The Influence of Art Concepts on Visual Communication in Games

Aesthetically, games can be technically accomplished and beautifully crafted, with surreal worlds of fantasy or photorealistic recreations of people and places. There are already a number of video games that have taken influence from art movements, utilising it to reflect the atmosphere and narrative of the game. This paper explores the concept of video games as art and discusses to what extent existing video games have taken influence from art movements and the advantages of this. It also investigates the extent to which art concepts can influence their visual communication. Specifically, we utilise contemporary art as a means for creating recognisable game assets that will portray a sense of time, place or identity to the player; and discuss its impacts on the game design and creation. We demonstrate findings by conceptualising and producing game quality assets that incorporate the idea of taking influence from art movements/artists, and discuss how this can aid a game by generating a cohesive style, and by inspiring new methods of gameplay. We discovered that by utilizing contemporary art movements, game assets can be created which reflect a particular era further than the reality of that period of time.