Aamina Khan MA Games Design

Having spent the past 2 weeks drafting my literature review for my Design Research module, I managed to explore my research area through academic texts. I found that there were a few people who had at least researched into areas relating to my own and it felt encouraging to know that more people than I realised cared about the same issues. My research question is:  How can South Asian representation be authentically implemented in fantasy video games? Although I thoroughly enjoyed reading the relevant texts I chose to compare and critique, writing the review itself was an uphill struggle. I found that I had lots of points to make but not all of them relevant to my research question, and initially I had over 4000 words of notes (the word limit being 2000). Editing was therefore my worse nightmare. Also, there were a few times I contemplated changing my research question so I could write about a different topic I was interested in (!) I won't go into that too much... Overall,...

I feel that I am already being swayed by the intention of my colour tests in that I am finding it harder to manipulate certain architectural elements to obscure/strip away the culture from the architecture. In my quest I have realised that I am further perpetuating the orientalist nature of perceiving culture as a set of easily identifiable markers and am 'stripping' away key elements which make the architectural style so closely tied into a particular culture.  I do feel that the purpose of my test is still valid as colour can inform many design decisions as well as culture when creating a game environment (mood, atmosphere, gameplay etc.). I just wanted to note that whilst creating my samples I must be doing so with a critical mind and ensure that I rigorously question the editing decisions I make when I choose to replicate an architectural style. Being conscious of my own prejudices and bias when designing is, I feel, an important part of being a concept artist as my inter...

I wanted to pause from posting work updates and reflect on a quote from the abstract of one of the comparative texts I have chosen to use in my literature review. It is in regards to specifically Indian gamers who play video games with colonial themes: "their encounter with colonial history is direct and unavoidable, especially given the pervasiveness of postcolonial reactions in everything from academia to day-to-day conversation around them."  - Souvik Mukherjee in Playing Subaltern: Video Games and Postcolonialism When Mukherjee used 'unavoidable', this felt like both a gentle and jarring reminder to myself that my experience navigating life is not universal. Once behaviours settle into a pattern and become habit, one forgets that there is anything unordinary about what you are doing. Not everyone reacts to the term 'colonisation' in the same way. Some hear it so rarely that it acts as their jarring reminder of British history and elicits an immediate...

Last week I sampled my colour themes to manipulate architectural buildings. Below I have used cuts of the whole image as I wish to use the full image for the test itself (I will post full images after conducting the test). Here are some samples so far: I kept the features simplistic as I wanted to focus purely on colour and not graphic detail. As can be seen I am using the colour schemes from my previous post I created. In order to avoid anyone guessing right by deliberating choosing the opposite 'style' in contrast to colour, I will depict around half of the images as their true style using their accurate colour theme. I hope by doing this I can make sure the participants are choosing on colour and whatever architectural sense they may have. Whilst creating these test samples I noticed that windows can, depending on the context, have a very visible identity in architecture. By using these 4 motifs as seen below I realised that even the shape of a window can...