Are Digital Games Art? Are Immersive Virtual Worlds Art? The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones Thinks Not #ArtOrNotArt #SecondLife

The Museum of Modern Art will exhibit images from digital games and virtual worlds, but The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones thinks such images are not art. I’m no artist, but I think there’ s some pretty artistic stuff going on in Second Life, though Jonathan Jones will pooh-pooh the idea. The Guardian article posted a companion gallery of images from or for the exhibition, but didn’t bother to include any images from Second Life as examples of digital-game or immersive-world art. They did include shots from Sim City, EVE-Online, Myst, The Sims, and Portal along with other game screenshots.

Continue reading

Kipling Rock on the Clackamas River: Add Rock, Blend Well

I tried and failed numerous times to create and bake a simple sculptmap of a blob. It was just a practice blob, and I got it to work ONCE, which was encouraging. But every other time, the steps seemed to be different. Things weren’t on the menu that had been there before. My inner volcano erupted, and much screaming, bad language, and tears of frustration ensued (luckily no one else was home except the cat, who wisely chose to remain upstairs).

Continue reading