The deeds and sufferings - Game Studies Week 3

"Colours are the deeds and sufferings of light" - Johann Wolfgang Van Goethe

This week I began writing the body of the essay talking about Newton’s theory of colour and how it gave birth to the science of Optiks. It was interesting as noted in my first blog post about how colour is a product of light. The experiment conducted by Newton involved blocking out all light from a room, and only allowing light to come through a hole, controlling how it enters into the area. Once this is done Newton placed a glass prism in front of the light and saw how doing this produced the colours of the rainbow through the refraction of all the light. It was here that he concluded that light is what makes colours. He refused Aristotle's theory that light was was a combination of light and dark. With his experiment he felt that he was able to prove his theory correct. For the most of part of the next century his colour theory would be held to as scientific fact as through science he was able to prove it. In the next 100 years a man by the name of Johann Wolfgang Van Goethe, a German poet who countered Newton’s theory. He conducted the same experiment but in reverse and found that you could still get some colour out of using the darkness as well. Which in turn was return to the similar thinking that Aristotle held prior to that of Newtons. However at the time Goethe’s contemporaries at the time never took him seriously enough as there was not enough science behind his methods. As a poet and an artist who also believed that the colour phenomena could not just be looked at through science and that the viewer would have to also use their own intuition when perceiving colour. As he saw it in his book the theory of colour, he believed that because we are apart of nature man cannot remove himself from nature to observe her and this was in case and point to counter how Newton removed man from the equation when he used the prism to observe light. Both of these men have contributed greatly to colour theory and both as well have contributed to the evolution of the colour wheel theory. With this in mind I pondered how would I be able to get enough information or show my perception correctly on the topic of colour. One avenue I thought would be really handy would be to look at how colour is perceived in the way it is used in film. Thinking about films I thought the following films fit perfectly into what could help me with my essay, I was looking at films like Equilibrium, The matrix and pleasantville. Equilibrium for instance we can look at how monotone and desaturated all colours are in the film, this could be to try and mute emotions within humans as it is believed that emotion is the true reason for wars which is the basic plotline to the movie. The Matrix on the other hand has the dull green tinged world that is within the matrix and how the people who know it is a dream are presented in the world with cold colours, this is also represented in the contract between the matrix world and real world where the matrix has a green tint and the real world has a blue tint. The last film on the list Pleasantville, starts out completely desaturated and all the viewer is able to see is black and white tones. As the movie goes on some things within the movie become coloured which the people in the movie begin to fear what they do not know. I thought these movies showed great use of colour in film and in all these cases have a specific use for them which in case could help me formulate why colour would be important in video games. In noting this after a discussion with Tece I've found that I have no video games to be able to relate these concepts to and in turn will need to as as soon as possible.