Critical Review

Initial thoughts and feelings

Deciding what I wanted to do for this critical review was difficult, I still haven't heard back about my last critical review so I'm apprehensive to fully commit to an idea just yet-- in case I did really poorly. What I started off thinking was exploring Music Album Cover Art and the discovering why the best covers worked; and I didn't want to stick to one idea until I had a few more so I thought about what damage AI has done to the art industry, which ultimately was very extensive in reality so I thought I'd give that one a miss.

The importance of visual development art in Movie/TV making, was also one that I contemplated doing. However, I was extremely torn between Board and RPG Games Art (and the history of it), or The Significance of Video Game Art and the influences it has. After a lot of deciding, I realised that I would be too fixated on 'The Significance of Video Game Art and the influences it has', and decided to do 'Board and RPG Games Art'.

200 Words

For this critical review, I would like to discover the secrets to creating expansive worlds of board games and RPG's. After some thinking, I realised how little I knew about creating imaginary worlds and how much thought goes behind creating these past-times. I would like to delve deep into how people come up with new worlds, and would also like to look into the history of D&D (RPG), Board Game and Card Game Art.

What reenforced these ideas was my exploration through the book 'The Wild Beyond the Witchlight' a D&D Adventure book, the book itself showcases beautiful work from a variety of artists, and I also found a book called 'The Art of Arcana' which displays older D&D art through the history if it's making.

Looking through cards that my brother and friends have a lot of art is extremely detailed, so it would be really interesting to observe how artists get applied for this area of art. I would like to explore this topic to get a better understanding on how much world-building goes behind these hobbies, and to appreciate the art behind the cardboard that so often gets overlooked.

Design Board

Reflection

I haven't completed decided if I was to do an essay or a video essay, I would just like to see how my last critical review video essay was marked before deciding which to do...

Approaching this critical review and writing this proposal, I was absolutely sure that I wanted to do this as my critical review-- however, I was recently going through video game essays on YouTube and stumbled across a Last of Us video essay that spoke about narrative of the game.

Anyway, since watching that video, the hyper-fixation in me got me really intrigued at the idea of doing a critical review essay/video on 'The Significance of Video Game Art and the influences it has'. I have always loved to learn about the behind the scenes of video games and seeing the art that goes into it, and I have been interested for many years to get into the video game industry in some form or another.

Ultimately, to avoid getting tunnel-vision, like I do often, I decided against it.

Although, I may write a proposal and mood-board just to see if it would produce a better question for the critical review...