Video Games and Travelling - The Main Influences

This post is a personal insight, explaining why I chose this subject for my project. As I keep painting, drawing, and creating, I mentally keep harking back to the same original inspiration, my rural youth, travelling, and playing video games that are built within natural landscapes, maps, or platforms. I have touched upon the deeper contexts such as video game graphics, but I want to explain on a basic level what these so inspiring to me.

Video games were my escape growing up, when I struggled with friendships or conversation, a major introvert, and always believed I was the 'weird' friend. This was my place to explore and experience digital worlds through characters who were capable, developed, or just silly like me!

The screenshots below are from some of the many games I was lucky to play. I got lost in a variety of representational, and fantastical worlds, urban, rural, domestic, or otherworldly.

2000's Video Games

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Underworld. 2008. PS2 [Game]. London, UK: Eidos Interactive.

James Bond 007: From Russia with Love. 2005. PS2 [Game]. Redwood, CA: Electronic Arts.

Super Farm. 2003. PS2 [Game]. Bordeaux, France: Asobo Studio.

Mashed. 2004. PS2 [Game]. London, UK. Empire Interactive.

Star Wars: Battlefront. 2004. PS2 [Game]. San Francisco, CA: LucasArts.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village. 2007. Nintendo DS [Game]. Fukuoka, Japan: Level-5.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider Legend. 2006. PS2 [Game]. London, UK: Eidos Interactive.

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Conversely, away from a screen indoors, I have been lucky to travel abroad during my teenage years. Visiting these places at a young age gave me a lust to travel and see even more. I think this heightened my sense of adventure from a child, and only kept growing. I chose film camera as this beautifully captures the location and marries it with visual equivalent of recalling an positive memory.

Photos from abroad, 2014-2016

• Tallin, Estonia

• Copenhagen, Denmark

• Los Hervideros, Spain

• Saint Petersburg, Russia

• Åndalsnes, Norway

• Las Palmas, Spain

Together, these environments, digital and physical have made me curious and excited to see new places and cultures, and experience what the world, and fantasy worlds, have to offer, and their potential for exploration, and physical or natural construction.