Ben Lee delivered an intriguing, in depth (an hour and a half!) talk on his work as Artistic Director for a computer game company. What particularly fascinated me about this topic was the attention to detail that is given to the fantastic environments that Ben and his ilk create. Amazing! The fantasy/sci-fi world is full of this sort of thing: people imagining environments and virtually ‘building’ them. I am particularly struck with the concept of inventing an environment to inhabit, (of course this isn’t limited to computer interfaces), for isn’t that what humans try to do in so many ways? What if we look around and try to notice that we are living in an amazing 3D environment in which we can interact with every ‘asset’ (that’s what they call discrete objects in a computer game)? Shouldn’t we then set to marvelling at everything around us, thinking “Wow, I can actually touch things!”
So that’s what I’m going to do now…