As part of my Creative Commons website search, I began with a search for David Bowie to see what kind of pictures would come up, but was not heavily interested with the results. So I searched “horror”, “penny dreadfuls”, and finally “video games” which gave me a set of results I couldn’t turn away.
That smiling blue shirted man in the pictures below is Mike Mozart. He likes old video games I guess, because all of his pictures are in the same style. It’s him, standing in a selfie, in each holding a different video game. I have attached ten to give you an idea, and know that ten is not all of them, it is only a dent.
After some research I learned that our friend Mike here might actually have a YouTube channel where he shares with the world his extensive knowledge of old toys and games. He also uses that as a platform to show his collection to the world; that is, unless there is another Mike Mozart that looks like this man and collects games and toys… which is totally possible.
I was rather surprised when I searched video games to have received a search result of this nature. I wonder ever so slightly what part of the creative commons website that Mike’s images arrived from.
All I feel I really learned today is that searches for Creative Commons content will bring some weird results if your key terms are sort of vague, hence how I met Mike. Although, that said, I can see some usefulness for Creative Commons content. With Copyright and Patents and Trademarks, there is so much out there that we can’t use as creators and cannot respond to for years after the death of people we may revere. Creative Commons takes away the struggle of waiting for a death or fifty to seventy years to pass to be able to engage with and use a piece of content. Anything in Creative Commons can be used immediately, responded to, or remixed into something new allowing dialogue to be perpetuated without crazy wait times. There are things in the Creative Commons that may not be as useful as others, but hey, maybe someday someone will need these photos by Mike Mozart as reference and record of the aesthetic of old school gaming.