Game Designer vs Artist
Hideki Kamiya (game designer) vs. Amy Stein (contemporary artist/photographer)
The game designer I chose is a Hideki Kamiya, a video game designer who worked for both Capcom and Clover Studio. He is responsible for both Viewtiful Joe and Devil May Cry, but I will be focusing on his design in the game Okami for this comparison. In Okami, the player is a wolf that saves human lives using a magical paint brush (as well as fight enemies using fierce wolf powers like slashing and biting). The way the wolf has to save lives is by saving and restoring the earth and thus the environment in which everything lives. The brush has the power to cut trees down, bring the sun out, cover enemies in ink, and restore life to dead patches of earth. The whole game is visually striking, utilizing an ink and wash painting style with vivid colors and stark contrasts between the saved and poisoned earth.
Amy Stein is a photographer who works in New York City. Her series, titled “Domesticated,” deals with the relationship between humans and nature. Stein creates images in which wild animals encounter houses, highways, and swimming pools using taxidermied animals as props. She focuses on the meeting point between backyard and nature, stating “That space was often a transition zone where houses and lawns ended and the wilder, animal-inhabited area began. A space where the domestic sought connection with the wild and the wild sought the spoils of the domesticated” in a 2009 interview with The Rumper.
The connection I found between the designer and artist here is that they both deal with a relationship we have with nature. In Okami, humans depend on nature for survival. The world must first be restored and habitable in order for us to live there. In Stein’s images, human and nature co-exist but not always peacefully. She points out the problems with domestication for both human and animal, as well as the complications arising when we have to decide which habitat is more important. At first glance Stein’s photographs may make the animal seem like the intruder, but really humans are. Visually, Kamiya’s Okami is very stylized, evoking an eastern aesthetic. Stein’s images are realistic, being photographs, though somewhat shocking because of the juxtaposition between the manmade and wild. Both Kamiya and Stein play on the human/animal dichotomy. Both works contain the message that after all, we humans ultimately depend on the earth and nature for survival.
