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Decrying the Excessive Emulation of Reality In Games
An editorial at GameSetWatch makes the case that game developers' relentless drive to make games more real has led to missed opportunities for creating unique fictional universes that are perhaps more interesting than our own. Quoting:
"Remember when the norm for a video game was a blue hedgehog that ran fast and collected rings and emeralds? Or a plumber that took mushrooms to become large, and grabbed a flower to throw fireballs? In reality they do none of those things, but in the name of a game, they make sense, inspire wonder, and create a new universe. ... We’ve seen time and time again that the closer you try to emulate reality, the more the 'game' aspects begin to stick out. Invisible walls in Final Fantasy, or grenades spawning at your feet when you go the wrong way in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are examples of kicking the player out of that illusion of reality, and letting them know that yes, this is a game, and yes, the rules are designed to keep you in the space of this world, not the real world. In reality, as a soldier I could disobey my orders and go exploring around the other side. I could be cowardly and turn back to base. Games shouldn’t have to plan for every eventuality, of course, but it’s not so hard to create universes that are compelling but where the unusual, or even simple backtracking, is not so unfeasible."
Yes, but creating an alternative appealing universe experience takes imagination, ingenuity, creativity, sometimes requires radical approach to ideas and expects thinking outside of the box.
Doing any of that increases the risk that the outcome will not be popular enough and will not succeed in terms of sales, this is serious business and money we are talking about here, what do you think this is, a game?
You can't handle the truth.
that's why you should play ARMA2 as opposed to MW2 which is the iphone of games, i.e crap, cant wait when Bobby at Activision lose the MW IP :)
The perfect model of this concept is the game Desert Bus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Bus#Desert_Bus). The wikipedia article doesn't focus on it much, but my impression was that the point of this game was to illustrate how realism and fun are not always aligned.
Uhm, what? The article summary starts with "too realistic" then suddenly turns to "not realistic enough" in terms of open-world gameplay. I dont really get the point, if there is one.
Im pretty happy not every game is a sandbox game, which mostly try to do everything but do everything mediocre (GTA, Oblivion etc).
BTW, nothing in doom kept me from staying cowardly in the first room of e1m1, not moving, shivering.
All with real world consequences if i choose so (boredom and starvation).
Everyone has their idea on what makes a game good for them and everyone has an idea on what makes a game bad for them and they're all right in their respective opinions for a single player: themselves.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
It's actually extremely hard to create such universes. No one has ever made one, as we speak. Not only there are hardware limitations (for example, a HL2 level takes almost all of 1 GB), but there are also software limitations. In order, for example, to have a successful "return-back-to-base" scenario, the programmers should encode a yet unseen AI into the program that turns the game into a war drama, instead of a fighting game.
Personally, when I play a game like an FPS, I want realism. By that I mean good graphics, physics, sound, etc. Others argue that "graphics dont make a game good" etc. I agree that good graphics alone don't make a game good, but to me, they are an essential part. Playing Sonic the Hedgehog is different than an FPS. Nothing is meant to be real, so realism isn't an issue. But when I want realistic online warfare, I want just that, realism.
Silly me, I actually got MW2 thinking it would be a realistic tactical shooter. I was deeply disappointed (especially since MW1 touched on it quite nicely). Dual-wielding sawn-off shotguns, firing grenades at a conflict area having only your team mates survive and the structures intact, submachineguns accurate to over a mile....It is more like a Die Hard film (where I am a bad guy..). And i got the game for PC, so I can't even trade it in.
I love playing Bad Company 2. Although I struggle with it, I find it much more enjoyable. Graphics are decent (but not dazzling, I admit) but the sound is incredible; gunfire changes pitch/tone when heard from further away, the crack and hiss of a sniper shot that just missed your head...I actually get startled, my blood pumps, adrenaline rushes! The game is not without its faults, I have used a high powered sniper rifle and hit an opponent three times without going down (though this may be related to lag). Still, for those after realism, a much better game.
Deus Ex
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There are few more immersion-shattering elements.
So I plan: "This will be the right sniping spot. I will have them all right on the plate, and covered on their escape route too. The approach is covered, and the location provides decent cover behind these rocks. This should be easy then." Then - bump - invisible wall, border of the world. And I'm stuck with hopeless frontal attack which I barely survive.
Recently, I began playing Planeshift and learned how to find the perfect spots for mining. Unfortunately some of them are just past the invisible wall, leaving only crumbles for the poor in the open area.
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REALLY old discussion.. Similar comments could be read in game magazines when the Amiga was the hottest thing around (late 1980s). People new to gaming tend to prefer realism while long time gamers consider playability more important. Personally I still remember paradroid on the 64 and the amount of time I spend with it. Realism? Not really. Absorbing gameplay? Definitely.
As game maker, I completely agree.
Gamisms are a good thing while reality is usually a burden. Of course it has its place in simulators, and mild levels of realism can be interesting (for example in robots, which I like to articulate in intricate forms), but videogames...they allow us to throw wild levels of nonsense and make them work. Gamisms allow our character to take a fireball to the face or defying death with credits, blessings or potions. It's convenient unless you aim to do a faithful simulation of reality.
But I think there aren't as many "fantastic" worlds because they require more imagination at work. Structuring a realistic city and putting it into the game is easier than inventing a different sort of world. You can use your mental image of a city, and the workforce will have less trouble adapting to that idea. In 2D it was easier to do because it was all drawn and required less detail and interaction.
The title is a reference to a game that used complete surreality as a plot device.
Yes, it's wxtremely immersive. I felt like I was right there.
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Games with real world settings are just hot right now, that's all. It's not like nobody's been making games in fantasy settings recently either, look at dragon age, mass effect, zeno clash, god of war etc. TFA makes it sound like games not based in reality are super rare or something right now, which isn't true at all. Maybe the author was grasping at straws trying to make a deadline or something.
In reality, as a soldier I could disobey my orders and go exploring around the other side. I could be cowardly and turn back to base.
In fact, I can even start shooting my own teammates when they aren't looking just for fun!
http://www.object404.com
...posted two stories after the headline "Haptic Gaming Vest Simulates Punches, Shots, Stabbing". That's just funny. -Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
and so on. /end sarcasm.
what, just because you're *more* smarter than the rest of us, you think you can get us to pay for your investigation of the nature of reality?
look, they tell me enough about math and philosophy in school, i just want a place where i can shoot/dismember people, drive really fast, and not have society tell me it's wrong. is that ok?
I agree that computer games could be much more. But the truth is that the people who could enjoy smarter games are already doing it.
By the way, if any of you has some time on their hands, please make a labyrinth in curved spaces (i know nothing of opengl, here's a link i found http://www.geometrygames.org/CurvedSpaces/ ). Pretty please...
new sig
...they, just like a hard core sim, lack the artificial scripting madness that has invested so many of todays games, instead the games provide you with some core gameplay mechanics and everything that follows is basically a result of those.
You're on to something. At risk of seeming old, I was always fond of the abstract or nearly-abstract games of the early 1980s— Qix or Tempest. Even in games like the original Centipede or Pac-man which purported to represent something vaguely physical, a lot of the excitement and interest was epiphenomenal to the game mechanics and was unknown at the time of design. Game businesses probably don't pursue such things so heavily because of the difficulty in predicting the level of interest.
I was chatting with my kid and his friends (11-13) about video games. I was saying how I hated games where you have to shoot someone more than once/twice (I only play hardcore (reality mode) on Modern Warfare 2). I was specifically making fun of Halo and no skill gamers. One kid piped up "why would I want to have it all real! Real is no fun!". Kids play with a big smile and want the fantastic, myself I play with a serious scowl and try real hard to outdo my last games performance. In other words I don't play at games, I try hard at games. Real effort is better rooted in reality unless playing to addictions like gear collectors. We play to hone what we are as a species, like a kitten chasing a floating leaf to hone hunting skills. The gear collectors are driven not by fun but hours of collecting (See work!). PVP reminds me of kids because of the way it plays out in some arenas with taunting and all the silly talking however... I've seen adults freak the f out over PVP games because of how much work/hours they put into character development. To sum up, you can change where we play (in game environment) but not what we are (hunter gatherers).
I swear it was almost like being in New Caprica. Even the death is real.
The key here is why Second Life is popular for journalist. How is that? is a very minor game, played by few people, that hype his number of accounts to pretend is big, still it get frontpage news often. Why is that? Is not that journalist are stupid, is that theres a type of people where the virtual reality is much more atractive than something abstract. The abstract shotter mean *nothing* to these people. A game played by 80 millions is ignored, by one played by 120.000 becuase the first one is abstract, so It don't make sense to these people.
I don't claim the people that play realistic shotters can't play abstract shotters. I claim that theres a bias, a preference for the realist one. The realist one has more meaning, it make sense to these people, much more than the abstract one.
I will not say this is good or bad, but I will say is boring to see lots of similar raycasting engines. Theres very small variation *IN* the realistic shotter. The technology is not there to produce good voxel FPS's, or cartoon rendering FPS's (other than maybe Borderlands). Not all abstraction will be good, but we live in a world where most videogames look alike, and try a type of realism, variation here will be rather good :-)
-Woof woof woof!
The amount of realism you need should match the story and setting and playfulness of your game. Sure sonic's style works for sonic. Mw2's style works for mw2.
It's true that games won't come even close to matching reality any time soon, despite how many wide-eyed optimists point at the past and extrapolate into the future, it just
won't happen like that. But becoming realistic enough is important for MW2 because it's supposed to be a modern wargame based in locales that exist, with
"real" forces like the USA and Russia. What's the point of doing the very same game but with the "unreal" forces of Chacoogaville and Wallcot's Group? It is needless work
to make things unreal and then work on them enough to make them come to life. Sticking with real life as a base is a perfectly commendable goal, for a story that is set in real life.
If he's arguing that video games *should* be unrealistic because they will never be /real/ then he's wasting his breath. Being close enough is good enough. But on the
other hand if he is decrying the lack of unrealistic games, then more power to him, they're a style that does not deserve to go away.
Chez Pière's.
Although it has its flaws, FF13's complete lack of realism makes for a very visceral and over-the-top experience. Anyone who has seen this game can tell the designers had a lot of fun and wore their anime influences on their sleeve. In battle, certain characters have an ability that can be used only at a certain period where an enemy is launched up in the air. Then they (and others, too) jump up after it and continue slashing away at it. While airborne, the enemy cannot do anything -- it is your chance to punish them. The game also grants the characters the ability to jump/fall quite high through a plot point. These two examples are in addition to the dragons, robots, ninjas, etc that are in all 'realistic' fantasy games it seems. :)
Talk about emulating reality. The diamonds and emeralds are an ASCII relic, while the blue hedgehog is a CGA relic. We inherited these game artefacts because of our limitations in emulating reality. Give it time - the creativity will return, and when it does, it will probably be mind blowingly beautiful.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
what is the guy complaining of afflicts fpses. in other gaming genres the opposite is true. extreme representation and simplification is done. like, in strategy games, for example medieval total war, a whole country, france, can be a single 'province', and you can attack and get all of iberia as a 'province', and then build 10 ships and go sail to levant and conquer jerusalem, syria, in one move. a lot of things are represented with 'points' and percentage modifiers rather than having any mechanic for them. even in the most realistic, well made titles as in paradox's games, you still have excess representation - the whole world is divided to provinces, and the victory and subsequent peace treaty and how much land is exchanged is decided upon the number and importance of provinces a side has, and the manpower each sides have. whereas in reality, you could get entirety of hungary after a decisive single war in the field, by treaty.
RTSes are even beyond that. you lump up whole battlecruisers as if they were small boats, a huge spaceship can hover over the city that produced it, which is much smaller than itself, tiny barracks can produce infantry units which appear 3-4 times their size on the map.
these are all minor stuff. but, when they add up, they totally change the atmosphere.
so, whereas there is a lot of sufferance due to realism in FPSes, there is another sufferance due to the lack of realism in other genres.
Read radical news here
I'd like to see a real FPS where one shot and you're done.
I'd like to see you get through Contra without a Konami code first.
Well, you know what? True skill is the ability to win the game that actually exists
How skilled are you at the game of Roulette? Because that's what items turn a fighting game into. When the championship is decided by whether powerful items spawn next to you or next to your opponent, you see why tournament players turn off the game-breaking items.
For all the griping about RPG elements missing from games and immersion and realism, not a single word about Bioware that I can see and only a passing reference to Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto Series. Really?
GTA4: Liberty City is insanely big, open world, no invisible borders, and fairly realistic physics, except that you--and to a lesser degree other characters--can take a slightly higher beating than in real life and survive. This is the closest you can get to "real", until Red Dead Redemption comes out.
Bioware, Mass Effect 1/2: gold standard for RPGs. Runner up: Dragon Age. Your actions shape the story outcome, responses, and so on. Leveling shapes the nature and tone of your character in play and combat.
Dude, where's my packet?
But when I want realistic online warfare, I want just that, realism.
Like having to learn to walk? Or being killed in one hit and never being able to play again? Or being injured and ending up in a hospital for weeks or months, also unable to play? Technically, even "Start Over" is unrealistic.
one which will lead to the same place if developers aren't careful. Old games inspired people, took them to wholly different worlds because it left a lot to your imagination. It's curious to have come across this article today because just yesterday I was replaying half-life 2, felt intensely bored, and suddenly felt like playing the original quake. The premise is virtually identical: go in and shoot anything that moves until it stops moving. Yet in quake, in the back of my mind there were always these questions: Where am I? How old is this place? What manner of creatures have lived here? Is this on a different planet? A different galaxy? Because really, the game gives you no effing clues.
These days I don't know if we're playing games anymore or if the games are playing us. Don't get me started on RPGs that throw lore at you like you have nothing better in your life to do than read crappy fiction.
:wq
the blue hedgehog is a CGA relic
There were odd-colored cartoon animals long before video games were invented. Sonic games wouldn't have been as fun if Sonic looked and acted like a real hedgehog
live off the interest
I always figured you were a Rethuglican Jew.
Check hers!
Why, then, are you playing a game with no dedicated server support, no real anti-cheat system, with flawed and random gameplay?
Hate to be the one to break it to you, but you're playing a terrible game that caters to casual players who have no actual interest in being competitive and spending long hours in front of their monitors / TVs in order to get good at it. Unless you're completely new to gaming and/or really slow, there is no learning curve whatsoever and not much skill required to play it; by employing a large number of luck-based elements (spread coupled with "realistic" damage, unlocks etc.), the "skill ceiling" has been effectively lowered to the point no one can get "too good" at the game, so that any person playing it can win once in a while.
If you really are a competitive player, do yourself a favor and try playing some of the oldschool deathmatch type games like Quake (Quake Live is free and pretty active). See how you stack up against some of the low-tier pub players after months of rigorous training in MW2. Try playing in some of the higher tiers, get totally slaughtered. Watch some demos from professional gamers recorded at large lan events, and keep in mind that any of those pros could single-handedly wipe the floor with all the players you struggled against on pub servers without even flinching. Quake, Unreal Tournament, Tribes, RTCW/ET are the games that actually require skill to play and reward you if you put some time into training etc.
There's room for casual games like MW2/BFBC2/Halo etc. and I've got nothing against them, but saying that they require any real skill, dedication, patience etc. to be good at is just laughable.
Remember when the norm for a video game was a blue hedgehog that ran fast and collected rings and emeralds?
And now we have sexy blue Asari commandos quickly kicking ass and collecting names.
Personally, I'd call that an improvement, but each to his own.
My last five "big" games were Mass Effect 2, Assassin's Creed 2, Bioshock 2, Demon's Souls and Final Fantasy 13, so I'm not real clear on the whole "games are too realistic" concept. Dozens of alien races, 15th century Italy, a dying undersea city, a demon haunted world and cell powered Final Fantasy psychedelia- yeah, I can just walk out my door and see all that.
Maybe I'd feel differently if I played endless FPS games day in and day out, but then then the article switches to complain that they are not real enough, so who even knows WTF they are babbling about.
You want real? Go outside. Or join the Army. Real enough for you yet? Or just have a friend pop a cap in you when you get snipered in a game.
Hardly knew her.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
So the debate isn't realism vs. non-realism; it's what falls into acceptable breaks from reality.
I worry about games in similar ways, but not sure if "realistic" games are what I worry about. I DO think game dev's are putting out to many games based on stuff we have now. Those might be called realistic I guess. I'd rather see less games in game universes based on existing settings, but I include historical based games (WWI, WWII, Old west, medieval, etc.) as well as all the combat games that happen in settings too similar to what we have already, which to me includes all the modern warfare/battlefield/blah blah blah and I also include the futuristic and alternate future games (just like today, but a disaster happens!) that are just today's world with a theme slapped on them (pulse gun instead of pullets, but reacts the same way as bullets...).
When people want more "realism" in games like FPS, physics based games, etc. I don't think realism, I just want the game rules to be consistent. invisible walls, oddball character behavior just to move you to the next section, plot devices that don't fit, all those things count as inconsistent to me (as well as breaking the physics engine for some scripted sequence or boss battle) are the things that tick me off in games. I don't care what weird game rules dev's come up with, as long as they don't change rules to make something more challenging mid-game or to get you in the right place for the story to go where they want it to...
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
If I want to play crappy cell shaded cartoony looking games, I'll pull out one of my old 16b era computers, or if I wanted to play a platformer or some other type of game that he espouses I'd pull out a handheld console.
Bottom line here, IS the HOLY GRAIL of gaming is MORE REALISTIC looking games. I looked forward for years to advances in GPUs as they improved their ability to render game in something other than some shitty cartoonish pixelized way. Sure some games ARE btter off being rendered less realistically, but bottom line here is that there just aren't many of them where it would work or is what I would want to see, e.g. TF2 of course that suffers from a whole host of crappy gameplay mechanic changes from TFC anyways, which I still play regularly along with Fortress Forever.
I mean could you imagine Arma or many of the RPGs with crappy cartoony gfx?
Yeah, the cinema was never the same when they added sound. Going color was kicking a dead horse when it was down. Now this 3D stuff, did you see what it did to Avatar, completely ruined it, that would have been much better served in black and white with no sound but a live piano, let me tell you.
What constitutes 'realism' in the first place? I remember being very impressed with the guard's walk-cycle animations on GoldenEye years ago, but I also feared that when I dropped a guard with a headshot, I might go over to him and find the wallet had fallen out of his pocket, to display the photo of his wife and kids and I'd never be able to play the game again.
Do you want to be able to get forensic on the results of a sniper shot ("Look! Sinuses!")? Does having a car's brake discs glow red under heavy braking in a race game make any appreciable difference to the game, especially if the 'realism' is thwarted somewhat by the usual drawback of 'licensed cars'='no damage modelling'? Does accurately mapping the tread pattern in GT5 actually have any effect on the car's handling?
I don't know if I could handle genuine AI in video games. I think I have a hard enough time with Artificial Stupidity. There are already games with CPU enemies that can see your muzzle-flash from 800 yards away, and shoot you in the chin from the same range. I've just been playing Uncharted 2, and if the guards and enemies actually knew how to use cover and flanking manoeuvres, you could never actually progress past the first level. When it's you and a pistol against multiple enemies with armour, shotguns and grenade launchers, they can't be allowed to be particularly bright, or they will be as unbeatable as they would be in real life.
What does bother me is the level of stupidity on the civilians in some sandbox games. How many times have citizens in GTA walked past 10 yards away, oblivious to the fact that I'm murdering someone in broad daylight? At least in Prototype, the citizens will react if you 'hulk out' in front of them and run away, but leave the area, go back 30 seconds later, and everybody's walking around perfectly normally, like they hadn't just seen me beat someone to death with their own spleen. And how 'realistic' were the GTA series anyway, where there was nobody under the age of 18 in the whole city, and no schools, so there was no way you could ever kill a child.
I seem to recall that games like Theme Park etc. have little personal 'scripts' running for all the patrons of the park - how hungry they are, how bored, thirsty and the like. Would it be possible to have the same for a sandbox city, even down to your approval rating, in a superhero game? Crush one too many criminals with a squad car, and have to go rogue and vigilante, instead of being the media's latest craze.
Realism is difficult - I appreciate this. Designing a world to give players maximum freedom is much more complex than the very tightly-controlled worlds we're currently being offered, where wood does not burn, glass does not break, and a rocket-launcher will not break through a wooden door. As long as we're willing to accept these strictures and just keep buying and playing the latest iteration of whatever 3D engine is the current hot property, there is no reason whatsoever for any games company to attempt to offer us any semblance of true realism.
Amen to that! I've been gaming since Intellivision was the thing and have been growing tired of the reality based games. Tired of waiting for every other Final Fantasy, with the exception of X. Hopefully this idea will catch and developers will take notice. Enough is enough already, take the plunge, be creative, do things differently.
Wrong POV. You're not playing a new character, or yourself -- you are playing an avatar, aka RPG. If the character knows how to walk, there is no purpose in introducing a mechanic to learn how to walk.
BTW, the realistic FPS shooters have done what you said for over 10 years. Injured = bleeding, disabled, eventual death, first aid for minor wounds. Killed in one shot 400 yards = this is where strategy comes in. Death = you take control over another avatar (NPC), or are forced to observe your teammates for the remainder of the match (which can be hours).
Basically, you and the author of this article wrote from inexperience. MW2 is the Quake of yesterday. Required reading material: Tactical shooters. I suggest you start with AA, ARMA, OFP, RO, RS, and VBS2 (or VBS1).
weeks or months, also unable to play
the remainder of the match (which can be hours)
Realistic: an online shooter where each player is allowed one character for the duration of the match.
More realistic: such a shooter where each match takes half a decade, just like World War II or the Iraq War.
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