Warzone 2100 Forums

Fortunately Matt Groening did refine and improve his drawing style. Had he not done that he would never have succeeded.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Simps ... Ullman.png that one is from 1987 and looks quite bad compared to the modern simpsons family.

What I meant is, since this thread is about sticker art you could presume to find pictures of decent resolution that don't look like 15 minutes of mspaint, unless they are works in progress or only concepts.

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Jorzi wrote:Fortunately Matt Groening did refine and improve his drawing style. Had he not done that he would never have succeeded.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Simps ... Ullman.png that one is from 1987 and looks quite bad compared to the modern simpsons family.

Oh please... Says who. Life in Hell was quite successful and opened the door for the Simpsons on Tracy Ulman's show. Lord spare me Wikipedia refs as if they are unimpeachable primary sources of peer reviewed scholarship.

Jorzi wrote:What I meant is, since this thread is about sticker art you could presume to find pictures of decent resolution that don't look like 15 minutes of mspaint, unless they are works in progress or only concepts.

Oh BS. Tell that to the creator of SouthPark. Be laughing at you all the way to the bank. Dude, I can marshal 100's of examples off the top of my head from Pop Art as well Fine Art that vitiate your PoV.

MY point is that the aesthetic that may work for you is in no way to be construed as an absolute, universally valid, aesthetic for success. There is NO such. It's as simple as that.

- RV
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Personally, when it comes to stickers/posters, I primarily value their visual quality above anything else.

Rman Virgil wrote:Oh BS. Tell that to the creator of SouthPark. Be laughing at you all the way to the bank. Dude, I can marshal 100's of examples off the top of my head from Pop Art as well Fine Art that vitiate your PoV.

Well, Jorzi does have a point in that Warzone is not one of those examples, and thus people who are looking for surreal humor could be misled by the sticker and disappointed by the game, while people who are looking for a more realistic game might be misled by the sticker and avoid the game when it actually does suit their tastes.

I presume people who've seen Evony ads will agree that Warzone should not go down the path of misleading advertisements.

(For those of you who haven't seen an Evony ad, well, Evony is a Civilization-like game, or so I hear. I've seen ads for it that read nothing but "Click here to enlarge this woman's breasts!")

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Advertising / Marketing are complex subjects and I'm not gonna pretend to do the field justice in a short post but i will comment some as is my wont.

I know what you mean by "misleading" advertising. Most modern advertising is about persuading peeps to buy something by making psychological & illogical associations with various tropes about being more successful or virile or attractive. Buy this car and you will have a chick magnet. Stuff like that. And it works too. Peeps aren't disappointed because their peers share the same delusions.

Then there is a segment of the populace that has the ability to distinguish an ad from the product in the sense that the map is not the territory and so no matter how much they are intrigued by an ad they will reserve the purchase subject to "test-driving" the product.

The point of most ads is to get you to look at something by getting it to stand-out from the 24-7 advertising bombardment that is the modern world we live in. Getting you to look at something, by whatever means, is considered a success.

Even when the game is not free like WZ is, you can play demos or rent it from Game Fly or buy it from Game Stop & return it within 7 days for something else if you don't like it.

I think that peeps whose attention is drawn by an ad like Berg's will try the game and it will either be to their tastes or not irregardless of how they were brought to the game.

I really do not think peeps will see Berg's ad and say -

"Oh chit, Warzone 2100, a comedy RTS war game - just what I've been looking for." And then be disappointed because it's not a comedy RTS war game.

More likely the ad will captivate by it's humor, make it stand out from the crowded field of games & their advertising, and peeps will say:

1.) "Hmmm. Warzone 2100. Never heard of it. A War Game. Hmmm. I like war games with tanks. Might check that out."

2.) Or: "Warzone 2100. Hmmm. I'll Google it, see what it's all about."

3.) Or: "An other tank war game. I hate those."

Whereas a more conventional ad approach might not actually even draw enough attention in the first place with peeps who like tanks and war games because it will just seem like all the rest of the ads they are already familiar with so it just slips under the radar.

But this is all supposition and why companies conduct extensive "Focus Groups" within their target market & in these focus groups they pay peeps good money (& feed them as well) for their opinions on such things as packaging art & particular ad campaigns in print, broadcast & e-media, before they go into mass production & market their product.

In all this I have left-out much. Not the least, Memetic or Viral marketing techniques. That's a whole new and powerful paradigm in advertising. But this just a brief forum post, not a treatise.

- RV

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i thought playwarzone.png was a joke, i would never stick this on my puter.. sorry but it really looks like a 5 year old's drawing... i think it should be a hightech/scifi based theme


\edit: or just the warzone logo...

m1ndgames wrote:\edit: or just the warzone logo...

Zarel wrote:I think the Warzone logo works quite well as a sticker - simple and tasteful. Here's a decent-resolution render of the logo:

http://developer.wz2100.net/browser/tru ... 00logo.png

And if you're interested in buying one, natbob1 is planning on selling Warzone2100 logo stickers on ebay.

m1ndgames wrote:i thought playwarzone.png was a joke, i would never stick this on my puter.. sorry but it really looks like a 5 year old's drawing... i think it should be a hightech/scifi based theme


\edit: or just the warzone logo...

It was a joke. And the sticker business that is directly joke inspired is a multi-million dollar segment of the industry. Just because you wouldn't use it does not constitute an objective frame of reference for the lucrative nature of this approach, it's bonafide history or it's legitimacy. This constant reference to "5 year old's drawing" more than anything betrays the utter, unmitigated, sorry state of art education the last few generations. Even so called "artists" have not a clue of the art of the last 30.000 years - beginning with the Venus of Willendorf right up to the latest gallery offering of local art in your neck of the woods. Photo realism, in and of itself, is NOT art - it is a technical skill called draftsmanship and ANYBODY can apply themselves and learn it but that is absolutely no assurance of ever creating a work of world valued art. Indeed, if there is one universally agreed upon metric in the art world across the globe (and multi-culturally) it is that photo-realism, in and of itself, is actually the antithesis of art !!. End of mini .

- RV

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Though it's a bit off topic, for reference, Photorealism is also the name of an artistic movement.

It's technically true that photorealism itself isn't art, but you could say the same thing of, say, Impressionism. Art isn't the style, but what you do with it. To say that the style has nothing to do with the art, though, is a bit misleading.

Zarel wrote:......

OT... hmm. Thought when I said:

"Photo realism, in and of it self, is NOT art.."

I was giving an appropriate nod to the distinction you raised but as long as I'm here, I'll expand briefly with some thoughts, in no particular order...

Photorealism technique & the Photorealism Art movement are not synonymous. In fact the Photorealism art movement's main thrust was to subvert photorealism technique by demonstrating that it is the unique subject vision of an artist, integrated to and modifying technique however the artist sees fit, the makes for a work of art brought into singular existence.

If you train a monkey to shoot camera pics and run the digital file through paint conversion software the result is not the art of the Photorealist Art Movement.

Same with Impressionist technique - it is not synonymous with the Impressionist Movement of artists & their art. There was a time when Impresionist technique did NOT exist. The technique itself was created by the artists who went on to utillze it to bring forth their unique visions to the canvas like had never before been seen anywhere.

Most common to an artist's apprenticeship is copying the work of masters. You may even get good enough to duplucate a 140 million dollar Impressionist painting by Monet, brush stroke for brush stroke, duplicating his color pallet impeccably. Is what you have done a work of art ? - no it's not, it's a forgery of a true work of art.

Now here is a last interesting tid bit which is derived from the artist Escher's body of work.

A drawing in which you can see an Old Hag or a Young Woman. You see one or the other - both are there. Now you scan and digitize the drawing. There is only ONE source code. Looking at the source code you cannot tell apart that there are the 2 images. The same bit of specific digital info can be, can exist in reality, as 2 entirely different subjects. Thought provoking, eh. ?

- RV

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You seem to disinguish art from craftmanship. Personally, I don't.
Craftmanship is the oldest form of art, something that distinguishes humans from most animals. Anyone can be trained to do it, but that doesn't mean it's not art. You can be original while making anything.

I guess It's mostly about how we define the word art. Does art have to be original? Can it be mass produced? Ask Andy Warhol
Someone even went so far as to put a pile of mudbricks in an art museum. A very basic form of art, but still, it requires some human thought.
Mathematics and geometry can also be considered art, as well as inventions.

Another question is, would I buy something or even value it because it's art? Definitely not. Very little art, if any, is valued by everyone.

Jorzi wrote:You seem to disinguish art from craftmanship. Personally, I don't.
Craftmanship is the oldest form of art, something that distinguishes humans from most animals. Anyone can be trained to do it, but that doesn't mean it's not art. You can be original while making anything.

I guess It's mostly about how we define the word art. Does art have to be original? Can it be mass produced? Ask Andy Warhol

Someone even went so far as to put a pile of mudbricks in an art museum. A very basic form of art, but still, it requires some human thought.

Mathematics and geometry can also be considered art, as well as inventions.

Another question is, would I buy something or even value it because it's art? Definitely not. Very little art, if any, is valued by everyone.

That's all true save for one point I'll get to.

I grew up NYC and was around for Andy Warhol's emergence and the party scene of those days. I would have used a more provocative example like the paintings of Frank Sella or JacksonPollack or the world renowned long essay by brilliant culture critic & philosopher Walter Benjamin entitled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" first published in 1935. Or John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" or Marshall McLuhan's seminal "Understanding Media".... but how about we just refer back to Andy Warhol - how many have followed in his footsteps & by his example created an equally successful body of like minded work ? The answer is - ZERO !

As for craftsmanship. I do make a distinction for 2 reasons -

1.) anyone can be taught craftsmanship but you cannot be taught to create singularly visionary, unique, work that changes the way folks see them selves and the world. This is not a position unique to me. Anything but.

2.) being a superb craftsman you can copy the art of others but cannot create any of your own, making you a superb craftsman but no artist. This also is not a position unique to me. It's expressed in art circles for generations (at least since anchient Greece) and across widely diverse cultures spanning the entire planet.

Ever go to a starving artists sale where paintings are sold for $19.95 - $49,95 and copy every known art technique. There is a reason those paintings are valued as such. They are produced out of pure craftsmanship devoid of any unique artistic vision.There is a name for such "art", it's called Kitsch.

Or take American artist Edward Hopper who started life as a fine commercial illustrator and craftsman. He himself made a clear distinction between in his commercial work and the work he subsequently did for himself after he left the world of advertising - the rest of the art world has agreed with that distinction for some 80 years.

Or what happened to the reputation of master Surrealist painter Salvador Dali in the 1980's when unauthorized lithographs of of his art work flooded the art world. While the same high level of craftsmanship was evident in both, the value of his work and reputation went into the toilet.

I was born into and raised in the art & music world of NYC by parents one of which was a professional musician for 70 of his 85 years of life and the other a painter with quite a few one woman Gallery shows under her belt before she died. Later in life I lived in the thick of the revolutionary art and music scene of San Fran. Along the way I also got a solid formal, classical, education in both. I mention these facts NOT to present myself as some infallible world authority but only to point out I am hardly a dilettante regurgitating chit I read in Wikipedia articles.

Art is MORE than craftsmanship and MORE than the mere thought of something anyone can entertain. This is NOT just my original point of view. It's hardly original, truth be told, but a rather commonplace PoV in the art world - held by both artists and their paying appreciators.

- RV

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I must confess that your knowledge in these matters outclasses mine, and you are right that many people make very good copies of famous artworks in an attempt to get money or fame, with limited success.
However, I think that the problem these people have is not unability to produce art but rather the false idea that they need this famous artist to produce good paintings themselves. This as well as the urgent need to generate money from their art, which plays a pretty big role in killing any originality and creativity.
I still respect these artists and think that, If they wouldn't have to worry so much about feeding their families/getting as famous as that specific artist, they would produce very different artwork.

Jorzi wrote:....

However, I think that the problem these people have is not unability to produce art but rather the false idea that they need this famous artist to produce good paintings themselves. This as well as the urgent need to generate money from their art, which plays a pretty big role in killing any originality and creativity.

I still respect these artists and think that, If they wouldn't have to worry so much about feeding their families/getting as famous as that specific artist, they would produce very different artwork.

I agree with that totally.

My 2 brothers are both artist's and musicians.

One of them focused on music professionally. Even if he was not my brother I would still be in awe of his musical artistry which, IMHO, even exceeded our fathers who was quite successful as a professional recording artist and performer. However, my brother could never break through professionally and had to become a software programmer to make a living and now that he has twin baby girls he is a stay at home dad with his wife being a prodigious bread winner from a wealthy family. Maybe when his girls get a little older he will try again to break through professionally with his music.

My other brother chose to focus first on business & real estate. He retired quite young 10 years ago a millionaire. Since his retirement he has totally focused on his painting - traveling the world and taking Uni courses to fill his brain with raw material - experience to invest in his paintings which he in turn has exhibited in one-man shows throughout Calif.

I do believe there is a tremendous amount of world class talent out there that never will get the attention and respect it deserves for economic reasons. It's a cruel & unfair reality, to be sure, for many.

Then there are others who continue to work regardless of the economic constraints and the world's recognition matters not a whit. Doing the work is the all of it and the rest be damned.

- RV

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Will I ever get what I asked for? All I end up with is controversial discussions all the time. Am I jinxed?

Oh, but I do enjoy these discussions

A big thanks to Berg and Colditz for coming up with something. And of course, Zarel, for the logo.

Regards,
JDW.