Miller, Wright, Mechner Discuss Videogame Graphics

Thanks to GameSpot for its article covering a panel discussing videogame graphics at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. According to the article: "The panel of designers--The Sims and SimCity architect Will Wright; The Manhole, Myst, and Riven-creator Rand Miller... and Prince of Persia and Karateka designer Jordan Mechner--presented ideas which simultaneously praised the progress made in the past decade and cautioned against relying solely on the bells and whistles those faster GPUs provide." Interestingly, opinions on graphical fidelity differ, with Miller arguing: "We draw every little blade of grass, because we can", but Wright "reiterated his overall recipe to making great games--a less-is-more approach to leveraging and relying on graphics to drive the user experience."

Comments

The game graphics arms race is slowing down

[radimvice]

Both Jordan Mechner and Rand Miller based their entries into computer game design around elaborate, cutting-edge graphics. The popularity of Prince of Persia (and Karateka originally) was because Mechner used primitively-rotoscoped sprites to create fluid character movement. Myst, of course, was the first CD-ROM that allowed you to navigate through a pre-rendered CGI environment. In my opinion, neither piece was particularly innovative or fun to play as a game because the focus was on storytelling and visuals. Now that computer graphics are getting closer and closer to photorealism and it's getting harder and harder to differentiate a game on graphics alone, the industry is beginning to shy away from them as their main focus (as evidenced by the middle-ground position taken by the designers in this article). Of the three designers here, only Will Wright will make an impact in the future because he's the only one that was actually creating innovative games from the start. The others were just low-budget filmmakers working in an underdeveloped medium.