I recently experienced turning up my level-of-detail dial when I played the video game Blue Prince. It’s a puzzle game that takes place in a house with a draftable layout of rooms that changes from day to day, and most of the puzzles are broken up across multiple rooms. It’s not always obvious what’s part of a puzzle and what isn’t; you might walk past a seemingly inconsequential object in a room dozens of times, only to find out that it’s a clue in a puzzle hours later. I ended up taking a huge amount of notes to record everything I saw that looked like it might be a clue, and I still missed some things.
That increased tendency to notice details, and to feel like I was observing part of a puzzle, carried over at times to my experience outside the game. I started seeing more detail in visual art and appreciating it more. My work involves some puzzle-like elements, along with note-taking, and noticing those similarities to the activities I was doing when playing Blue Prince made my work more enjoyable.
I recently experienced turning up my level-of-detail dial when I played the video game Blue Prince. It’s a puzzle game that takes place in a house with a draftable layout of rooms that changes from day to day, and most of the puzzles are broken up across multiple rooms. It’s not always obvious what’s part of a puzzle and what isn’t; you might walk past a seemingly inconsequential object in a room dozens of times, only to find out that it’s a clue in a puzzle hours later. I ended up taking a huge amount of notes to record everything I saw that looked like it might be a clue, and I still missed some things.
That increased tendency to notice details, and to feel like I was observing part of a puzzle, carried over at times to my experience outside the game. I started seeing more detail in visual art and appreciating it more. My work involves some puzzle-like elements, along with note-taking, and noticing those similarities to the activities I was doing when playing Blue Prince made my work more enjoyable.