Although this is an article about how your audience experiences your art and/or your fiction, I’m going to have to start by talking about classic computer games and old films for about six paragraphs. As usual, there’s a good reason for this that will become obvious later.
As regular readers of this site probably know, I’ve been going through yet another “Doom II” phase recently. Anyway, whilst I was trying to think of an idea for today’s article, I decided to take another look at the “Doom Retro” source port that I reviewed last year.
If you don’t know what a “source port” is, it’s a program that allows certain older games (whose source code has been released to the public) to run on more modern computers.
However, unlike many other source ports for “Doom”, “Doom Retro” tries to re-create the experience of playing the original “Doom” games on a vintage computer as accurately as possible. For the most part, it doesn’t add any new features to the games (eg: modern controls, a modern aiming system, higher screen resolutions etc…) in the way that most modern source ports do.
Needless to say, it didn’t take me long to remember that the old “Doom” games are a lot harder when played using the traditional keyboard-only controls and the original aiming system. Years of playing challenging fan-made levels using modern source ports had led me to think of the original games (“Final Doom” especially) as being ‘easy’. But, of course, they weren’t. Thanks to the controls and the limitations of the original game engine, they were meant to be a lot more challenging than they are these days.
This made me think about films from the 1980s and the 1990s. Whilst most classic films actually look better on DVD than they do on VHS, I can think of at least a few films that are better on VHS than on the slightly more modern DVD format. Sometimes, this is purely due to nostalgia but, many times, there are good practical reasons for this.
The main reason, of course, is that the low-resolution fuzziness of the VHS format (especially when viewed on a CRT screen) conceals a multitude of sins. It makes a lot of old special effects look better than they actually are. Some films just look better on VHS.
So, what does any of this have to do with art and/or fiction?
Well, it’s much less of an issue for the simple reason that images are images and words are words. Even so, I’d argue that formatting can still have an effect on how your creative works are perceived.
The classic example is the differences in formatting between writing in print and writing for the internet. Because online texts are often read in one continuous “scroll”, block paragraphs tend to make them easier to read. Whereas, if you saw block paragraphs in a traditional book, it would probably look out of place. Likewise, traditionally-paragraphed text can look dense and confusing on a computer screen.
Likewise, typeface size can influence how your fiction is viewed. A good example of this that I saw when I was a teenager was when I read Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather”. Since my copy of the book was an old second-hand book with relatively small print. The book itself was slightly thicker than a “normal” novel, but it didn’t really look that much like a “long” book at a glance. Of course, when I happened to see a more modern imprint of it in the shops, it looked significantly longer due to the changes in typeface size, formatting etc…
As for art, whilst I’m not even close to being an expert on photography, how a painting or drawing is photographed (or whether it’s scanned rather than photographed) can have an effect on what it looks like. For example, a small sketch can look more spontaneous if the rest of the sketchbook page and some of the surface the sketchbook is resting on is also photographed.
Likewise, I usually digitally edit my art after I scan it. The most important part of this involves altering the brightness/contrast levels in the scanned image (because my art looks “faded” when scanned). Of course, these can vary slightly from painting to painting. So, if I ever had to re-scan or re-edit one of my paintings, it would probably look slightly different to the original.
So, whilst formatting and presentation isn’t as much of an issue for art, fiction etc… than it is for films and computer games, it can still have an effect.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂 Hopefully, I’ll think of a better idea for tomorrow’s article.
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