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The Future of Videogame Aesthetics
daniil writes "Here's another look at the 'Realism vs Style' debate. David Hayward, a level designer involved with UT2004 mod Alien Swarm, among others, has written an interesting essay on the aesthetics of videogames, suggesting that, similar to other art forms, the peak of realism in computer games might also be a plateau that acts as precursor to wider experimentation: "We've come a long way since the flint-carved figures of early 3D games, but there's still progress to make before we're producing the game equivalent of sixteenth century marbles. Though it makes for a myopic obsession when compared to the vastness of the picture plane, photo-realism is nonetheless a worthwhile technological achievement to aim for, because it is through this that games will attain the sensation of a lucid dream.""
The only lucid dreams I have are where either
a) I am a "water baron" in India. (not sure what that means)
OR
b) I'm back in high school as an adult going for my second diploma as if it were a bachelor's degree.
I don't think I would want to play those types of video games.
Post-rock/Ambient/Drone and other noise.
Perhaps after we reach true photorealism game companies will actually start to sell their products based on good gameplay instead of the latest flashy graphics.
I'm so sick of this. Style and realism are not opposites. Realism is just one of many visual styles that a game could adopt.
Photo-realism is of course very important. It can get you immersed in a game. But what about gameplay? For e.g. photo-realism took a new standard in games like Doom3. But a hour in to the game, I lost interest and realized I also list my $50. Every game in a genre is the same. How about re-inventing the gameplay? How about actually concentrating on virtual reality?
Check out dreamfall.com - sequel to The Longest Journey.
The future of dupes, however, is stead-fast: http://games.slashdot.org/games/05/10/09/1747256.s html?tid=10
This guy reminds me of the scene in Mallrats where they're trying to have an intellectual discussion about superman's baby. He's over thinking and over analyzing something that really just isn't that deep. I think he may just like to use big words or see himself in print. I really don't suggest anyone read this unless they've got insomnia.
The all time low was definitely when I got into nethack. You've never had a nightmare until you've had a nightmare in ASCII.
A long winded story but here goes: Went up to a yard sale at a neighbours place a few days ago. Her son, probably 14 or 15, comes over to me and *immediately* starts describing to me a scene in Grant Theft Auto (not sure what version). At first I just listened along, agreeing with him, as I had played games like that previously. But after a while I realized he was talking about BEING (hard to describe what I mean) in the scene. He was talking about characters like Sanchez and police officers like they had really spoken to him. It was a tad creepy. "Sanchez was looking at me like I had done something wrong, but then I could tell by his expression that what I said had really upset him". I came home and immediately tried to look up what kind of condition the boy might have to no avail. It was like he was living the video game, and that people in the real world should understand because they're watching in on it too (game as reality). I'm going to try and chat with his mom about his video gaming habits. At the very least he's spent one too many hours in the game. Anyway I was always against the anti-video gaming nuts since they were blaming Columbine on video gaming (at least it was mentioned as a contributing factor along with marilyn manson and the kitchen sing), but this is the first time I've seen a real scary example of kids being absorbed by the medium.
~jennifer.k~
Here's the problem - the people who buy games - lots of games, not just once every few months, are teenaged boys. They're insecure, hormonal, and rather stupid. So, games must market to them.
First of all, they violently object to anything stylized as being "kiddy" and "stupid faggy crap" - witness the reaction to "celda". Second, they don't have very complicated tastes.
Also, as costs go up the game industry will become increasingly risk-averse.
So, the games of the future are $200 million titles that feature photorealistic graphics, voices provided by pop artists, and lots and lots of explosions and tits. Plus, since the market grows up in roughly 8 years (assume they start on hardcore action games at 12, and grow out of them in college when they can chase RL tits and beer) then they don't need to worry about rehashing - it doesn't matter if your gameplay has been done 1000 times, these kids never played the original Doom and all it's ripoffs.
Yay future.
Photo-realistic graphics will only go so far toward immersing a player in the game, when those graphics are displayed on a flat screen several feet/inches in front of the gamer's face. Looking at pictures on my computer rarely, if ever, makes me feel like I am in that place where the photo was taken.
The thing that will make games more immersive is holographic technology - when a 3D image can be thrown all around you rather than on a comparatively small rectangle in front of you.
Photo realism is not the key to imerision and never has been. Games that are truley great make you feel like you are in the game. The characters acomplishments become your own. Its kinda sick when you think of it that way but its true. Anyway the key is in better interfaces. Pressing keys doesn't make me feel like I am in the game. The paddle vibrating is a start but we need to improve on the interface not how it looks. Personally if I could feel like I am walking around in a virtual world then I could live with the graphics as they are today.
Aesthetics are important, but they should never override gameplay.
I worry about the fate of the up and coming generation console falling on there faces because all they have been touting have been the aesthetics.
I think it'll also be interesting to see when we reach the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley"> Uncanny Valley in video games and how video game developers proceed from there as far as photo realism goes.
M$ it's whats for diner!!!!!
Eventually, the mods are going to post a story and, at the end of it, comment "btw, this is a dupe" or, a little more subtle, "this was previously covered here".
I look at it this way, if your trying to sell a flight sim, racing sim, or Army-Sim then yet photo realism is going to be a good feature to have.
Yet for games like the "Sims" there isn't a need. The context of the sims isn't emulating real life in the same sense as the other games.
A lot can be said by adapting a style that is not trying to be realistic to create an environment more beneficial to the story you are telling. World of Warcraft is a great example. While many other MMOPRGs tried harder to look more "realistic" WOW went a whole another direction.
The problem with trying to make realistic appearing models is that the little errors of those models become glaring. Half-Life2 has many examples of approaching a realistic setting but having incosistencies that totally blow it. Examples include objects of a type that are not destructible while others of the same type are. MMORPGs suffer more as they have to meet the limitations imposed by lesser machines. This leads to a game that looks great on the high end machines and downright atrocious on lower end machines.
Context should be the deciding factor. Don't do it just because you can.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
A sign of the apocalypse for sure.
On topic, I think many games already express a specific style, even if it often is more subtle. This is unavoidable as long as different people take notice of different things; different people express themselves differently. This is unavoidable as no man is objective in perception.
Conways law is satisfied.
A quick comparison between the releases of gamehouses should show this. It's often striking how varied models of humans can be. Faces especially.
All rites reversed 2010
Here's another look at the 'Realism vs Style' debate. David Hayward, a level designer involved with UT2004 mod Alien Swarm... I don't see how you guys can call it a dupe when the first sentance clearly states that it is "another look" at the realism vs. style debate. Just because something is on the same subject does not make it a dupe!
WoW: Scheod 70 orc warlock on Shadowmoon
I will be very glad when photorealism is actually EASILY possible in games. Then, maybe game companies will stop dedicating all of their resources to making their games 'pretty.'
One of the problems that I can see on the horizon is that games will get ALMOST perfect photorealism and start causing nausea when playing. When the brain starts to believe that what it is seeing is real but has problems with certain aspects, angles, reflections or refresh rates, motion sickness like symptoms start to occur. Couple this with larger monitors and TVs that completely occupy your FOV, denying your sense of real world perspective and it gets interesting. Half-Life2 seems to be one of the first mainstream games inwhich this might be starting to occur; the hovercraft level seemed to be particularly troublesome for many.
http://www.tomandemily.com
Take Half-Life 2, for example. It has some of the best renditions of humans I've ever seen in any game. But once you look past that, it becomes glaringly obvious that these characters are still missing something. A character finishes talking to you, then goes into a "trance", staring straight ahead. HL2 tries to fix this by having the character "wobble" a bit to give the illusion of a living, breathing, not-perfectly-motionless human, or by having them turn their heads and look around from time to time. But there's still something... just not quite human about them.
Compare that to Mario in (let's say) Super Mario World. He's obviously human, but drawn and animated in such a whimsical way that you don't find it odd at all that he stands perfectly still, never moves a facial muscle, etc.
This isn't the article I was thinking of, but have a look at the Wikipedia article on The Uncanny Valley if you're interested in more. See also this blog for speculation on why The Incredibles did so well while The Polar Express just creeped people out.
I hate "debates" like this. I really do. They all make the exact same mistake. They assume that the games industry is some kind of ultra-homogenised body, that's going to inevitably move in one direction, and one direction only, with regard to aesthetics. This is simply not true. Looking at my games-shelves, I can see any number of styles represented. There's the ultra-realism (yes, realism is a style too) of Doom 3, Resident Evil 4 and Farcry. There's the comic-book look of Guilty Gear X and most of the first-party Nintendo titles. There's the exaggerated, "epic" style of Halo 2 and Final Fantasy X. And there's the deliberately retro look of Disgaea. To cut a long story short, developers are *always* going to know that there's a market for titles which look "different", so we're never going to see a move towards a single consistent style.
That said, there *is* the related (but slightly different) issue of stylistic trends and bandwagons.
What I'm talking about here is where a particular visual style is successful in one or two games, so a big section of the industry starts shovelling out games that use that style, until it's been done to death and the industry moves on to something else (often swinging too far the other way and abandoning the look in question completely).
On a technological rather than stylistic level, look at what happened with the use of full motion video in games when CD-ROMs appeared on the scene. We had a rush of games with vast amounts of FMV, some of which were awful (Rebel Assault, Night Trap, Sewer Shark, to name but a few) and some which were decent (Wing Commanders III and IV, Privateer: The Darkening, Terra Nova), then suddenly, there was a huge backlash (which persists, unfairly, to this day) and FMV vanished almost entirely. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm sure the costs involved made this a relief for a lot of developers, but... erm... let's ignore that for now.
Moving back to the present, I think cel shading is going to be the next victim of this backlash. It was fun the first few times we saw it done and it's produced some cool-looking games, but now that Nintendo have pretty much based an entire generation of games, many of them highly mediocre, that rely on it exclusively, I think the market's thoroughly sick of it and it's going to vanish off the radar soon. Who knows what the next big trend will be...
Photo-realism, while just another style, will, I think be immune to the trend-swing for a while longer. For one thing, it remains the "default" style that people are accustomed to. For another thing, it's as much a technical aspiration as it is a style for the time being. Until we actually get there, I don't see any kind of market backlash against photorealism happening.
If you want to frame the debate as style vs. realism (which is incorrect), give me style any day. If I wanted realism, I'd get a life.
Seriously though, the point of videogames is as escapist fare, like movies. Sure there are movies about ordinary people doing ordinary things, but they are only critically acclaimed, not popular. Some of the most fun video games are unrealistic or just flat out absurd. (see Katamari Damacy)
Besides, a good style is a form of visual branding. People don't forget the earliest Mario games, partly because everyone remembers what they looked like.
"MY APOCALYPTIC TENOR HAS NOT BEEN DISPELLED!" - T-Rex, qwantz.com
it is through this that games will attain the sensation of a lucid dream.
As a side-effect of meditation, I've had quite a few ucid dreams, and can confidently say that mere photo-realism will get you nowhere near to duplicating the LD experience of "Hey, I'm dreaming! This is great, I'm in a world created by my own mind, I can see anything, do anything, be anything. . . Damn, I've woken up!"
So.. it has come to this
Personally, I like my videogames to look pretty cartoon-y. It's just a neater look, artistically.
Which brings me to my big idea. "Cartoon-Strike". Counter-Strike, but everything looks something like a G.I. Joe cartoon. Well, better than G.I. Joe, but you get the idea. Flat shading, bright colors, low detail. I'm suprised it hasn't been done yet.
I'm just tired of realism. It's boring.
In short, what the fuck to videogames have to do with reality? Aren't they about escapism, just like almost everything else we spend our money on?
... and then they built the supercollider.
This is a large reason why Pixar had such a small screen-time of humans in Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, etc... because humans are really, really honed in to the visual qualities of other humans. If anything looks wrong, an expression, an animation, the skin folding, the hair, cloth, it all looks wrong. Even Geri's Game was very stylized, instead of trying to mimic the photo-realistic visuals of an old man.
Most artists aren't even capable of it (I guess we should call it "video-realism" instead, since the motion is at least as important as the still image). And for the few that are, it takes a long, long time.
But how do you want the gameplay "reinvented"? I often hear people request this with respect to games, but they never really seem to be able to pinpoint what specific changes they'd like. Perhaps you can offer some suggestions?
I'm just not sure that there's really any way to reinvent the killing of people and monsters. Unless you want to transition to virtual reality suits and holodecks, there probably isn't much more that could be done. Such games are already in 3D, and thus already at the level of reality. And if they add more environmental/story interaction to the basic DooM-esque theme, you end up with an RPG. Many people play shooters because they don't want the hassle of an RPG storyline.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
In the old days of low-poly monsters and low-res textures, any slightly artistic geek could build a model or a level and it would look as good as anybody elses. That is changing as the tools and processing power evolve. The newer games require very high-quality assets that not every artist has the skill to produce. It's no longer enough to be an arty geek, now you need to be a geeky artist.
Imagine you take two people and sit them down with a pencil and a piece of paper. One's just some guy from off the street, the other is a fine arts major from t he local art school. You tell them each to draw a figure using only six lines and in the shortest possible time. They each draw a stick figure, and both look pretty much alike. You then say draw another person, no limit on the number of lines, take a half an hour. You've now removed the limitations that were hiding the disparity of talent, so at the end of that time the first guy has a stick figure (maybe a stick figure with hair) and the art student has a passable portrait of the first guy.
The same thing seems to be happening with game visuals: the improved tools and increased polygon pushing abilities of modern consoles have removed most of the limits that in a way protected less-talented artists, and their limitations are now made more glaring. If you really want to push for photorealism, how long before you get to the point where you need a Francisco Cortina to make your models? There are'nt a whole lot of those guys out there.
Re: the larger "stylized vs. realistic" issue, I think overall it's easier to be "Boris" than it is to be "Frazetta". Mimicing real life is always easier than developing a distinctive and original visual style.
Everquest, the screenshots.
We have a long way to go.
Remember, it's not so much about what the publishers will sell, but rather about what the consumers will buy. After all, the publishers could offer a game with a great storyline and semi-decent graphics. And you know what? It may very well not well.
I'm sure many of the major game publishers have looked into the possibility of offering games like you describe. But the potential benefits most likely do not outweigh the risks. When you're dealing with millions upon millions of dollars, you usually don't want to go wrong.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Videogame graphics are a form of art. Like other forms of art, they reflect the vision of the artist and the tastes of the patron--in this case, the graphic designer and target audience of the game. Like other forms of art, there will be visual and stylistic trends, but always some great individual works.
As technology advanced in other forms of art, the ability of the artist to transform artistic vision into a medium has increased, stylistic variety has increased and (arguably) the tastes of patrons has increased. Think about how many genres of music there are. Think about how many instruments. Think about the variety of painting styles. All of this variety was made possible by technological advances. Is there any reason to think it'll be any different for video games?
Seriously, go to Japan. Look for some games there. You can find some pretty odd adult games. Many of the games would make even the most extreme of Western perverts cringe.
I stayed with relatives who had been to Japan. I ran across some of their games while using their computer. Boy, was I surprised! There are games where you go around as a big octopus tentacle ripping the cloths off of people in the street. Then you proceed to tentacle rape them. In one of the games, for instance, you rape people up the ass. Then, for whatever reason, you were able to control their limbs. Now if that's not absurd enough, you can go to dance competitions. You have to make the person embedded anally on your tentacle dance.
They were addicting games, that's for sure. And challenging. Real mind-benders, too.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I want an engine that'll let me choose how things get rendered, much as can be done with various products like Max or Poser or whatever.
If I want to cel-render everything so it looks like a cartoon, let me do that. If I want things to look hyper-realistic, let me do that. If I want things to look as if they are made of stained glass, let me do that.
Give me a palette of variables and let me experiment. Let me export those variables so that I can share my settings with other people, and they with me.
A perfect example of a game that could really benefit from on-the-fly changes to the rendering would be City of Heroes. I would *love* to see the game done in a XIII/Zelda: Wind Walker style - but, alas, the developers chose to present it in that "pseudo-reality" style that's become boring to me. There have also been a number of games that I think I might have otherwise enjoyed, but I was just bored to death with the visuals.
Video games are interactive. So let me interact with the renderer.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Keep in mind that there's nothing that states that photorealism has to be the same old thing that the average homosapien can witness in his or her daily routine or with a few hours sitting on an airplane. The fact that Yet Another Jungle Commando Game can look as realistic as ever doesn't mean that better games can't take a photorealistic rendering approach and make something that is genuinely visually interesting. In a fantasty game, clever use of surreal lighting effects can make a light source be a little less like an exposed light bulb and a little more like an aurora borealis; in a sci-fi game, clothing surface properties can make the world seem just a little different than anything you've ever seen in real life. Even when none of the techniques applied technically reach beyond photorealistic rendering, the result can be so much more than any photo you'll see.
It's really up to the artists to take the capacity for photorealism and run with it, creating something that brings the player out of their reality and into a new one. They've failed if they take photorealism and fill it with parking garages and cubicles and crates and things that people play games to get away from.
I think that the idea is sort of rediculous. Video games by necessity are unrealistic, and the graphics are realistic. It'd drive people insane in a FPS if they shot a fully detailed human in the hand, and the hand didn't fall off/become useless. I mean, they can get away with it now, but realistic gameplay and realistic graphics go hand in hand.
Then there is fantasy. How realistic can you make a Chimera (sp?) look?
As one poster mentioned GTA, I'll bring it up here. The basic psychologic principle for why we can play violent video games and not be affected by them is because we know they aren't real. However, if the brain can't tell real from video game, it could affect us unconsciously. I have no problem understanding that it is encouraged that I shoot people up in GTA, but discouraged on campus. But if there becomes less and less of a distinction, there could be people who have a problem with it, especially people who already have some violence issues.
"but there's still progress to make before we're producing the game equivalent of sixteenth century marbles"
Not really. Experimentation with fancy technology won't win the hearts of the masses - good ideas will. That was true for marbles and that is also true for games today. Down the road people won't look back at Far Cry, Half Life 2 or other technological wonders as marvels. Nor will they look at the wonderfully wacky world of Viewtiful Joe, Jet Set Radio or other stylized creations.
If you want to look at the modern day marbles, look at Tetris. It's beautiful in its simplicity and that's what made it an instant classic.
Against the grain
I'll postulate that by the time we have true, full screen photorealistic graphics running at 60fps, laser technology will have evolved enough to 'paint' over your vision (similar to the eye controls used by fighter pilots) with enough density to remove the screen as a disbelief problem. This, btw, is technology that's close to working, but then so is 60 fps visualization at real-like resolutions. The real problems to date, as someone noted above, have been the physics engines with regards to character motion and interaction, and the limited range of motions that currently are programmed into the capture for each model.
The current reasoning is, we'll put someone in a rubber suit full of sensors and make them execute every motion that they could possibly do as a charater, which leaves the billions of other motion possibilites unexplored. A real breakthrough is very close, where we can code out the lives of bots to give them some sense of place (that seems to be what's missing in Uncanny Valley) by allowing for more random movement and activity paths. I think this will be the real breakthrough, since suspension of disbelief is about more than just resolution.
Meandering back to the topic though, I think the 'style vs real' debate is overblown, since by very nature if you can do real, you can do anything (on a screen). Obviously real wins every times, its just noone can do it yet.
-chitlenz
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
It's also not really clear to what extent the teenager believed he was the primary character. It might have been a linguistic convention, where he just avoided having to say, "My character in GTA..." It might have reflected humanity's tendency to anthropomorphize everything. It might have reflected a healthy level of immersion and suspension of disbelief, and he was trying to convey the emotional impact of the situation.
What it almost definitely does not mean is that he was confusing his own sense of self with that of the character.
but it won't happen.
The more 'photorealistic' the engine can make the game world, the more art and design is needed to take advantage of that. You might not spend those dev dollars on stretching every last polygon out of the engine, but you will spent them making those polygons look good. If you have 2GiB of video memory availible for textures and associated maps, you'd better make good use of it. No more repeating the same box image over and over in every level.
Honestly I think graphcis are an adivsary to game play; and probalby will continue to be after we reach a point where more graphics rendering power is of no benifit. (Which I doubt will be anytime soon) The simple fact is there is generally a limited budget to do everything, and right now limited CPU / GPU cycles. If you have to develope tons of super high quality and complex models and textures to take advantage of Really super fast rendering engine(TM) then the AI, the story, ect suffer. If you have to optimize out every last CPU cycle of waste in the Really pretty slow and boring rendering engine(TM) then the AI, story ect suffer.
I think the fact is, graphics sell games, gameplay keeps you playing. Only one of those is useful for a companies bottom line. (Unless you're making The Sims and have 457 expansion packs you need to sell)
Most of the dedicate nethack players I've met seem to have dreamt with ascii at least once. From my experience, nethack and tetris are the most dream-prone games.
In my nightmares, I was once chased by a giant yellow lowercase 'c'...
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics