AS Photography
Jude White
In a Nutshell
With the decision that I wanted to explore the different sides of gaming with my work, I decided that my next shoot of the set should be something fairly light-hearted, with an undertone of something serious. This eases the heavier topics in gently. The idea I went with was to think up a list of games, and then the first thing I thought of when thinking about each particular game; these tended to often be quite comical, and many were negatives or gripes which I personally had with the game. My ideas were as follows:
Watch_Dogs is a game by Ubisoft released in 2014, and is largely considered one of the greatest disappointments of next generation gaming. Its ludo-narrative dissonance was one of its greatest setbacks; the game tried to explore a gritty, serious storyline whilst simultaneously offering the player ridiculous power. It was also thematically inconsistent, one example being the huge glowing arrows used to guide the player around the city streets, contrasting with the more gritty urban aesthetic. To mock this, I decided to take a photo of a road, desaturate it hugely, and then create some of these arrows within the image.
Battlefield 4 gave me lots to work with; the game is known and often mocked for its over-the-top, almost comically exaggerated aesthetic. Plenty of lens flare is used, and DICE are known for showing off their admittedly flashy rain effects; by overusing them to the point of exhaustion. Dubstep music is consistently used, as is an abundance of blues and oranges. There are consistently dogfights going on overhead, almost perpetually. Finally, BF4 is known for its sniping element, where players will sit in one spot for the entire game trying (and more often than not failing) to pick off people in the distance. I decided to bring every single one of these stereotypes into one image; I used huge amounts of lens flare, placed a sniper’s nametag on a crane, used a rain overlay on my image, added fighter jets in the sky, and replaced a fence’s colour to make it orange.
I myself know very little of WoW, so I decided to comment on the one thing I knew a lot about; the rarity system. In Wow, the colour of an item’s nametag dictates its rarity. White is common, green is uncommon, blue is rare, purple is epic and gold is legendary. I decided a subtle way to demonstrate this rarity system was to use a car garage changing vehicles’ colours based on their rarity in real life.
When the online mode of GTAV is mentioned, almost every gamer thinks of Heists; a mode which was penned to be released a month after the original game. In reality, it didn’t release until over a year later, after constant delays. I turned a store under refurbishment into a bank branch from the game, and placed a comic statement on the front to satirise Rockstar Games’ dismissive attitude.
It is a tradition with The Sims games that the game will be released with as little content as possible; this is in the hopes that the company in question, Electronic Arts, can sell the additional content as DLC. However, EA also sells The Sims as a fully-priced game, despite its lack of content. This photo was intended to satirise this, using a real housing development to represent EA’s DLC practices; taunting people with things they don’t already have.