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.

Re:The game graphics arms race is slowing down

[h0mer]

I do agree with you about Myst, but your comments about Prince of Persia are misguided. Yes, the fluid animation was good eye candy when it was first released, but it also broke some new ground in gameplay elements.

All of the platform games I can remember before PoP would let you jump instantly from a ledge as long as a couple pixels of your character's feet were still on the ground. PoP changed this by requiring forethought, you would only make a running jump by pressing jump a tile before you actually were going to jump.

PoP spawned its own type of game, the puzzle platformer. Out Of This World, Flashback, Blackthorne. In fact, considering the planned action and trial-and-error gameplay, I would be so bold as to say that PoP is the spiritual ancestor of the modern "stealth" genre.

Re:Inevitable comments...

[EngineeringMarvel]

It is true that graphics play a big role in the popularity of video games, but to me it has gotten a little out of hand in the last year or so, especially with first person shooters. Every other FPS that comes out is the same style gameplay of Counter-Strike, but with better graphics. I have personally gotten old of CS gameplay and so I moved on to Battlefield 1942 two years ago. Now I have gotten a little old of that, especially after wasting my money on Battlefield Vietnam, which was basically the same gameplay as Eve Of Destruciton (Mod of Battlefield 1942), but with better graphics. In the end, the better graphics was not worth the money. My point is that creating a fps based on another fps gameplay, but advancing the graphics is never worth the money in my opinion. Hopefully Half-Life 2 will add some new dyanmic and different gameplay than games of the past. I know the original Half-Life not only changed the way fps graphics were done, but it also created a totally new type of gameplay. The software designers should stop being lazy and start being iventive again instead of spending all their time on creating new code that only makes something look more real. Whatever happen to the genius people who first created Super Mario Bros, Zelda, Quake, & Half-Life? I refuse to think that all the gameplay types viable to be created in our graphics world have all been used up already. Shoot, I find the original Super Mario Bros (NES) more fun than some of the fps games coming out now.