Post by Pacmanite on Dec 4, 2008 18:07:01 GMT -5
I dream about all my passions 
If I've been working away at a piano all day, then there's a good chance this really annoying piano is going to play in the background of my dreams. If I fall asleep doing Latin homework, Aeneas and Queen Dido barge in with their Trojan companions. I've had Pokemon, Neopets, and Harry Potter in my dreams (though not all at the same time... *shudder*). I've had a dream where I painted something cool and showed it to the class (it was a surrealist landscape with a beach hotel being ripped apart in a storm). I've dreamed about getting a new pet like a pigeon or a kitten. I've dreamed about pretty much everything. Except doing Maths homework lol!
But the thing I've noticed about dreaming videogames, is that even though I know full well when I'm awake that the game's graphics are pixellated, the viewpoint is set permanently to a bird's eye view, the character can only move north, south, east and west in straight lines and onto predefined tiles, when I dream about a videogame, the viewpoint changes as readily and naturally as the camera angles in a movie and as the dream progresses, I stop being the one playing the game, and become the character in the game.
I just had one last night. With an annoying piano banging away in the background, I turned on my cousin's Pokemon Silver game and realised that she hadn't completed a certain part of the game (meeting her rival at such-and-such a place, and battling with him). So I flew there and walked up to the cave. At this point I'm still in the cheesily-cute pixellated graphics that the early pokemon games are known for.
Like with this kind of detail in the graphics:
(image from here: maxpages.com/pokemononline/Gold_and_Silver_Screenshots)
Then suddenly I turned a corner and it was like watching a movie. The bird's eye view that had always been offset was now a true birds eye view, so I could only see the top of my character's head. More notably, though, there was no more pixellation, it wasn't even rendered in 3D like modern videogames, it was just like a movie, with all the colour depth and shading that you see in a high budget production, and the character had the same mobility as a character in a movie. I entered the cave - now a building, 'cause my brain can't make up its mind - and the view changed abruptly to a side view, and I wasn't looking at my character any more, I'd replaced him.
Maybe it says something about how immersive a game can be even without top of the line graphics, but I still find it quite wierd that a whole world can suddenly spring out of a lot of pixelly rectangles
Tell me I'm not going crazy. Maybe it's like reading a book, you don't "see" the words printed on the page, and you very rarely see them in your dreams either, but you create the scene in your head, and then that's the world you visit in your dreams too.
But it seems that people who have watched monochrome ("lower graphics quality") films and TV as children have a far greater chance of dreaming in black and white than people who have watched TV in colour all their lives, according to this study - www.newscientist.com/article/dn14959-its-black-and-white-tv-influences-your-dreams.html so I don't know why people would dream videogames in superior graphics quality?
Or is it just me?
If I've been working away at a piano all day, then there's a good chance this really annoying piano is going to play in the background of my dreams. If I fall asleep doing Latin homework, Aeneas and Queen Dido barge in with their Trojan companions. I've had Pokemon, Neopets, and Harry Potter in my dreams (though not all at the same time... *shudder*). I've had a dream where I painted something cool and showed it to the class (it was a surrealist landscape with a beach hotel being ripped apart in a storm). I've dreamed about getting a new pet like a pigeon or a kitten. I've dreamed about pretty much everything. Except doing Maths homework lol!But the thing I've noticed about dreaming videogames, is that even though I know full well when I'm awake that the game's graphics are pixellated, the viewpoint is set permanently to a bird's eye view, the character can only move north, south, east and west in straight lines and onto predefined tiles, when I dream about a videogame, the viewpoint changes as readily and naturally as the camera angles in a movie and as the dream progresses, I stop being the one playing the game, and become the character in the game.
I just had one last night. With an annoying piano banging away in the background, I turned on my cousin's Pokemon Silver game and realised that she hadn't completed a certain part of the game (meeting her rival at such-and-such a place, and battling with him). So I flew there and walked up to the cave. At this point I'm still in the cheesily-cute pixellated graphics that the early pokemon games are known for.
Like with this kind of detail in the graphics:
(image from here: maxpages.com/pokemononline/Gold_and_Silver_Screenshots)
Then suddenly I turned a corner and it was like watching a movie. The bird's eye view that had always been offset was now a true birds eye view, so I could only see the top of my character's head. More notably, though, there was no more pixellation, it wasn't even rendered in 3D like modern videogames, it was just like a movie, with all the colour depth and shading that you see in a high budget production, and the character had the same mobility as a character in a movie. I entered the cave - now a building, 'cause my brain can't make up its mind - and the view changed abruptly to a side view, and I wasn't looking at my character any more, I'd replaced him.
Maybe it says something about how immersive a game can be even without top of the line graphics, but I still find it quite wierd that a whole world can suddenly spring out of a lot of pixelly rectangles
Tell me I'm not going crazy. Maybe it's like reading a book, you don't "see" the words printed on the page, and you very rarely see them in your dreams either, but you create the scene in your head, and then that's the world you visit in your dreams too. But it seems that people who have watched monochrome ("lower graphics quality") films and TV as children have a far greater chance of dreaming in black and white than people who have watched TV in colour all their lives, according to this study - www.newscientist.com/article/dn14959-its-black-and-white-tv-influences-your-dreams.html so I don't know why people would dream videogames in superior graphics quality?
Or is it just me?
