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Research
Graphic Design as Image Production in the Age of Game Engines
Jasmin Kharamani & Louis Kocmick
MA Thesis @ The Royal Danish Academy
June 2024
[Excerpt]
Welcome to an inquiry of graphic design’s move into the game engine and onto the grid. A move from XY to XYZ: paper becomes screen, surface becomes landscape, elements become characters, foliage, props – white space becomes air, void. A move in which Stepping Onto the Grid explores the navigable game space and its implications for image production: implications that oblige us, the graphic designers, to reconsider our decision-making process. If we once concerned ourselves with which typeface to select, we now have to concern ourselves with the movement patterns of our characters.
Enter the digital microcosm. A recursion made comprehensible through Unreal Engine, an image-producing apparatus. The microcosm itself, a self-enclosed design system. Between its blades of grass, you will find infinite directions to traverse. Each walkthrough unique. You will become both a world-builder and a forager of imagery – simultaneously extracting images while you explore and terraform the landscape. Through the microcosm, visual design becomes an act of sculpture, gardening, and ecology. A development that has not only arisen as a consequence of recent technological developments but also due to the importance of continually examining our field and the possibilities that come with it.
In 1559 Earth was rendered navigable through projection from XYZ to XY, the Mercator map. Earth’s shape transformed from sphere to plane in the Western mind – a coordinate grid – world as a graph for marine navigation. So called operative or artificial flatness. Mercator moved Earth from an external experience of space into the mind as a flat image of the ‘enlightened’ western human. It signified the path of convergence towards reassembling the world into a world of representations. Ever since, this logic has been carried out across books, music sheets, iconography, databases, websites, and so forth – the act of distilling the essence of complex concepts in order to present it as a graphic representation.
Today you might argue that graphic design stands before a transposition; replacing the edges of the paper with the borders of the game space. A space wherein worlds are constructed from 0s and 1s within the engine room of the computer. These worlds arise from the aforementioned map, which once again finds its three dimensionality. In here the flat map is referred to as an UV – contorted polygons, crunched together to conform to a rectangular grid. An incomprehensible flat image made with the sole purpose of being projected onto a three dimensional mesh. As we have used maps to render the world comprehensible, the engine uses maps to render the world. Through this reversion, the UV map becomes a symbolic representation of this divergence from the reproduced world towards ‘the produced world’ – a world constructed in the game engine.
These worlds are navigable to the designer, through utilising the same control framework as a game player. Using WASD-keys and mouse, to orient and move, makes designing within this engine an act of ‘gaming’. When working with traditional compositions, the designer is placed outside of the area they are composing. When working on a microcosm the designer is placed within the world as a game entity themselves. This re-animation of graphic design thereby contributes to a new dimension that gives the designer an opportunity to live and relive props and characters – from different angles, in different light settings, with shifting distances. The area in which we convey information becomes a world of information. Opposite the traditionally two-dimensional artboard we look upon from one perspective, the worlds made in the game engine present themselves through a controllable perspective – hiding the ‘borders’ of the composition and thus making the composition transition into a state of cosm – a world build around the designer and not in front of her. A construct in which the designer can essentially extract images, going beyond the idea of composing what needs to be within the edges of the composition.
Whereas these worlds exist as three dimensional environments, the game engine itself lives behind the screen: A terrarium-like setting – a peek into an untouchable yet feelable microcosm – a visual, yet haptic experience. Alas! Let us not view the screen as a border, but rather accept its role as an invisible veil, translating the database of the game engine into a perceivably living world. Living due to its autonomous characters, performing their behaviour independently of the player – creating complex cause and effect loops. Wind moving through grass. Turbulence... dust particles obscuring the lens. Light setting behind the horizon.
Overall one could say that the image production landscape we stand before today comes with a strongly increased complexity. Not only does the game engine have an increased amount of technical possibilities, its images also suggest references and meanings that extend beyond their mere function. They are not a modernistic drawn arrow that leads the way to the nearest exit. Rather they are having us lose our sense of what is real in intricate image-to-reality fragments and moments. In simulations that might remind us of something we once knew but in this very second can not put a finger on. This increased complexity requires the designer to transcend visuality in world-building: dealing with narratives, ideas of culture, eco-systems, character relations, and inter-object connections, even soundscapes. There is a relatedness at play; as trees cluster together they become forests.
Forests born out of the grid: a pinnacle of contemporary graphic design history, ever-present, through columns of text, placement of images, and the rhythm of the composed surface. Before visible, it now hides from plain sight of the player in the game engine. The grid is brick, gridiron, map, type, screen, network – an organisable template for designers to build from. While still present in game space, it has stepped away from the spotlight. In the translation along the X and Z-axis, the surface within becomes navigable distances; plains to traverse. Along the Y-axis; hills, skies, above us, canyons, oceans, below. A coordinate system that keeps expanding infinitely. In order for it to feel like a world, the designer must structure her objects in a relational way rather than aligning elements to lines or guides. The game-engine grid becomes directional: left, right, front, back, up, down – the alignment guides are now entities from the past.
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