I want to see with my eyes.

. . . but that's the same thing I have about my house in Animal Crossing. Does that automatically make it art?

North Room - No Series - Specialty

I refuse to denounce it from the offset. I believe that anything can be art. A pile of rubbage can be art; one man's trash is another's treasure, after all. I believe that a photograph is art, that a sketch is art, that music and paintings and fabric are all art. But asking about art in a video game format stumps me.

I think it's because we typically don't see art in video games. Do we have digital artwork? Yeah. But do we look into games like these and expect to find art? Nah. It's not even described that way. It's a life simulator. It's not about the prettiest house, it's about messing around a little, just playing casually. But just because it's in the context of a video game doesn't mean that it's not art, nor a lesser form of art. Right?

East Room - Pavé Series - Blue

I've been a casual gamer for the majority of my life. I have a brother who is obsessed with games. I have another brother who has a degree involving Game Art and Design. So yeah, video games ARE art, in a sense - even simply talking about the graphics, it's definitely art. There's a style to it, there's an appeal to aesthetics. And why shouldn't it be? Bad graphic design can ruin a perfectly good game. It is, after all, the first thing we see in a game.

So, is what I'm doing above - constructing rooms in a life simulator with an intent in mind - art? And - this occurred to me as well - can we suppose it equal to other types of art? Really?

Truth be told, the thoughts I had about this, I figured would take one post. But no; after a lot of thought, I realized that I have far more to say than can fit into a single post. So expect updates! And more parts! I mean, this is mostly on the fly, but I think these are important questions to ask. Why? Because they are questions. Question everything, for it's better to ask and know than remain silent and not.

It's 1:10 in the morning.

I've been working for the last three hours on trying to get all edits done for my LGBT project so I can turn it in on Tuesday, and I'm still not even fully done.

But I am done. On the manuscript. And I've reached my word goal. Barely.

...all I can think of is, "I wonder if my teacher is going to notice those substitutions I made for my swearing habit . . ."

Mock Graduation - Or What I Wish I Could Say

Sorry for not posting in forever! Graduation is coming up in three weeks (!!!) which is more than a little terrifying, and one of my qualms is that I have an inability to sit still for so long. It's going to be about three hours! Talk about ants in your pants.

That being said, as much as I know I won't be able to do this, I thought I would write a little graduation speech for the occasion. I won't be able to go up and say anything, since I'm not in line for valedictorian (about forty spaces below that), but I thought I would just give my thoughts on the subject. Just for funzies, I guess.

Expect this to be a very, very rough draft.

***

I know very little about graduation speeches. I'll be the first to admit that. But what I've noticed is that every commencement speech starts off with some kind of metaphor or saying or some such, and often times, it's about fish. So I guess I'll start with that.

So two fish are swimming along in the ocean, side-by-side, among all of the other fish and beings in the ocean. It's a day like no other; their school swims along fast, everything's totally normal. And the first fish looks to the second and says:

". . . wait a second, you're a HORSE. What are you doing here??"

*waiting for potential laughter to come down*

It seems like the strangest allegory ever, right? But the both scary and reassuring fact is that it's really true. I have felt like a horse in a school of fish. I'm sure everyone has felt like a horse in a school of fish. Entirely, illogically out of place. Surrounded by more normal and expected fish, occasionally interrupted by the special jellyfish that sometimes come to play, hiding with the others when the scary sharks come along and threaten to try and pull off your face. And as the horse, it seems like all of the sharks come after you.

It's the same way in high school. I've always felt like the odd one out. Surrounded by a bunch of totally normal students, along with some of those really cool kids I admired from afar but could barely go and talk to. I never felt like I was part of a group, and if I did, I continued to feel like the strange horse. When I was younger, these facts often sent me to my room after school, crying. I remember third and fourth grades being really hard for me, because I can remember getting off the bus and going inside and running to my room and tossing myself onto my bed in tears. In many ways, that hasn't changed; I've just more easily accepted it.

But I don't think I'm alone. I think that many of us in high school have felt that way. The star athletes. The art kids. The popular girls. The video gamers. The anime dweebs - which I mean in a loving way, because I used to be one of those dweebs. But I digress. I think no matter what "clique" or lack thereof that you fit into, I think the feeling of a horse in with the fish is a universal feeling. We feel left out. An eyesore. An abnormality.

It's taken me a long time - and it will take me even longer to accept it more - to realize that we all feel like that. All of us. There's this great quote by Steve Furtick that I discovered earlier this school year, and it goes like this: "The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel." *pause* Of course, I thought when I saw it. Of course. I have privately suffered with anxiety and fear and secrets I simply wanted to come out with, and when I compared those problems to those around me, it made me feel like the horse. Awkward and ungraceful among a sea of fish. But all the while, I was just seeing the highlight reels of others - what seemed to make them fish.

I think high school, unfortunately, does a fair bit to promote some of that thought, that you're somehow abnormal. Kids leave other kids out of their social cliques, somebody's bad mood is taken out on you, and suddenly you're eating alone at lunch wondering why you're so uncool. But you're not. It's a product of all of the crap going on around you, everybody else's private issues. It makes us all horses.

Despite this - that high school leads to our privatized feelings of abnormality - high school has its perks, too. Those teachers that notice when you have a bad day. The school nurses that hold so much more respect for you than you think you deserve. Those kids who see you as the jellyfish, the cool ones, even if you can't understand why. No man is an island, and I think high school is a great way to realize that. And if you are an island, well, at least you have some handy bridges built. And learning how to construct those bridges between yourself and others is better in the long gallop.

I know that so much of this speech has been spent talking about animals, and insecurity, and so little about school and what it's done for us. But that's because I know - know - we will all understand someday how much school matters, even if not right now. But this - this is what we've been working with. Horses and fish and jellyfish and bridges. Those are the things we have worked with over time; those are what have continued to make us strong. Realizing that we're all swimming horses makes the journey easier, and we need that reassurance as, now, we leave the reef and float into the big, blue sea.

So thank you. Thank you, all of you glorious horses, for helping me realize what you are - what all of us are. And hey, if we find each other someday, maybe we can have a race. No matter who wins, crossing that finish line will just serve to remind us of all of the things that got us here, the good and the bad. And that's what matters in the end.

Thank you.

Sketchbooks

I always end up planning really intensive posts and never actually get to posting them. Who knew that improv worked out better for blogging? I didn't.

I don't really have anything in specific to talk about, but I did want to talk about my sketchbooks. Specifically, about what I like and don't like about sketchbooks. Some do's and don't's, I suppose. Just in case there are any sketchbook makers out there who want to pick out some ideas, perhaps? Eheheh . . .

Let's start with a don't. DON'T make all kinds of sizes of sketchbooks and NOT make an 8 1/2" by 11" one. That annoys me to no end. I have one of those fax-and-print-and-scan printers, and it won't accept anything bigger than 8 1/2". So even 9" by 12", while nice and round, isn't nice. It's close, but no banana.

DO have some quantity of pages. Don't charge me $10 and give me 25 pages. That's annoying, too. I don't care how fancy it is, if I can buy a book at the same price with more pages, I'll shoot for it 9 times out of 10.

DON'T bind it like a book. What I like about my hardcover sketchbooks is that I don't necessarily need a desk to work; I can lay it in my lap and work. I can't do that if I can't fold the cover and other pages back, though. Why would you even want a book with stitching?! I mean, that's cool for my favorite novels, but my sketchbook is for me to work and draw and practice...not to hold up for eons upon eons.

DO give me perforated pages, so I can tear out my works.

DON'T perforate the pages, but do it so bull-shitty that it's nigh impossible to tear them out seamlessly. I was trying to get a page from my sketchbook today and it tore. It was only about a centimeter and it wasn't so bad, but that made me rage inside. NOT COOL. I shouldn't have to take a whole minute to pull it out - it should be five seconds and DONE.

DO make the paper have some quality. I bought a sketchbook so I wouldn't have to work with the typical printer paper, so don't give me that.

DON'T use the kind of paper that smudges at the blow of the wind! My last sketchbook was like that, and it was rage-inducing! I had to buy sealant so I could spray the pages and keep them half-alive! Trust me - I work almost entirely with pencil. I don't want that shit smearing on me!

DO make it cheap enough to buy, so I don't have to save for weeks to get it.

DON'T make me pay extra for crap, as mentioned above.

And DO make your sketchbooks so good that I'll want to buy the same brand for years to come.

I know that really does sound like a really annoyed-sounding list, and in some ways, it is. It's inspired by my last couple of purchases of sketchbooks, especially my last one (man was that a load of hooey). No reason behind me posting this, really; just wanted to get my thoughts out there and update my muse a little!

Until later . . .