Game Over

I arrived in this world exactly when the golden age of video arcade games started (1978: Space Invaders). As a little boy, I was fascinated by those games. I remember staring at the demonstration screens in the mall, insisting for my parents to leave me there while they were buying food for the week.

For some reason, my parents were quite reluctant towards video games. I believe they have always considered them as some kind of silly activity. On the other hand, they also understood the importance of computers as tools: this is how I ended up with a PC at the age of 8. This was not the ideal gaming platform, but given the fact I had no choice, I started to learn how it worked. I was already a curious boy, so I asked for programming books, and a few months later I was playing my own little games (their code was no longer than a few hundreds lines, but I was so proud regardless!). Long story short, but this is probably how I ended up in a IT school, and also currently working in that field.

A few years later, while being a student, I started playing MMOs (massively multiplayer online games). I was an avid "EverQuest" player: I remember averaging 12h per day on the game. This lasted about 2 years, then I stopped when I met my wife. Or, more precisely, I stopped in order to find a wife More recently, like many I also played to "World of Warcraft", which inspired my image: still addictive, but I was managing to restrain my play time to around 20h per week. I stopped about a year ago, to give photography all my free time.

Creating that image was a bit challenging: usually, I am able to photograph all the different parts of my composites and directly arrange them on the canvas, but here, there was no way to shoot a big monster exploding a wall with a strange giant hammer. This requested some creativity: for example the explosion is made of ordinary cloud photos, that I slowly deformed to give them the needed shape. Similarly, the monster face is made of a human skull photo, altered to suit my needs. Of course, the overall result is just a fun image, without any profound meaning or anything like that, but I am sure the new techniques I learned there will prove to be useful in the future.