…but with a hilarious and not at all surprising amalgamation of stress, panic, procrastination, and volcanic enthusiasm barely contained by the dangerous human assumption that we have “plenty of time.”

The end is nigh. But not so nigh that I intend to do anything about it.

Yet.

The plan – the wall of red string, post-it notes, and cat pictures currently posing as a plan – is to look at a video game. A number of them. Which I’m sure isn’t going to lend itself to anything so disastrous as, say, chronic procrastination masquerading as research.

I digress.

The “plan” is to look at a number of video games – games like Assassin’s Creed and Uncharted and Mirror’s Edge – and analyze their fashion. Specifically, how the characters, central and otherwise, represent themselves with what they wear; how the fashions of the supposed day (ancient, modern, futuristic) reflect the society that surrounds them, or how it does not properly represent the human landscape and why that is; and, most importantly, how the modern fashions of their designers influences the way that these characters are represented, particularly with regard to ancient and futurist fashion.

How we aim to do this is still up in the air, hovering like an alien spacecraft. Practically daring us to throw something at it, just to see what color it makes when it explodes. Which, in normal-human-speak, translates to “We have a goal, a conspicuous hole where the plan usually goes, and enough resources that if we just start looking at things that exist, we’ll eventually have something we can at least pretend is cohesive. It’ll be just fine.”

Famous last words.

So, what to throw at the alien spacecraft? Interviews with gamers of various ages will be involved, asking them what game aesthetics they enjoy and why; we have access to a vast repertoire of historical knowledge that will definitely be pertinent when analyzing how fashion expresses the world that requires it; and the games themselves, of course, and whatever research and designer notes we can find online (with the very real potential of making digital contact with the designers themselves – most of them are actually quite personable; human, even). We intend to use animatics with voice-overs as the backbone of our presentations, because animatics have the potential for an excess of color, and learning things is just so much more fun when you’re being taught by a very small blood-and-sunlight-scaled dragon named Henry Chancellor III.

Thus concludes the tenuous summary of our plan-that’s-not-a-plan. With luck and providence and a fair bit of animal sacrifice, it might just become something worthwhile.

Might.