Realism.
In the eternal (and occasionally futile) quest to reinvigorate my interest in video games, I do regularly keep my ear to the ground regarding new developments. And, as I read the press releases for the next big new game, they always boast about “ultra-realistic graphics”. That’s all well and good - watching someone play FIFA these days, you could easily think that you were watching a real football game - but there’s a part of me that thinks that games companies are rather missing the point.
It seems that the quest to improve the graphics processing capabilities of computers and consoles seems to be driven by this drive for greater realism. That’s all well and good, and it has resulted in some amazing hardware and some incredibly realistic games. But there’s so much more you can do with a tool as versatile as a computer. For instance, FIFA looks amazing, but you can still quite easily go and watch a real football match, or (deity forbid) go out, buy a football, and play the game yourself. Sure, I would love to drive around the Top Gear test track in a Nissan GT-R, and the forthcoming Gran Turismo 4 will offer me a virtually photo-realistic chance to try that, but it’s still rooted in real life.
A computer is capable of creating environments and experiences that are simply impossible in the real world, without the constraints of physics, and only limited by the imaginations of those who create them. These are experiences that cannot be had by any other means, which are unique to the medium. Worlds where causality doesn’t apply, where even time can be meaningless. A totally new paradigm. These are the types of experiences that would draw me back to gaming. And I don’t mean games with fantasy or futurist elements - the bulk of these experiences are available in real life, with a little imagination and capacity for make-believe. The experiences of which I speak can’t.
This used to be a much more common thing, back when computers were utterly incapable of creating realistic graphics. The programmers and designers of the time had to work with what they had, and, in the absence of realism, imagination took over. A game that stands out in my mind that was very much of this ilk was Iridis Alpha for the C64, created by one of the few games programmers who can actually see past the whole quest for realism - Jeff Minter. The game was essentially a side-scrolling shooter, but that incorporated various “invented” laws of physics as essential components in the gameplay. Your ship was capable of shifting between two dimensions (each shown as a separate horizontally scrolling slice onscreen), and part of the gameplay was that you had to shift dimensions regularly, as you were incapable of existing in one for very long (a mutated law of “entropy”). Also, the visuals were in no way even attempting to be realistic (although that’s not to be expected, given the capabilities of the C64) and the whole experience was somewhat on the “trippy” side and required some tangental thought to play. Happily, Jeff is still busy creating his own psychedelic takes on classic genres, and the industry needs (and has always needed) more people like him.
But no. People want to play virtual football, cast spells on virtual trolls and shoot virtual aliens, so games with this degree of vision probably wouldn’t sell.
Doesn’t stop me wanting to see more of it though. Maybe, coming back to my previous post about the revelation that is small-team development on the iPhone, we might be able to see more of this sort of thing in the future.
Games as art? Perhaps. That’s when you know that a craft has outgrown its medium and can stand on its own.
