Blog: New Ventures and General Thoughts

These last couple weeks have been a bit all over the place for good reasons.  After a year and a bit of doing primarily freelance work I got offered a job which I am enjoying a great deal.  It has allowed me continue my work within the heritage sector while continuing to grow my people skills; of which I’m interacting with from lots of different national backgrounds.  In essence, this work is very similar to my small local museum, just on a much larger scale. 

This job has required me to commute for a relatively large distance (~3 hours a day) but it has allowed me to have time to think about new topics and ways to discuss ideas through the duality of architecture and video games.  Well, I would say that but there has been a couple other things on my mind thou.  First of all, I have ~160 years of maritime history to learn alongside local history which has occupied a decent amount of time and secondly I’ve kind of been tripping over thoughts I’ve already brought up.  To give an example, commuting has got me thinking about the occupation of space in transit which I’ve pretty much talked about 3-4 times at this rate so it’d probably be best to leave that alone for a while.  So what I thought I would do is give a couple ideas I’m working on with some brief notes and we’ll go from there.  As the title suggests, think of this as a typical blog over regular stuff.

Facades

I’m currently working in the area of Greenwich which has some great pieces of architecture nestled within its borough.  One piece I have a particular interest in is the maritime museum which has a fantastic façade with its pronounced pillars and wings accenting the main building.  This got me thinking about two things: the grand buildings made in games full of design and intricacy that are primarily used to wow the audience and the everyday building that fills sandbox city games like grand theft auto.  I’m more inclined to talk about the everyday buildings but I need to play some recent titles like GTAV or Watch_dogs to build up a better assessment. 

Transitions

This one is a bit more abstract but pretty much I’m thinking about the process of moving from one space to another.  This was somewhat influenced by the recent play through of Dark Souls by Extra Credits as the game does doors pretty well with its overbearing doors requiring effort from the player to open.  I’ve got a selection of games I would like to talk about this so I will probably be looking to do this next. 

Layered design

In terms of video games, it would probably be better to say “verticality” but I felt that would associate the subject with tall structures.  What I was thinking about was the different between architecture being built on top of each other and the spaces in-between them, creating new experiences.  This was inspired from my travels on the Docklands Light Railway which tends to travel on a multi-layered track which is visible to the everyday traveller.  A game like Deus-ex: Human Revolution comes to mind when talking about this as its hub towns feature a great deal of these concepts, but as with these other subjects I would like to get some more knowledge of the subject. 

So that’s everything to do with me at the moment.  Things have been really busy recently and I wanted to write something to make sure I didn’t just stay mute for two weeks.  Hopefully this will give an insight into my thought process and see what’s to come.