When one thinks of the “magic circle”, one typically envisions a sports arena where college athletes battle for victory, or a field in which children run and play tag. However, with today’s technology, the concept of the magic circle has expanded to include entire virtual worlds where the participant can be wholly enraptured by the level of detail and imagination that goes into creating these worlds.
“Mr. Adamowicz, who died on Feb. 9 at 43, was a concept artist whose paintings of exotic landscapes, monsters and elaborately costumed heroes and villains formed the visual foundation for two of the most popular single-player role-playing video games of all time.”
A visionary who created the worlds that the massively popular games, Fallout and Skyrim take place in, Adamowicz is the driver of the complex environments that video gamers have fallen in love with over the years.
As the article puts it, “Whether sketching out a mutant-riddled, atomically ravaged downtown Washington or a sprawling continent populated by wizards and trolls, Mr. Adamowicz was, in a sense, the costume designer, prop master and set designer for highly cinematic games. Other team members would render Mr. Adamowicz’s drawings on computers once the writers and art director approved them.” The game director Todd Howard further explained that Adamowicz literally drew every image for these games over the years, and as one can image, this amounted to thousands of images and conceptual designs.
Going forward, it is interesting to consider the fact that as rending technology, and other advances such as 3-D technology develop, the possibilities in which magic circles can expand to are absolutely limitless.
Source: New York Times
-Alexander Chen
http://uc256theplayaz.tumblr.com/
I remember hearing about this about 2 months ago, unfortunately Mr. Adamowicz's death was overshadowed by that of Ms. Houston. Having played both of these games I have to say both these RPGs are graphically stunning, and without a doubt have some of the best graphics I have ever seen. Bethesda games actually changed their website to a memorial page (unfortunately no longer available) for Mr.Adamowicz. Things like this remind us just how frail the game of life is and that we should pursue our dreams while we can
ReplyDeleteI agree that the question of just how in depth the virtual worlds we create can become. You are absolutely correct about the near limitless possibilities. In fact, this link (http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/05/23/brain.download/) leads to an article that suggests that by the year 2050, computers will be fully capable of rendering worlds populated by actual consciousnesses. This article is even crazier (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/science/14tier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1). In it, Dr. Nick Bostrom, philosopher at Oxford University, asserts that there is a 20 percent chance that we are already currently living in a computer simulation created by some advanced civilization. So, we could already be living in one of these fantastical worlds. Not really sure if I buy this, but interesting all the same.
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