When we moved to Australia in 1994, I got a few consoles and then started becoming a more serious gamer. I was always obsessed with quest-style games and with the graphics and character designs of the games, but it never ever occurred to me that I could MAKE those kinds of games one day for a living.
The idea of working with games didn't become clear to me until I was in high school, where I was practically the only girl who played games on an obsessively regular basis. Art had always been my favourite subject and I had always enjoyed drawing immensely, so after year 12, I decided to study Visual Arts at Monash. I hadn't really looked into Multimedia at that point since I had at that point wanted to be an art teacher or something.
After half a semester in Visual Arts, I decided that I'd much rather work with games that teach a bunch of high school brats, so I got a course transfer into Multimedia with the intention of creating a concept art folio. While I do enjoy basic programming (nice to do something not so subjective sometimes), I have always been more interested in the design of games rather than the development.
This project has been the one that I've been anxiously waiting to do since I started this course, and now, finally, it's here!
The brief states that we need to choose to do either an animation, a game or a film and that concept art could be a step in this (in the pre-production stage). I spoke to Troy and we agreed that I could do a project on concept art for a game if I put in a hell of a lot of work and handed in something more than just a sketch book at the end of the year. I had always intended to do a mixture of drawings and digital paintings, specifically exploring character design, which would be presented in a properly printed out book, maybe like an artist's book, which is a piece of art in itself.
Now the hard part - the concept. I have always wanted to make some sort of Viking game since I have been obsessed with the Vikings, their history and mythology since early primary school. The world knows so much about and is so interested in Egyptian, Greek and Roman mythology, but for some reason Norse mythology always seems to get forgotten. Or, in the case of the xbox 360 game "Viking: Battle for Asgard", the theme gets done really really really badly.
I have done a few other projects during the course of this degree on the Vikings, but I have the urge to just keep going along with the theme. In my opinion, according to my research, the Vikings were probably in a lot of ways the most advanced race of people for their time. They were powerful, smart and good at almost everything they did. They were pretty much amazing.
In 2008 I went to Europe and of course had to go to Scandinavia. This just strengthened my love for the Vikings. In Sweden, I went on a viking tour, which was an entire day with a Viking expert who took me around to many of the main viking attractions in the country - runestones (including the biggest runestone in the world!), the old viking parliament, an old viking town, viking burial ground, viking museums, viking church, viking roads and many more amazing places. This was the best day of my life! I learned so much and my passion for the vikings just got so much stronger. I was really sad to learn though, that modern Scandinavia seemed to want to forget about their rich history - many of the viking artefacts had been destroyed, including the majority of viking history books. The reason for this, according to the guide was due to the Viking's poor reputation. And this is what has always made me really want to create something cool based on the awesomeness of the vikings - the fact that if you mention Viking to most people, they will immediately get the very wrong image of a hairy, bearded guy with a horned helmet raping and pillaging. I would love to change that perception in some way.
Vikings never had horned helmets. During the christian reformation, they tried to hold tightly to their own Gods and beliefs and the Christian missionaries met heavy resistance. It has been noted that the Vikings in the end became a christian civilisation - but not by choice, by brute force. Many vikings retaliated against the Christians and there are records of bloody wars - neither side necessarily on the "right/good" side. Such resistance meant that the non-Viking Christians, who were largely responsible for writing the history from this part of the world during this time period, gave the Vikings a really bad name. They started the image of a dirty, hairy man (they were very clean for their time and would bathe often) with a horned helmet (image of the devil), drinking out of human skulls (no, never happened - they drank out of horns and horn cups) while raping and pillaging without cause or reason (while there are true records of this, e.g. Monasteries in England, people forget why these things happened, what led to them and that bad actions such as these were done by a minority of the race. The rest were mainly traders and farmers who struggled to survive in lands of snow and ice and sometimes took to the seas in search of a new home).
I think I've rambled on enough. My point is that the Vikings have had an unfair wrap and that they should instead be thought of for their amazing design, their unbelievable inventions, their superior technology, their amazing ability to survive terrible conditions, their amazing stories and mythology, the fact that Viking women were seen as equal to men (rare for other societies back then), their discoveries and explorations at sea (constantinople, the Middle East, North America etc) etc.
In my project I'd like to definitely base my story line around the Vikings. I've known that this is a theme I want to explore for my folio for ages now, but I've had a hard time trying to work out exactly what I would do and how I could twist the theme into something more interesting.
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