• In writing this, I have no hope to change anything. If I could change things for the better, it would be fantastic, however I doubt the word of one lonely writer in a forum saturated with thousands of other submissions from other writers, some superior but many quite inferior. It would be a godsend for my point to get across to someone, however I’m agnostic and therefore it would probably more along the lines of a ‘somethingsend’. But now on to the actual rant:
    The ‘art arenas’ of Gaia Online suffers from an unbelievable amount of problems. It seemed to be Gaia’s attempt at making their version of deviantART, but cluttered, unorganised and saturated with garbage. Now, this isn’t to say everything about it is bad, on the contrary. A large amount of the illustrated art is quite beautifully made, and there are a few decent writers out there who submit decent work. However this will bring us to the first problem, the quality.
    Now quality in the drawing section tends to be quite consistent. Very rarely do any of the drawings fall below the level of mediocrity (however, when it does it‘s mostly spam or someone who is full of themselves), and the vast majority is quite beautiful if not inspiring. One problem I may have is everyone (for the most part) assimilating to the anime style, but because Gaia bases the entirety of it’s graphical style and the majority of Gaia’s users are anime fans this problem isn’t all too serious (However it is really cool when someone does something that goes beyond the usual anime style). Also, I’d like to add that the majority of the photography section is just pretty and rarely do I find myself having a problem with someone‘s garbage photoshopping jobs. However, unlike the visual portion of Gaia’s art arenas, the writing is just unbelievable. There is a huge amount of boring, un-inspired ‘literature’ floating around in the arena and even when technical qualities are put aside, it’s still really bad. For the most part, they suffer from similar problems. The writer of the work is far to ambitions, creating something that they say that they intend on making a full book out of when it is quite clear that they don’t have the skills to create enough content to fill 200 pages, especially when their first ‘chapter’ barely fills one or two. Another is that people just don’t understand that what they are writing has been over-done and that their take on it isn’t original or inspiring when they have nothing to bring to the table (P.S. Stop writing about vampires already when you‘re just using it as a generic set-up and not exploring it at all. Also, vampire romances are highly over-done.).
    Another big issue with the arenas are the ‘homes’ and ‘avatars’ sections. Now interior design and fashion are in fact forms of art but in my opinion however, Gaia is still very limited on how much you can do using their pre-created virtual items. Besides, a large number of these avatars turn out to be flashy ’demonic’ avatars and the whole of these two sections urges users to spend gold in order to ’express’ themselves. Also, a big proportion of fashion is assimilation rather then creativity but that’s another rant in itself.
    What could improve Gaia’s art arenas is to alter them slightly. Create pages to showcase and archive all the art and work of individual users, rather then spotlight them once and then allow them to fade away and be forgotten. Also, what should be done is allow the blocking or demotion of poorly written works in order to promote faulty writers to work harder. This could also come in handy for the removal of spam and other garbage that doesn’t have any place on the art arenas.
    I know I’m one voice attempted to be heard in a crowed of many, many others. But I hope someone out there understands what I’m trying to say. Gaia’s visual art arena is well done, however the other portions have room for improvement. Thank you if you have taken your time to read this to the end, as I know many people don’t have the time to some days. I appreciate it.