Sick Chrome Rims for that Frozen Throne
Any community that is focused on a creative task is a great opportunity for learning life skills to do with cooperation and productivity.
As a wee lad, I got dangerously deep into Warcraft III and its expansion The Frozen Throne. I played for probably thousands of hours and spent a a good amount of time in its modding tools. I produced very little playable content but learned a great deal about the logic of computer programming, the artistry of textures in video games, and how to overcome limitations like low-poly models. Having to learn about these topics and having experiences with them allowed me to participate in communities and learn about skill-building in incredibly formative ways.
Limitations like low-poly models are really not that big of a deal in a real-time strategy game like Warcraft III. The more polygons you have, the more points of data are used to define the features of a three dimensional shape. Generally, you can just tell the player that this weird gyrating blob with pseudopods is actually a villager and they'll at least treat it as such if not believe it. A similar thing occurs in a lot of older RPGs where voice acting wasn't a thing. Text can be a perfectly functional tool for dialogue, but speech is really immersive if you can get it done, such as in games like later Bethesda RPGs. These were the realizations that led me to partially despise the graphics arms race of the 2000s where everything started to look like it was covered in Vaseline, but boy did that Vaseline shimmer brilliantly! In retrospect, I am appreciative of this transformation in graphics rendering because now in the year 2016 we have a lot of games where they aren't trying to push technological boundaries, but rather trying to achieve specific aesthetic goals with the technology they want to use already being in existence.
Making textures for characters and terrain in custom maps in Warcraft III taught me how to be creative visually at a period in my life where I was being introduced to the concept of art as something besides crayon marks on a wall. Eventually I went on to take art classes and apply to a California State University for graphic design and even did some paid design work for my community college. In terms of importance to the path of my life and learning to express myself, Warcraft III was probably much more influential than the sum total of middle and high school, which were the other major life activities that I sometimes engaged in at the time.
As time passed in the games industry, textures became more complex technologically, but also less monolithic in importance for defining the aesthetic of a game. In fact, there are popular games out today that have either close to or exactly zero proper textures. As much as I futzed around with creating textures in photoshop and ensuring they mapped properly to the intended models, I never really created much that I was proud of, so I am quite thankful that you don't need a bunch of textures to establish an art style for a video game. It means that if I dabble in video game production, I'm not totally screwed.
Eventually games like Minecraft came out and I was able to really see how unnecessary complex models and textures were for non-reflex based game play. The skills I learned by programming triggers in Warcraft III translated to redstone in Minecraft quite readily. By the time I started throwing down redstone contraptions, I was already used to using a clunky system of logic to jury-rig complex systems into kinda doing maybe what I wanted. This is truly where I think my education from video games occurred. My intellectual curiosity was almost certainly shepherded by logical tools like scripting and in-game resources at a young age. Faced with the uncaring logic and power of scripting languages and conditionals I learned to resort to deductive reasoning from a very young age for most things I was invested in.
Another small side benefit of using modding tools at a young age was that when I started using industry standard software for various things in a professional or near-professional capacity, I was already completely aware of their ability to eat your projects and break horribly, resulting in massive losses of work. Frustration was still certainly present in these projects, but I knew how to move forward and I was already using practices to protect my data from such issues, mitigating my losses in the process.
Any kid who has a rational bone in his body should be exposed to games with iterative modes of creation in them, such as building contraptions with end goals in mind. For video games with modding tools, these modes are ever present. If that's not up their alley, try creative tabletop games like RPGs where a story is collaboratively made and told. As valuable as activities like sports can be, they don't exist in the same realm as software and don't fulfill the same role in an increasingly computer and (sometimes arcane) logic oriented world.
See you later.
As a wee lad, I got dangerously deep into Warcraft III and its expansion The Frozen Throne. I played for probably thousands of hours and spent a a good amount of time in its modding tools. I produced very little playable content but learned a great deal about the logic of computer programming, the artistry of textures in video games, and how to overcome limitations like low-poly models. Having to learn about these topics and having experiences with them allowed me to participate in communities and learn about skill-building in incredibly formative ways.
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| Classic Warcraft III. |
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| How I remember it. |
Making textures for characters and terrain in custom maps in Warcraft III taught me how to be creative visually at a period in my life where I was being introduced to the concept of art as something besides crayon marks on a wall. Eventually I went on to take art classes and apply to a California State University for graphic design and even did some paid design work for my community college. In terms of importance to the path of my life and learning to express myself, Warcraft III was probably much more influential than the sum total of middle and high school, which were the other major life activities that I sometimes engaged in at the time.
As time passed in the games industry, textures became more complex technologically, but also less monolithic in importance for defining the aesthetic of a game. In fact, there are popular games out today that have either close to or exactly zero proper textures. As much as I futzed around with creating textures in photoshop and ensuring they mapped properly to the intended models, I never really created much that I was proud of, so I am quite thankful that you don't need a bunch of textures to establish an art style for a video game. It means that if I dabble in video game production, I'm not totally screwed.
Eventually games like Minecraft came out and I was able to really see how unnecessary complex models and textures were for non-reflex based game play. The skills I learned by programming triggers in Warcraft III translated to redstone in Minecraft quite readily. By the time I started throwing down redstone contraptions, I was already used to using a clunky system of logic to jury-rig complex systems into kinda doing maybe what I wanted. This is truly where I think my education from video games occurred. My intellectual curiosity was almost certainly shepherded by logical tools like scripting and in-game resources at a young age. Faced with the uncaring logic and power of scripting languages and conditionals I learned to resort to deductive reasoning from a very young age for most things I was invested in.
Another small side benefit of using modding tools at a young age was that when I started using industry standard software for various things in a professional or near-professional capacity, I was already completely aware of their ability to eat your projects and break horribly, resulting in massive losses of work. Frustration was still certainly present in these projects, but I knew how to move forward and I was already using practices to protect my data from such issues, mitigating my losses in the process.
Any kid who has a rational bone in his body should be exposed to games with iterative modes of creation in them, such as building contraptions with end goals in mind. For video games with modding tools, these modes are ever present. If that's not up their alley, try creative tabletop games like RPGs where a story is collaboratively made and told. As valuable as activities like sports can be, they don't exist in the same realm as software and don't fulfill the same role in an increasingly computer and (sometimes arcane) logic oriented world.
See you later.
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