@ Evil Dan -

I’m glad to hear you got something out of it! The original intent of this blog was to provoke to developers to think differently about game design, and you’re the first developer that seems to have taken it to heart.
and re: realism – I’ve been working on a 2D game with a partner of mine for
several months now, and we made the decision to ‘abstract from’ the experience of using a computer terminal program to a more GUI-like system that’s more user-friendly, colorful, aesthetic and fun, instead of trying to “simulate” a real terminal environment for a realistic effect. What this has done is open up our game to a world of possibilities that weren’t there before when we were originally caught up with trying to simulate every aspect. I think the game “Uplink” by Introversion is a great example of imaginative abstraction.
Would love to link out to you – you’ve got some interesting game criticism on your blog that fits right in here. Glad you stopped by!

It was actually a link to your blog from Brain Gamer that led me here, so I’d already read his BGE2 post.

I find that the annual Interactive Fiction Competition is a good way to get involved more in text adventures. IFComp games are generally short – under two hours to complete. Judging an IFComp is worth considering (in general, I mean). (Sorry if you already know this, but) it starts at the beginning of October and ends in mid-November, so there’s plenty of time, and it gives you an incentive and a time frame and a goal, because otherwise, if you go to Baf’s Guide to the IF archive or something and click around, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by the extreme number of games out there, and you just get lost. And you can learn a lot from authors’ mistakes as well as from their successes – a lot about game design in general. And for a while now there has been a notable increase in experimental games – games that challenge how we think about games, and games which are, for want of a better phrase, merely ‘art pieces’. Deadline Enchanter, from last year’s competition, was very controversial in this respect.

Sorry – I’m rambling about something you might not be interested in. But I do at least wonder: why are books still popular, despite movies, but text adventures aren’t, because of graphical games?

Hah! I knew something looked funny about that Zork screenshot, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It’s been at least 10 years since I loaded RTZ on my PC, so I grabbed the first image on Google that came to mind… I guess my memory isn’t as good as I thought Thanks for pointing out the error.

I absolutely agree that modern IF does a great job of expressing the world of the PC – I just wish I had the time to play more of them. I really like what you say about that idea that games allow us to “rejoice in worlds which are purely of imagination”. I also find that true of many other media forms, but games allow us to – play – in imaginative worlds and not simply witness them passively. There is no doubt that realistic graphics are driven by an economic model. I highly suggest checking out Michael Abbott’s latest article over at the Brainy Gamer on the same topic – it looks like Beyond Good & Evil 2 is on the same road to “realism”. Damn!

“trying to control everything in a scene like a puppet master with a thousand fingers” is a fantastic analogy, I feel. My take is this: Why would I want to play a ‘realistic’ game when it obviously isn’t going to be quite as good as the actual reality that surrounds me every day of my waking life, and when the pursuit of ultimate one-to-one simulation of reality is a fool’s challenge, as unreachable and pointless as Sisyphus’? Personally, I, partly if not exclusively, play games in order to escape reality, to rejoice in worlds which are purely of imagination and which do not exist in the real world. I think stories should be convincing – i.e. self-consistent with their world model – but ultimately unrealistic. Of course this doesn’t just apply to graphics, but it’s clear that the graphical style of the game should serve the story and gameplay and not vice versa. However, I fear that ever more realistic graphics and perfect control over perfect simulations are driven by an economic imperative.

Much thanks for your thoughts. True, I spoke in generalities. I think inanimate objects are a place where CG really shines – films like Children of Men did an amazing job of turning them into background objects that didn’t detract from the central theme and only added to it. The landscapes in settings in FF, if you want me opinion here, were pretty – but also shamelessly hyper-epic and lacked the kind of stylistic flair that awaken my imagination. Games like Okami do such an amazing job of it in comparison.

I haven’t played Assassin’s Creed yet – although some of the preview videos did make the characters seem interesting enough. I’ll definitely look into it, especially since yes – Mass Effect went overboard with its attempt at capturing feeling.. and simply became machinima.

Thanks for the visit – hope you find some of the other articles worth a read.

But for inanimate objects, I think the stakes are lower. I hated seeing Jabba the Hutt poorly animated in the Episode IV remake, but watching the newly rendered fleet of X-Wings didn’t bother me nearly as much. You mention the Final Fantasy movie. I remember being wowed by the shots of landscapes and settings, but whenever a character walked on screen the effect was ruined.

A game that I feel uses photorealism well is Assassin’s Creed. The scenery is rendered incredibly, but the characters have just enough abstraction to animate easily and avoid that dip into the uncanny valley (there are sometimes hundreds of characters on screen at once, so the poly count is lower than in, say, Mass Effect). Interesting post!

However, I’m not so fast to discount the real difficulties that photorealistic production presents. An artist who does not ‘know his/her tools’ will certainly do a worse job if they’re given 10 tools (photorealistic cinema) instead of one (text) to work with. But that alone does not account for the failure.

If photorealism didn’t in fact ‘get in the way of what matters’ (note, we still have not specified exactly what matters yet!), then I think you’re right – we’d definitely be on the right track for a creatively fulfilled game. But if photorealism fooled the eye (ie. films that make use of very small amounts of CG for subtle background changes), photorealism would no longer be an issue – it would be just another tool in the artist’s kit. When photorealism *itself* becomes the focus of a game (and this is what I tried to suggest in the article, but wasn’t clear enough) that’s when we perceive a failure – it’s nothing more than an interactive movie. A cheap toy. Not a story, or drama. I think that accounts for 95% of the “interactive multimedia” PC CD-ROM games that come out in the 1990’s just to demonstrate digital video.

Indirection (as you say), suggestion, and subtlety are the means through which art moves us, I suspect. Unfortunately, in my opinion, games like Mass Effect and films like War of the Worlds, lack all forms of subtlety. Mass Effect, however, at least allows the player to choose between one of two visions (Paragon or Renegade). Good art has an infinitude of visions, I suspect.

Thanks again for the comment – this does a lot to open up the issue beyond my article.

The reason Return to Zork and Spielburg’s take on War of the Worlds fails in some way is because they both try to revisit ground trodden on by previous mediums, namely Text and Radio (akin to oral storytelling.) This is why a Planescape: Torment, Revisited would not work. It cannot be realistically feasible and true to the original at the same time. However, a game like Mass Effect, a new IP created specifically with modern technical specifications in mind, succeeds far more than these remakes.

For example, the line from Mass Effect, “I don’t care what you want to do. We have to save her!” may not succeed if we first read the text, imagine the situation that this occurs in, then see it played out, but, this is not what happens in the game. The text is spoken as dialog by a performing computer generated actor. Because of the nature of the medium we are more likely to accept the performance as “reality” than compare it to an imagined scenario. In this way it is more like cinema than literature.

What I’m trying to say is that it seems like you bemoan the robbery of imagination by photorealism when it is meant to excite the imagination in a different way, an indirect way. Good photorealism gets out of the way of ‘what matters.’

If photorealism really did fool the eye, would it still fail?