Tuesday 18 February 2014

Game Art and Machinima Research: Anthropomorphism

By Meg Sugden 
Anthropomorphism is the method of taking elements of the human form or other characteristics of it and moulding it with anything other than a human being. Early example of this are seen in most storytelling and also in art and a lot of the time we find humans mixed with animals. Seen throughout history one of the oldest known pieces of work to contain anthropomorphism is an ivory sculpture of a human-shaped figurine with the head of a lioness or lion, presumed to be able 32,000 years old.


For our project we wanted to specifically look at animal and human mixtures as this is the route that we want to follow for our project, but mix it up a little bit. Throughout history it has usually been seen that human figures will have some form of animal feature on them, like the figure with an lion head. But what we want to do is follow more traditional animal looking humans seen mainly on television or on video games. In a lot of modern literature there have been animals that have human characteristics, ones who will stand up like a human does and also talk. This is an interesting way of using an animal to make it act like a human, for example seen in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Wind in the Willows.




When it comes to video games probably the most obviously and one of the oldest examples of anthropomorphism is Sonic the Hedgehog, released in 1991. Along with song, a blue hedgehog that is the lead character in later games produced for the series we also get other animals that have been portrayed in the same way. This can also be seen in many games like Spyro, Crash Bandicoot and the Sly Cooper series. What we as a team aim to do for this project is take the idea of a duck-billed platypus and a raccoon and give them human features in the same way that these other games and ideas do and the research stage which will be continuing to look into a number of different games and films will definitely help influence and guide that process.

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