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REALITY IS OVERRATED: WHY MODERN GAME GRAPHICS BORE ME by Mr Biffo

9/9/2015

13 Comments

 
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Modern games are beautiful to look at, right? 

With their sunsets, and shimmering water, and their trees that wave in the breeze, we've reached a point where in-game graphics are every bit as spectacular as the CGI cut-scenes of a decade or more ago. 

How many of us have stopped in GTA V or Assassin's Creed Unity to just take in the scene? But what is it that we're marvelling at, specifically? Recreate your own living room in a video game, and most of us would spend hours inspecting every CGI shadow, dust mote, and the pattern on the sofa. Do that in real life, and your family would start to worry about you. 

So what is it that grips us - if we're talking about games on an aesthetic level - when it comes to games recreating reality? Is it art, or is it merely simulation? 

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SOUFFLE THEORY
I've got this theory that I'm sure I've mentioned before, about how graphics used to be better before computer artists could lob a ton of maths and processing power at them. 

I remember a friend telling me about the amazing "scuff marks" you could see on the skirting boards in Toy Story. My curiosity was piqued - I'd never known that I'd wanted to see distressed skirting boards recreated in CGI, but clearly I had. Yet - as impressive as those scuff marks were - they didn't appeal to the part of my brain that appreciates great composition or imagination (though Toy Story also had that in spades - Pixar and Disney get what I'm talking about better than anyone).

Back in the 80s and 90s game graphics were all about art through adversity, when the people creating their games were given nothing but a bag of carrots and some lard, and had to make a soufflé out them. 

There's a reason why Bitmap Books are able to produce a range of retro art albums, and it isn't pure nostalgia. It's because there's something iconic and honourable about those graphics of yore, when the computing power was limited, and you had to make your artistic choices carefully. There's something heroic about these Commodore 64 developers who had to work with a mostly brown colour palette, and could still produce something that pleased the eye. Most of the time.

NEOLITHIC BOG
I speak as someone who used to work as a graphics artist, when computer graphics were still mired in a Neolithic bog. My first job was for Ladbrokes Racing - designing animated horses and logos for their in-house betting system... which I somehow had to fit into a loop of 15 frames. 

After that I went to work at Wembley Stadium, where I produced pixellated "GOAL!" animations for their scoreboards, and then I ended up at Teletext, a company and a medium not known for its contribution to great art (though it does now have its own international art festival). So, I know a thing or two about working within the limitation of the tools to hand. 

Now it feels like having infinite tools are limiting imagination, and that the only thing people can think to do with them is create photorealistic scenes - even if those scenes contain photorealistic dragons, or flaming blue whales.

Much as I appreciate the design that goes into something like Destiny, The Witcher III, or Forza 6, I don't want to browse a book of it, because much of it just looks like real life. Consequently it's a bit boring. It doesn't move me. If I want to admire a wood, there's one five minutes from my house. Sunsets happen pretty much every evening, and if I want to look at water that's even more realistic than the water in Far Cry 4, then I'll run a tap. 

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DIFFERENT PARTS OF MY BRAIN
I suppose what I'm saying is that modern, big budget, game graphics - for the most part - speak to me on a level that's different to how I'd appreciate, say, a nice painting. They're working on different portions of my brain. 

The part of me that loves great art - and I say that as someone whose idea of great art is the golden era of 2000AD - isn't stimulated by simulated reality. It doesn't punch me in the gut.

In terms of recent game graphics that have lit up that part of my brain, they've been Indie or mobile games. The cartoony visuals in Angry Birds 2, or the recreated 16-bit style of Ball King. 

It just sometimes feels like the triple-A blockbuster games are all blending into one now, because they're all trying to do the same thing; appeal to a sense of technical grandeur, rather than artistic appreciation. 

Hats off to Borderlands for its cel-shaded visuals, but look at most of the games on today's charts and their screenshots are virtually interchangeable... and that's because most of them are trying to recreate the real world as it looks outside our window. Or how it would look outside our window if we lived in revolutionary France, or a quasi-medieval fantasy realm. You know what I mean.

Games don't have to look real to look great. We know what they are capable of now - we get it. You've proved your point. Now can we find a way to apply all that power, all those tools, differently? It feels like in leaping so far forwards we've somehow lost something, become blander, more homogenised. Less interesting.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
  • AN EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES by Mr Biffo
  • IMMERSIVE THEATRE: IT'S REALLY FOR GAMERS by Mr Biffo
  • THE MAN IN THE MIRROR'S EDGE by Mr Biffo
13 Comments
Bananasthemonkey
9/9/2015 11:56:20 am

Kenneth Clarke said much the same thing about the Dutch realist painters of the 17th Century. See Paulus Potter's The Bull. COUGH... I'll get my coat.

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pfspleen
9/9/2015 01:07:24 pm

That's why Zelda Wind Waker is timeless.

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Kelvin Green link
9/9/2015 08:17:34 pm

Well said.

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lilock3
9/9/2015 01:49:10 pm

If I was only allowed to agree with one thing Mr Biffo has ever said, then that thing would be this thing.

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Peter Sim
9/9/2015 03:42:50 pm

Excellent article Mr. Biffo - I guess the increasing cost of developing games has meant publishers are much more conservative & less likely to go with something that's different to the prevailing aesthetic. Which is generally desaturated & grainy.

It's a real shame as although indie games have much more scope for experimentation, very few have the budget to go beyond the self consciously 8-bit or slightly odd vector graphics stuff.

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Kelvin Green link
9/9/2015 08:20:10 pm

"Games don't have to look real to look great."

Too blooming right.

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Anon
11/10/2015 05:27:32 pm

True, but if they look like crap, I'd pass. I want my games to look good AND be fun. Games like Shadow of Mordor show that a game kind be all kinds of fun and look awesome. If a game has 8 or 16-bit graphics, I really have no interest.

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Matt
9/9/2015 08:46:23 pm

Maybe it's symptomatic of the big industry as a whole? All the imaginative stuff is coming from the indie studios. Guys like EA, who helped bring us Sim City, now bring us FIFA Recycled Tarted Up Sequel.

Less shinies required. More imagination please. As always, an excellent article.

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Mr Biffo
9/9/2015 10:02:43 pm

God bless you all.

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Frank Chickens
10/9/2015 01:06:43 am

Textures for a lot of today's game seem to be a mixture of brown, grey and dull green; safe, boring and bland.

In the 8-16 bit era they had the ability to pique the player's imagination, using the resources at hand to create striking visuals that would leave a lasting impression. Less is more, a lesson that needs to be relearned.

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Col. Asdasd
12/9/2015 12:15:57 am

I get this. I think.

I feel like it has a lot to do with symbols versus depictions.

In old games like Baldur's Gate you'd have a lot of sprite-based stuff that was like a symbol or placeholder for an object, which the eye could scan over and quickly process as a knave or a hobogre or whatever, freeing up brain cycles to fire up the imagination and take in the gorgeous hand painted backgrounds.

Whereas one generation later and you're playing Knights of the Old republic, which presents everything to you in full 3D and which the eye and the brain are invited to take at face value. Less 'this represents the game world' and more 'this IS the game world'.

Not unlike how matches in the early Championship Manager games were much more vivid because of the narrative from the text ticker than the hopeless 'highlights' provided by the transition to a shonky match engine ever could be.

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Mr Biffo
13/9/2015 12:45:48 am

Pretty much spot on.

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Tom Gleeborg
12/9/2015 08:07:15 pm

I tend to marvel at the fancy graphics at the beginning of the game, get used to it very quickly then ignore it and concentrate on the actual gameplay.

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