AS Photography
Jude White
Earthly Access
In response to the work of ‘…’, I decided to produce a photoshoot exploring a realtionship between gaming and the real world. I decided, in an experimental series of edits, to take several well-known issues experienced in incomplete games and integrate them into real photograpgs. Overall, the piece is designed to be critical of the Early Access video game system, made popular by the Steam storefront. In Early Access, incomplete games are sold for money with the promise of a free version of the full game upon completion. However, many times these games are broken, full of bugs and glitches, and are often never even finished. My photoshoot is critical of this by proposing the question of what the real world would be like were it an Early Access game; such an extreme example is satirical of the incomplete state of these games and the diffculty of playing them.
By covering this building with Valve developer textures (used in game development to represent things that are unfinished), I made it seem as though this huge structure was being programmed into a game.
One problem fequently encountered in Early Access games is etxture pop-in. This refers to textures remaining blurred until the player walks very close, at which point they will 'pop' into quality. I used the extreme example of emergency signs to mock the serious repurcussions this has on gameplay, using a real-world example.
I was pleased with the result of the first building, and as such I created another, this time using a church.
This image represents how video games appear when floor textures do not render; an endless void for a floor. I placed this at the bottom of a flight of stairs, a satire of how problematic this can be within games.
This image represents another common glitch in games; an object, usually a car, will become lodged into a piece of scenery, and will vibrate vigorously as the physics engine tries and fails to repel the object. This often causes the object itself to act as though it is being hit or scratched, causing particle effects like sparks to trigger.