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RE The Robert Overweg article

I'm sorry but I do not mean to cause offence to either the artist or the writer of the article but I consider this article neither news, anything special and even the art if you want to call it that is old and pretty uninteresting stuff.

Let me start by saying that I have been a gamer for over 20 years. I am highly interested in what are considered out of map glitches. Both for their beauty, ways they are done, things that can happen and working out how games developers code their games. Yes I'm a nerd and I'll happily admit that. I just wanted to show I wasn't a 60 something housewife without a clue and unable to appreciate the art for what it is.

This article seems to talk as if this is something new. It comes across that way to me and this "art" which I myself partake in and record is a dime a dozen and has been for a long long long time. The article mentions the artist got into this "art" in the game of Left 4 Dead. Left 4 Dead is a game by Valve released in Nov 2008 (less than 2 years ago). I have been enjoying glitches (both out of map and other things that cause interesting things to happen in games) since my teens (Late 80's - early 90's. The early 90's saw proliferation in the FPS (First Person Shooter) genre where I believe it became more prevalent.

You can simply go to Youtube. Type the name of any video game you can think of and add either the words "glitches" or "out of map glitches" to see the crazy things from over the years and the beauty of these games.

Technology is limited by space, all games have a finite amount of space / size and therefore a final boundary. This has been the case for a long long time and no games has breached or in my opinion reach "infinity". Map boundaries and "The End" is nothing new.

People have been capturing these things for years in high quality, in video rather than still format and there are far more impressive views, vistas and findings. I myself record videos detailing these and have my own Youtube channel dedicated to gaming and music. There is a lot better "gamer related art" out there and has been for a very long time. I cannot count the number of glitches I know not by pure number in one game but over hundreds of games.

The artist seems very new by the admission of discovering it in Left 4 Dead and seems to be trying to make a living of it / name for himself from it. The amount of effort that goes into finding these glitches and documenting them either by testers or people like myself for fun is huge. It can take hours upon hours to discover "breaches" in maps and other exploits.

Some simple ones ala Left 4 Dead, and captured by the artist are in this writers opinion nothing special. I dont want to make assumptions but this gentleman could have easily looked these up, done them quite easily without the effort and taken a simple snap shot and is now trying to sell it as art? With his being new to glitching as a whole I would guess he took advantage of other peoples hard work and is unlikely to have discovered these. With his being new to "glitching" I dont think he would have a lot of experience to begin discovering these himself.

Over 20 years I have only discovered a handful myself and have countless years of experience in actual game time and "glitching".

A few 100 to a few 1000 people worldwide may truely discover an individual occurence to breach a maps boundaries but once they get noted they proliferate very quickly due to the technology of the web and video sharing.

OK. Art is what people make of it but this article kind of reeks of riding off the back of other peoples work. Yes I consider his work art myself due to my love of these things and good on him if it sells and he makes a go of it. I just feel a little annoyed that he probably hasn't done a lot of work here and the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ in its ignorance towards the video gaming world picks up on it like its some big thing. He's probably touting his pictures left, right and centre. I'm sorry I should stop assuming and I'm sure he loves the field of glitching as much as myself and most gamers but it is neither anything new nor in my opinion very good from what I see of his pictures.

It is mentioned he hasn't had any response from games companies. I'm not surprised.
They have in house testers and outsourced testers who find these things for a living with a background resume / CV to show their hard work in doing so over many years.

There are members of the community who do not get paid for finding these and who do so at their own enjoyment. There are even website dedicated to this. Community testing even bypasses a need to employ some testers. Lots of games have regular public beta tests to let communities find these things too. True testers are told to do menial tasks on a daily basis. Run, jump, walk into this 30 metre section of wall for 8 hours a day finding a combination of moves and occurences that mean you can breach the invisible wall. This is the true hard work that goes on.

Also games makers know what the outside of their maps look like and have the tools to simply view well outside their own realms by simply a click of the mouse button on a PC. Think of CAD (Computer Aided Design). A guy in a car factory flipping around a new model car he's designed on his PC screen. Now imagine that car is a computer level with the innards of the car containg the level proper. Its that simple for the developers to use a mouse to flip there level around the outside and view it from any angle. The games designers like other big companies are there to make money. They could pass it off as art too. Why not? It probably wouldn't sell as art when they can do it so easily and there are hundreds of thousands of examples already out there from members of the public.

He has recieved no replies as it is nothing new to them, they see it all day long (RE the art) and have testers and the public to do this research for them in (RE the breaching of the boundaries they create / discovery of flaws).

It's like saying to the car designer, I took off the lining on the inside of the car door to show the electrics underneath, took a photo, send it to them and say "do you consider this art" / "isn't that cool" will you pay me for it? It wasn't mentioned what he had said to the companies but I guess he was either looking for monetary gain or appreciation and I'm not suprised, as previously mentioned that he hasn't got a response due to their knowing whats there and the breaching elements being tested by communities of gamers and professionals

The above has just shown the my truely high level of geek.

As for the reporting. It was all solid but I think within the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ there really should be a specialist when it comes to matters of the Video Games industry as the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ does seem quite a bit behind. Any person spending a moderate amount of time gaming would not consider this material for an article in my honset opinion. Its very old news. You could call it "olds". Going back to my car door analogy. Would the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ really write an article about car door interior photography? Perhaps I'm thinking too hard about this and as previously explained, art is art, make of it what you will. I think this guy has got lucky in that most gamers would not think to send things like this to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ and he got lucky that someone lapped it up. Suffice it to say there is a lot better "Gaming Art" and "Glitch Art" out there today and well into the past where this artist has only just started to learn. I still feel it is unlikely he did any work himself other than learn to breach maps quite easily off the internet where someone else found the way before him. A few simple step by step guides on how to do them and he takes a photo.

Good on him if he gets noticed due to his work. Perhaps he has been a tester for 30 years and is only now thinking of setting art from the back of it as it is certainly a niche but I doubt it due to the aforementioned Left 4 Dead reference".

The gaming world today is worth millions of pounds and games can take more effort in production and a more lasting output than film media. It is one of the fastest growing industries. I really do think it is time the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ caught up on their Video Gaming knowledge.

Apologies once again if my response offends anyone. I'm sure I'll have lots of "flames" about my extreme level of "sadness" but I'm happy with my love of the gaming world and its unfounded stereotypes from the ignorance of the non-gaming community. Gaming is for everyone, the age boundaries are fading, the misconceptions are getting less and I would hope the unwarranted social stigma it receives is dying. Remember this is the 21st century. The MTV generation is over.

RE my last comment (if / when it finishes passing moderation). Multiple grammar and spelling errors. Apologies as I am normally pretty hot for proof reading my own material countless times and am very finickity. It is 2AM , I felt strongly about the subject and there was an awful lot of typing involved.

One last long comment from me unless there is someone who asks me a direct question etc.

Just wanted to highlight the parts of the original article that caused me to create the previous and lengthy response above which points still stand.......

[Robert Overweg in the Netherlands has been capturing virtual spaces since 2007 and his latest project has produced some of the most eerie and unexpected pictures from the worlds of first-person shooter video-games.]

These are neither the most eerie nor the most unexpected pictures from the world of FPS's. They are very commonplace to a large amount of people who glitch and have been doing so for decades. These are some of the least eerie out of map images I have ever seen and as explained very familiar.

["I saw normal road, walls and bushes but then the road just ended - it was foggy. So I decided to capture this and go into other games and explore their aesthetics of the ends of their worlds," Mr Overweg said.]

He might be trying to get across the "eerieness" here but the problem lies in the first few words.

It implies he happened across these ends which he did not.

This is wrong. Game designers do not just have levels where there are things as normal (bushes etc) and then the road ends / disappears. It requires the glitching beyond the normal boundaries of a games map to find these areas. e.g. You are wandering down a street in a computer level. There is alley on your left. You go down the alley and there is dead end with a wall about 5 foot tall. You see that beyond the wall the alley continues. At the end you can see it goes off left and right (T junction). The wall cannot be passed and will have an invisible barrier on its upper half.

This is the games designers creating the impression you are in a large world that continues on like real life. Adds a sense of depth and realism. They will have intended for you to continue down the street away from the alley and the wall in the alley is a block to prevent you from getting out of the designed level. The alley adds more depth and realism. There may even be a "goody" in the alley (fresh ammo / health supply etc)

If you test and glitch for many hours you may find a way to breach this wall and get past it or its invisible barrier. So. You breach said wall. Continuing down the alley, you take a left or right remembering you are in zone you are not intended to be in. Round the corners of this "T alley" the roads will drop off / disappear and whatever. Why? Its simply because you weren't meant to be there in the first place. They don't build anymore as there is no need to. These "ends" are out of visual realm of the intended level.

The statement from the artist seems to imply games just have these ends you can easily reach. Not the case. It could perhaps be poor reporting on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s behalf in that I'm sure this followed on from an explanation by him of the breaching itself but it might have been above the average non-gaming readers comprehension.

The breaching in most cases requires many many man hours and it is highly unlikely he discovered any of these himself but learnt them from Youtube in a matter of seconds.

[Mr Overweg believes that images he captures remove the sense of gaming from the graphics. Instead they can be interpreted as separate art works revealing new themes to the viewer that may not be related to the ideas initially designed by the game developers.]

Ok it can be considered art. Each to their own but "..revealing new themes to the viewer that may not be related to the ideas intially designed by the games developers".

As explained before. You are not intended to be there. Of course its not designed to look like that. You shouldn't be there. The designers have nothing in mind for that area. It was obviously left unfinished, devoid of texture and patterns not lining up properly. This is the end of the realm. This is nonsense reporting talk in my honest opinion. "Viewer" should be replaced by artist. A glitcher will see it as commonplace and may be impressed like myself with what they are seeing then head on their discovering ways into the abyss but "theme?" Theme for what. A new wallpaper in the living room? Sorry for the sarcasm. Theme implies a new topic which is something an artist would consider and not a necessarily the regulars in this field.

[Glitches differ from the end of a virtual world which appears to be a conscious decision to stop creating the virtual environment in a specific direction.]

It doesn't "appear to be". It is a concious decision. They want a map to run from (A) to (B). Why would they do work where it wasn't needed. Reporter stating the obvious.

["I see myself as an explorer, making use of new possibilities, and seeking out cracks in the worlds or new areas to document in glitches," said Robert Overweg.

"It's like a copy of the real world where things go wrong and it's very surreal."]

Yes he's documenting end of map areas and the glitches involved but as stated before I highly doubt he actually discovered any of these "cracks" himself. Good on him for being another person to document these out of the many thousands that already do but I seriously doubt he is a discoverer.

The last sentence is mindless gibberish ("It's like a copy of the real world where things go wrong and it's very surreal."). Last time I walked down the high street the world didn't just disappear and I couldn't walk on air. Nothing has "gone wrong" in those cases. You weren't meant to be there. No thought is put in / it is not fully designed by the developer. There is no mistake or error.

Perhaps in "gone wrong" he is referring to glitches other than escaping maps but the only ones that spring to mind / that he has covered would be the errors of character models in games (extra limbs, conjoined bodies and disfigurements). If he is referring to these in context of the real world all I can think is that he is relating to people with disabilities which is bordering on offensive that people with disabilities have "gone wrong" and are being compared to video game characters.

I have re-read the statement about him sending the images to companies. It seems more to imply that he wants to help them in knowing of these issues in escaping their boundaries anbd / or other glitches. If so then what good will a picture do when a video with either an audio description or a written description will describe to the companies how to replicate the error and therefore determine possible fixes. See my 1st statement RE testing either by in house testers and / or free testing by communities.

In summary. I think the article shows the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s lack in understanding and being extremely behind the times when it comes to video games.

The article seems to make a big thing about this as if it is news when it is decades old.

Some of the statements, quoted of the artist may possibly be misleading and give the wrong impression. I cannot be sure whether that is a fault of the reporter and / or the artist.

The only glaring definate issue on the artists comments is the last note.

I visited his site and although the pictures are all very mediocre you can still determine them as art. I mean. I consider a person with brilliant drawing talent who can draw a lifelike painting an artist.

Whereas some modern art like a big cube I would not consider art. It is however and art is in the eye of the beholder.

Most of my issues on this article stems from the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s poor reporting, being behind the times and making it seem like the "newest thing". Less of my issues lie with the artist.

As a note. Half life 2 seems to be where his artwork mainly comes from rather than Left 4 Dead. Both are games by Valve and are outstanding games for gameplay. However the artwork and animation is not as advanced or beautiful as many other games out there. Valve, who I am a big fan of, centre their work on the gameplay and the addictiveness therein which to most gamers is more important than how a game looks. If anyone wants to view better art, ignore this article, the artists page and do some internet searching for instant success.

Apologies if I have looked too deeply into this article and seem to have a grudge but when something is close to your heart (in my case gaming) then you do not like to see information that is wrong, misleading or detrimental to the work of others.

Sorry but in my honest opinion this is pretty poor reporting.

Rodent.