Flow is the state achieved when you get in "the zone." Time passes quickly, day turns to night, and you fail to notice your eyes are as dry as the Sahara until you close them and it stings. Your mouth is sour and your head slightly hurts around the sides. All of these feelings come when you spend hours upon hours playing because you were stuck in a state of flow. Flow is important for the design of video games, since it's the end goal for most games to have their players be invested in the game so much that they fail to notice anything else. For this example, I chose the classic game Half-Life. It's super easy to enter a state where all you do is run, think, shoot and live. Half-Life has a simple gameplay loop, but it's highly dynamic and adaptable. You explore, find supplies, defeat enemies, solve a puzzle, and then move on to the next location to do it again. What makes this fun is how satisfying it is to solve the puzzle, how curious you are to open the boxes and doors, and how exciting it is when a horde of zombies or soldiers come your way and you know the only way you're getting out alive is based on your own skill at shooting and dodging. Half-Life was carefully designed to give the player this feeling, There are moments of peace and quiet every so often to give the player a moment of calm so they can take the time to appreciate the environment. Some may think this breaks the state of flow because it removes the player from the action, but I'd argue the opposite is true. It makes the player feel excited for the next time action comes, and also curious as to what's around them. The player becomes lost in exploration and progression as they tensely wait for the next time to fight. The way the weapons feel also helps. They're all super satisfying to use. The areas I included are important because it shows how the gameplay is staggered, not to break, but to strengthen the gameplay. However, the last part of the game on Xen does break this, and commonly skipped by fans.
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Oh boy, it's currently 12:34 AM and I'm writing my blog post. I realized though before making this, that I always seemed to get hit with inspiration at night. Why was that exactly? Why was it that when I'm lying in bed, I feel the urge to write or draw? What is it about lying down that psychologically inclines us to get up and start doing something creative? I really didn't have a clear answer. I decided to dig into this and see why this was the case. After doing some digging on the internet, the prevailing theory has to do with how our brains react to sleep and nighttime as a whole. During the night, your body has much less to focus on. This decreses the amount of energy your body spends on analytical thinking and other life processes. The effective result of this is that spare energy is able to be dedicated to things like creativity. You also have much less distractions and obligations at night. While throughout the day, assuming you don't have a job in a creative field, you probably don't have a ton of free time to give to creative tasks. At night however, this burdon is lifted from your shoulders and you can take the time to be creative. In summary, it's not my fault I stay up late doing things. It's my brain's... which technically is me.
On September 12th, I celebrated the two year anniversary of my job as a freelance voice actor. And oh boy, what an uneventful two years it has been for me. Sure, I was fairly active. Soon I'll be reaching the 100 auditions point, but despite that it's been rather quiet. One problem that I've noticed in the industry is the lack of apparent proactiveness from a lot of my directors and staff that I work with. I get the constant feeling that I'm the only person working on the project, and I'm only doing voice lines. In another situation, I had to put the entire video together myself on the behalf of the director just so something would get put out. This is the problem I have noticed in the field of freelance and unprofessional work. There just isn't any structure or motivation to finish things. This lack of motivation for small groups though is something I've noticed outside of voice acting however. In groups of people I work with that make games, I don't see much getting done. Friends of mine who are very talented artists aren't getting anything done. It seems as though people who work independently just get less done than those who are part of a structure. Why this is has been on my mind for a while. Was it because there was nobody but themselves to get them to do it? Was it an effect from the stress and drain of quarantine? I don't frankly have a clear cut answer.
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AuthorI am an artist as anyone else is an artist (if that makes sense). My style is abstract and I also draw cartoons. I am also a voice actor for a web-series. Archives
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