PERSONAL STATEMENT

Having been in the mobile game industry for more than 12 years in various artistic roles, whether it be 2D game concept or production artist, or art director, I have grown to love the medium of how it delivers art to people more than I have before but even beyond that witnessed how it has the potential to help regulate and channel people's negative emotions and replace it with a positive ones. Undoubtedly in the past, there are times when games could become destructive when people got too addicted, but in the mobile game sphere where I work, games have evolved into stress relievers that only require mini-minute sessions where people have the freedom to walk away after a couple of minute of tower defense multiplayer session or fill their free time with a couple of bubble shooter levels.

Game art essentially takes art and puts it into a whole other dimension of interactivity and brings it to life before our very eyes. It's how the character expresses joy when you win a game of battle royale or how colored cookies create explosions of delightful visual effects when you match them in a row of 3s. As part of a game-developing team, specifically the art department, we can bring joy, excitement, stability, and satisfaction, and take away stress, pressure, anxiety, boredom, and brain atrophy through mesmerizing worlds or cute animal characters. We could take complex programming knowledge and break it down into fun bite-sized learning material through conquering alien territories for young children. The possibilities of what art could do in games is endless. The fun we deliver to people with the most serious of professions or people no one imagines would play games. Nurses escaping into a dessert-filled Match 3 world of jam-filled cookies from the harsh realities of witnessing high covid death tolls daily or Harvard professors not knowing where to vent their intelligence between classes jumping on to strategy games like starcraft. I have seen it all. It has led me to believe that cumulative that as artists in the fun business should have fun themselves while working on games that deliver fun to people.

Naturally, my philosophy which I promote fervently while teaching game art is being able to have fun and enjoy the process while you create the art for games in a pressure-free environment. To clarify though I do not mean to slack off and become lazy but rather teach students to replace negative emotions like fear of not meeting deadlines or being put on the spot by teachers for not finishing work, or being embarrassed about being less skilled than other artists with positive emotions like choosing game themes you enjoy doing and having fun while you are working on it, getting into the zone where you focus on the quality of the work and delving deep into the process, being experimental and taking creative risks, and basically awakening that part of the soul that is passionate and excited about what the task at hand, ultimately putting control back into the hands of my students. I want to make my students realize that the responsibility of creating awesome game art falls on themselves and goes beyond the class, that there is a world of possibilities they could achieve such as using their class work to get a game art job at their favorite game company or find investors to fund their game ideas, which could potentially impact their future paths.

There is a misconception that because I am teaching about "game" art, making the class fun and exciting requires no effort and happens automatically. On the contrary, students come with high expectations of excitement so it is much easier to fall below those expectations easily. That's why I select relevant and practical topics that are simultaneously interesting, share my industry experiences relating to the topics, personify concepts, break down complex ideas into bite-size easily understandable concepts using visual illustrations, project lots of enthusiasm when teaching, making it conversational at times, encourage student-teacher interactions and QAs, and demo art processes. To me, teaching is a lot like storytelling in a game through the artistic expression of game visuals, animations, vfx, etc. where you are delivering a pow-wow player experience through the cool action poses of the characters, satisfying explosions of star particles, alluring them through free trendy and lovable costumes, and much more to capture the attention of the player so he or she would want to interact more with the game on a daily basis. After all as emotional beings, students remember lessons the best when you evoke impactfully positive emotions.

I firmly believe that education happens best when you connect on an emotional level with the students, and besides the dynamic theatrics and storytelling that I bring to the table through my game art teachings, it's the smaller things like showing support, being empathetic, encouraging, seeing unlimited potential in every student, not playing favorites, nor overcomplimenting more experienced or seemingly more talented artists, reminding them to have fun doing funwork ( not homework), building community with their classmates, avoid punishing verbality or putting anyone on the spot when student make mistakes, and pushing students to get motivated by good work without getting discouraged by the disparity in skill level. Ultimately bringing positive energy to the class is almost like planting a seed of positive energy that extends from the students to their students and or if they work in the game industry, overflowing into the games that they produce, which branches out into game products that billions of people in the world play and get influenced by.