256A Reading Response #3

This is a response to a line in Ge Wang’s book Artful Design: “Comics are a kind of animation, happening sequentially but at less uniform timesteps. Our mind fills in the gaps between frames.” (pg. 129, below “Ka—Boom! Whoa.”) The “filling in the gaps” is something that really resonated with me. In comics, we’re invited to not only fill in the content gaps, but also decide how long those gaps should be. Comics seem to provide a lens with sufficient context and expectation so that the readers are not only allowed but invited to fill in the gaps. This reminded me of games that use pixel art and how some of my experiences of those games are more immersive and visceral than other AAA games, that is videogames from large studios with enormous budgets, with cutting-edge graphics. While part of it feels like AAA games are always in a graphics arms race which can lead that aspect of the game to feel more like a spectacle than a meaningful addition to the game world. It is also the room that pixel art leaves that feels so exciting. Similar to comics, there is a sufficient level of context and detail that I’m not left completely floundering, yet enough room that I’m able to hold a detailed and fluid image of the character in my mind, and maybe even emotionally invest in them. Tabletop RPGs (like Dungeons and Dragons) are perhaps on the other end of this spectrum, affording an enormous amount of freedom while asking for a lot of mental energy from the players. Maybe the appeal of comics, pixel art, and even some cartoons is this balance they’ve struck with explicit meaning and an implicit invitation to the audience to co-create with them. This could also be a form of bounded and guided abstraction. A blank page can be incredibly daunting, but once it is filled with just enough ink to establish a context, then it’s off to the races and into the flow state. Maybe this space left by comics and pixel art encourages an experience of flow that other mediums don’t. Then again, maybe comics and pixel art just look really cool.