"This is good, this is bad," or "This is the next big thing" are all in fact fads...

[Jake]

This is another classic "Jake states the obvious and then descends into ranty town" post, but I'm sorry to say I just can't help it.

That article about "real" characters in games in fact looking like freaky death masks reminded me of something I was thinking about a while ago. It's extremely frustrating to me (especially in video games since that's what I happen to spend too much of my free time thinking about) that people, even smart people, get so sucked into the proclamations of what is the "right and wrong" way to do things or what the "next big thing" is that they fail to realize that most of the time it's simply a fad, a trend, a part of a natural cycle.

I'm not talking about the Grand Theft Auto scenario: coming up with one unique idea and having 60 copycats appear. Though that's probably related, what bugs me is more subtle and less talked about.

Look at the characters in Hitman, Mafia, Silent Hill, Splinter Cell, Resident Evil (GC RE1 remake, and RE0 specifically), look at most of EA's 3rd person movie licensed games (and some of their sports and EA Big extreme sports games). They're all billed as "realistic" or "real" but its just a style. I don't mean that in the "the style they chose was the style of real life instead of a cartoon," I mean its very specifically a style. Everybody in those games is built nearly the same. Everyone has the small eyes, the slightly overdone cheekbones and foreheads, the clothes are just a little bulkier, more pronounced than they should be.

People claim that this is an evolution towards mimicking reality, and maybe that's true to a point, but despite the claims of marketing (and possibly even the claims of confused art directors), higher polygon count and the occasional appearahce of a "stubble beard" texture on manly faces aside, in quite a few ways these characters are no more or less "real" looking than the weird slightly too thin arm and legged guys everyone was calling "real" in video games five years ago, especially when you put them up next to a real person. Granted, there are some exceptions (like the fake Pierce Brosnan Bond in Everything or Nothing), and obviously with the newer stuff there is a lot more clarity and detail, but for the most part... no.

Photographs were used for the clothes textures! We scanned their face in for the face texture! So what? The fact remains that in 20 years I could make a retro throwback Video game that is in fact very intentionally stylized in the "classic early 2000's 'realism' style." I would get rave reviews for my hilarious retro throwback to those goofy cheekbone cartoon guys with the over baggy suits and big foreheads and hands.

What I'm saying is this will pass. In five years someone will come up with a new look, coupled with some extremely crisp renders, that every magazine, marketing department, and EB salesman will talk about as "the new realistic look," and we'll talk about how weird the Hitman's forehead looked, and how cool it is that they fixed it in the new ones.

Granted, I've picked a really really stupid example to prove my point (something Chris will surely point out ). After all, yes, the new "real" stuff does come a lot closer to "real" than the original Half Life, or the PS1 Madden games or something, but I think I've still made sense decently.

Shit. I had a good 3 other examples I was going to go off on (maybe actually examples you will agree with), but I got too into the creepy face thing and now I've forgottten. Basically the fact that right now there are art directors or whoever telling their modelers "this is how you make a person look real" and then just explaining the "right" and "wrong" quirky modeling and texturing shortcuts to make something read as an emoting moving human... I dunno it seems like it's just the "in" way of making the "in" look.

Please help me! There are a million other examples of this. I'm not talking about "people all using 3D when they could use 2D," or "everybody copies Half Life." That sort of stuff is related (and could very well be the same thing and I'm wrong), but the fact alone that they've been talked into the ground makes them different enough to not be directly addressed in this forum thread

If you feel able, try to bring up more specific examples... there's currently a "no cutscenes!" thing going on right now, for instance, which has been gaining steam since Half Life. While telling a story entirely in-game is a noble persuit, and a cool idea, the "no cutscenes" idea has occasionally, in fact frequently, been thrown around as "the next true step forward in games" or "the real correct way to tell a story with games!" Doesn't that seem like a load of crap to you? I love games that have no cutscenes, and its definitely a new thing, but in time it will pass out of its position as "the right and only way to tell a true game story," and fade back into what it really is: a style.

So, help me out here, throw your two cents into the ring and/or hat and/or other analogy, and let's talk

[Marek]

Okay, I'm not sure if my example is one of those large sweeping ones (3D vs 2D) or if it's one of those more subtle ones that you're after, but what immediately came to mind was "emergent gameplay". I think it was kind of blasted onto the game dev scene by Harvey and Randy Smith. Basically the idea of emergent gameplay is that you don't set every solution in stone -- you merely create a bunch of rules and let players discover their own ways of responding to those mechanics so that solutions would "emerge". A game like GTA has quite a few examples of players finding really creative solutions to some of the missions. Anyway, that was sort of seen as the game design ideal for a while.

Then at this year's GDC everyone was like "oh shit oh shit I tried to force emergent gameplay into my design and now the inner fabric of my game is falling apart". Warren Spector, who I think has a natural tendency for extremes or overthinking too much*, basically gave a presentation that said "We were all wrong. The experiment has failed. People don't want emergent gameplay or lots of non-linearity. Wooooo linear pre-scripted games all the way!" Just before Peter Molyneux began his presentation, he snuck in a little extra bullet point in one of his slides that said something along the lines of "emergent gameplay is a pain in the ass". Incidentally, Fable's design has been made a lot tighter in the past year or-so. It's still very open-ended, but not nearly as much as it was initially conceived ... and it's probably become a better game as a result.

So I think that's an example of a certain style of game mechanics that got out of control and then backfired again.

*) In the "love story" game design challenge, Warren Spector said "it can't be done" and talked about really extreme stuff like simulating tactile contact and pheromones or maybe something else in that order of insaneness that I forgot the specifics of. Will Wright and Raph Koster just came up with game designs based on online matchmaking or love as a narrative theme.

[Chris]

If you feel able, try to bring up more specific examples... there's currently a "no cutscenes!" thing going on right now, for instance, which has been gaining steam since Half Life. While telling a story entirely in-game is a noble persuit, and a cool idea, the "no cutscenes" idea has occasionally, in fact frequently, been thrown around as "the next true step forward in games" or "the real correct way to tell a story with games!" Doesn't that seem like a load of crap to you? I love games that have no cutscenes, and its definitely a new thing, but in time it will pass out of its position as "the right and only way to tell a true game story," and fade back into what it really is: a style.

I'm sorry, I only skimmed over your post for now (I'll read it in more detail later), so I just wanted to quickly disagree with this point. I kind of miss cutscenes too, but I think it's unlikely that the no cutscenes method is just a phase and will fade away. Especially when the next generation of consoles/PCs crops up and in-game graphics get even more impressive, it's just going to be less and less worthwhile to construct pre-rendered cutscenes when the game engine can produce something detailed and cutsceney on its own. I don't think it's as much some big stylistic thing like you say it is, nor do I think it's being heralded as "the right and only way to tell a true game story" (at least in all cases), it's more just developers realizing their in-game engines are getting more advanced and with some good scripting they can make exposition scenes that don't require a whole team of animators doing stuff pre-rendered. There are still games with cutscenes (Final Fantasy, Painkiller which does a shitty shitty job with them, others I'm sure but I haven't played enough new games at the moment to give you good examples), it's just becoming slightly less necessary than it used to be.

[ysbreker]

well what is a cutscene to you? is it a prerendered movie? Yes obviously. But is still a cutscene when it uses the ingame engine, but doesn't allow you to control the game? I think so...

[Chris]

Look at the characters in Hitman, Mafia, Silent Hill, Splinter Cell, Resident Evil (GC RE1 remake, and RE0 specifically), look at most of EA's 3rd person movie licensed games (and some of their sports and EA Big extreme sports games). They're all billed as "realistic" or "real" but its just a style. I don't mean that in the "the style they chose was the style of real life instead of a cartoon," I mean its very specifically a style. Everybody in those games is built nearly the same. Everyone has the small eyes, the slightly overdone cheekbones and foreheads, the clothes are just a little bulkier, more pronounced than they should be.

People claim that this is an evolution towards mimicking reality, and maybe that's true to a point, but despite the claims of marketing (and possibly even the claims of confused art directors), higher polygon count and the occasional appearahce of a "stubble beard" texture on manly faces aside, in quite a few ways these characters are no more or less "real" looking than the weird slightly too thin arm and legged guys everyone was calling "real" in video games five years ago, especially when you put them up next to a real person. Granted, there are some exceptions (like the fake Pierce Brosnan Bond in Everything or Nothing), and obviously with the newer stuff there is a lot more clarity and detail, but for the most part... no.

Photographs were used for the clothes textures! We scanned their face in for the face texture! So what? The fact remains that in 20 years I could make a retro throwback Video game that is in fact very intentionally stylized in the "classic early 2000's 'realism' style." I would get rave reviews for my hilarious retro throwback to those goofy cheekbone cartoon guys with the over baggy suits and big foreheads and hands.

What I'm saying is this will pass. In five years someone will come up with a new look, coupled with some extremely crisp renders, that every magazine, marketing department, and EB salesman will talk about as "the new realistic look," and we'll talk about how weird the Hitman's forehead looked, and how cool it is that they fixed it in the new ones.

Granted, I've picked a really really stupid example to prove my point (something Chris will surely point out ). After all, yes, the new "real" stuff does come a lot closer to "real" than the original Half Life, or the PS1 Madden games or something, but I think I've still made sense decently.

Well, the problem with this example is that the current Hitman/Silent Hill/whatever "style" you're talking about is the one un-stylistic style, if that makes sense. The developers are going for absolute realism, so their goal is clearly laid out for them, and they will be able to work towards it as the years go by. Those crazy foreheads and crazy hands are just roadblocks on the way to an eventual style, not really the "style" itself. You're talking about technological limitations, not a style. It's like saying that the style of early 90s cartoony games was big pixels. I would disagree, saying that big pixels were just a side effect the technology had on that style. The Hitman people are just going to make their next characters look slightly more realistic in the next game, and maybe they won't have the crazy foreheads. This isn't abandoning the current style, it's just improving it to work more to the obvious goal of photorealism. As much as styles in games have obviously cycled around throughout the years, I think we're in a pretty stylistically diverse period right now. The "realistic style", if you can call it that, has sort of been chugging along the entire time. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, released in 1992, tried to make the characters as realistic it could with a fixed resolution of 320x400. Some of its 2d adventure contemporaries did not shoot for that goal; they took on their own more cartoony styles. As the years went by the realistic characters (including stuff like Tomb Raider, if you forget about certain...unrealistic parts of Croft's anatomy, as well as stuff like Gabriel Knight 3, SSX, and a thousand more examples I annoyingly can't recall at the moment) got more realistic, and other styles swirled all around them doing their crazy thing. Now the realistic characters are in the same boat as all the ones before them: they're obviously supposed to look like real people, but they're not there yet. The problem with this generation of Realistic Video game People, as you point out, is the crazy-ass death mask thing, as a result of the character models being super realistic but not quite realistic. As far as your hypothetical future game in which you receive critical acclaim for constructing crazy-foreheaded Hitman characters, I suspect you're right that you could do that, but I also suspect that if we were to take that game out of the future and look at it now alongside Hitman, Hitman's characters would still look more realistic. My guess is that your characters, utilizing future technology, would be able to reproduce the crazy foreheads so well that it would look quite deliberate and part of the character design, whereas in Hitman's case it's messy and obviously just a side effect of lacking technology.

Anyway, I agree with your point (seriously) about there not being a right and wrong way to do things, and I even agree about style cycles, but I think the "realistic" thing can't be approached in the same way as other styles, which are conscious artistic decisions. The realistic deathmask/foreheads/whatever thing is just a side-effect.

[Jake]

Sorry, Chris re: cutscenes... I wasn't referring to pre-rendered vs in-engine, I was referring to the post-half life desire to eliminate non-interactive moments from gameplay. I think the term "cutscene" has taken on the meaning of "pre-rendered video moment" but I've always thought a "cutscene" was any non-interactive (sometimes cinematic, but not always) moment usually used to move the story along.

I really can't think of a game other than Half Life that's truly never broken out of the in-game camera for the full duration of the game, but lots of developers got obsessed with this model as "the future" and "the true way to do storytelling in games." Even Tim Schafer, king of the cutscene, talked about wanting to move towards this model.

[vimes]

If you feel able, try to bring up more specific examples... there's currently a "no cutscenes!" thing going on right now, for instance, which has been gaining steam since Half Life. While telling a story entirely in-game is a noble persuit, and a cool idea, the "no cutscenes" idea has occasionally, in fact frequently, been thrown around as "the next true step forward in games" or "the real correct way to tell a story with games!" Doesn't that seem like a load of crap to you? I love games that have no cutscenes, and its definitely a new thing, but in time it will pass out of its position as "the right and only way to tell a true game story," and fade back into what it really is: a style.

So, help me out here, throw your two cents into the ring and/or hat and/or other analogy, and let's talk

I was making a mini-thesis on games two years ago and I had made the statement that the game industry is right now in the state of the movie industry during the 50's 60's. At this time, there were a lot of directors called "engineers- directors" which meant that really drive their movie-making process around a technical point of view : 3D, makes up, cinemascope, the firsts cheap crane had really fed the movies of these times.

Sure, some directors weren't in this state of mind but the movies were really brought forwarded thanks to these "engineers-directors". Eventually, these guys learnt to use these new techniques as a mean and not an achievement.

I think it's typically the state of current game industry. There are lots of "engineers-game designers" regarding a small amount of real creators but we can hope that it will change. Now what's a little frightening is that we have reached a level of technique improvment that should allow more creativity and less trend... but it's not the case.

And, Jake is right, most of studios are constructing their vision of games around a gameplay innovation allowed by some brand new technologies neglecting previous ideas.

A quite accurate example is IA a few years ago, it had become the hot topic of games and every developers were preaching the "dynamic characters with unpredicatble behaviour" point of view. thing is, it's nice but's xstupid because you can't give a soul to randomly generated people and, moreover, you can't drive a story!

[Erkki]

I agree with Jake on this mostly (but can't think of any more examples at the moment), but I'd say the realism thing is a combination of a fad and technology limitations, and maybe something else.

[Erkki]

I think a little dose of "engineers" is actually healthy. Or maybe I don't fully understand that concept you brought up.

For me, Appeal (of Outcast fame) seemed a lot like engineers/scientists because all their "behind-the-scenes" stuff I read/watched seemed really scientific. But at the same time, Outcast was artistically very different from anything else and is one of my favourite games. But maybe Appeal was just a lucky combination that will only happen once in a decade.

[Jake]

Face death mask thingey aside (since its in fact a bad example, sorry I used it it was all I could think of to get my brain moving on the subject), most of these things (emergence, no cutscenes) are in fact good, cool ideas. People just get too excited by them and blinded by their newness and declare them "the future," and talk about them far too excitedly and exclusively for a while, while other good ideas that don't fit the current mold of what is "good" or "correct" get left behind (until they're put on a pedestal as the ideal real future of games five years later).

[hermes]

Disclaimer: I'm going to go a bit academic in this post - so please excuse my obvious

This is a quite complex discussion - but there seem to be general disagreement on one point. Whether or not the hunt for photo-realism is a passing trend or a generel concept of evolution in the gaming-industry.

In some way, I think that everything is passing 'trends', the only differences between them is their timescale. This means that a lot of 'trends' coexist at the same time. Some ceases and dies a horribly dead (like the FVM-games or was it FMV ??..), and others live a long time. The longliving ones having subtly or not so subtly influence on the trends that die quickly.

Chris has a point, that the hunt for photo-realism is in many ways connected to the more and more advanced technology the developers has in their power. But alas, more advanced technology can be used to do more advanced stuff in general, not necessarily photo-realism, for example the cell-shading trend we have seen the last couple of years (e.g. wind waker and XIII), is certainly not realism, but none the less the product of better technology...

One thing is sure - developers will always try to make things look better. The turning point here, is what 'better' means.... This is the subjective grey area, where no-one holds the truth - and it will then be very much related to the general trends at the time...

If we make a comparison to art history in general - we see that through the last 10.000 years, or so, there have been different trends. Sometimes things look realistic, sometimes stylistic and even abstract. But again, the realism of the akkadian art 2200 bc, is certainly different than the realism of the renaissance.

I think there is part buzz-mentality in photorealism, and part general evolution

of graphics. In general other stylistic choices will always have to be made (music, script, colors etc)- there will never be a definite photo-realism, but things will look better and better....

End of - I think that I study way to much these days...

[Chris]

(everything)

I agree, but I think that no matter what photorealism will continue parallel to whatever other styles become trendy. I was not trying to equate technological advancement with photorealism, but I will say that photorealism is furthered with more advanced technology, whereas certain other styles do not rely as much on increasing graphical capabilities.

[spaceship789]

I agree with Jake here, its completely just a style.

And what has been overlooked here, is how we *adjust* to a style and mange to look beyond its shortcomings.

If you hadn't played any games in your life, except for 80's games, and then picked up GTA, or Mafia or Hitman..

..it would freak you out!

You won't have adjusted to the style, and it would just look wierd. like someone had done a stop motion film of a cut up photograph or something.

The same will happen in the future, when facial animation will much more prolific. A future person we will look back on GTA/hitman etc and think it looks unrealistic, and much worse than the cartoon graphics of many

premillenium games.

[Intrepid Homoludens]

What's wrong with Hitman's forehead? I think it's sexy!!

We have to remember that technology is probably the most influential driving force behind all these trends, making the games industry and the experience of gaming (i.e. interactive entertainment) rather unique and distinct from other industries (movies, literature, fashion, architecture, art, etc.). Thus it's technology - its speed of progress and advance - that shifts and changes and ultimately catalyzes our experiences of, concepts of, and perspectives on gaming, including what constitutes styles and trends and what is good. This can have its perils, do doubt, a double edged sword, mainly from the fact that technology today advances obscenely fast. Too fast, in my opinion, so that considerable new possibilities are introduced and pimped and whored as 'the next big thing', thus often do not have time to crystallize and be subject to refinement and improvement by more talented development houses.

Many publishers and developers, fearful of being left behind and accused of using outdated technology (even when they truly are studying it and want to improve and refine it for a better gaming experience) and thus branded as unsalable, may have no choice but to run onto the next new, bleeding edge, and trendy idea in technology just to sell more copies to the techno whore hardcore gamers who, like it or not, really do have a sizeable influence on how the rest of the world (i.e. mainstream) will perceive the new games coming out. Companies like nVidia and ATI don't just race to come up with better ways of presenting games, they want to be the first with next technology in order to make the most money, and that in turn helps shape our ideas and points of view. In the end it's the inevitable combination of technology, marketing, and commerce that can have a great impact on trends and the 'zeitgeist-du-jour'.

As far as the latest fashion in realism, we all here know that that in itself doesn't necessarily constitute a good game. It can, however, augment it. But it really depends on the concept of the game itself, what kind of idea the game is about. Take the Max Payne series for example. The concept was to reproduce the intensity and visual style of a Hong Kong action thriller, but as an interactive experience where the player has a key involvement in progressing the story. Developer Remedy decided to go for the literal visual look: photorealism. The technology was of course available, a game of this caliber and of this depth in richness (on all levels) would have been impossible to create ten years ago. The available technology was stretched to its limits. On this note, I think they ultimately were not trying to be fashionable (although the series did end up being masterpieces in how to do realism most effectively), they were trying to give the player a solid foothold into being in and participating in the world of the action thriller.

[arrr_matey]

Someone else made this point before me, but I can't remember where I read it so I'm just going to paraphrase... but essentially, an article I read argued that the last thing that gamers want is realism. Think about it and it's true. Here's one example. Your character in most games refills their health by running over a little icon in the shape of a heart, or first aid kit, or eating a leaf or something. Now, does anyone want to abandon this abstracted, metaphorical kind of gameplay for something more realistic? Could you imagine a game where your character could only regain health and heal injuries by going to a hospital, spending a few weeks there, then rehabilitating him/herself. It's absurd. Even if a game just had something more realistic like a character having to find bandages and then spend ten minutes or so bandaging herself up, it would bore me to tears. I don't want that level of realism AT ALL. Reality sucks and is tedious most of the time, why would I want more of it?

I'm playing Rise to Honour right now--the Jet Li game--and even though you could argue that it's designed in a realistic style. Like, the characters are semi-realistic looking to the extent of trying to make the main character resemble Jet Li and the backgrounds are the same style, etc. But since the game is like a kung fu movie, the actual gameplay is ridiculously unrealistic. Fighting fifteen karate dudes at the same time while dodging motorcylists trying to run you down is pure fantasy. But, it's so effin' fun that I don't care at all. If the game were realistic, it would blow.

I think the same holds true for artistic style. Realism just requires far more effort than it's worth. Not only that, but it's deceptive and misleading. Realism as a genre, I think, is always tied to a desire to fool the public. That's probably an overstatement, but realism in video games to me seems to me to have a strong tie to military games (Kuma War being the extreme example--now you can kill Saddam Hussein!). And these military games pretend to be realistic by making the gun sounds authentic and crap like that while totally distorting the conflicts that they portray. Realism my buttocks! More like propaganda.

[Jake]

You're opening up a lot of cans of worms which deserve their own threads. "What gamers really want versus what they say they want," and "'Realistic' gameplay versus 'realistic action movie' gameplay." Nobody wants to get shot once in a game and start shaking and drop to the floor until medically treated... even in *slightly* more realistic stuff like erm... dunno Splinter Cell?

[arrr_matey]

I guess that's my point. Saying you want to play an action movie and saying you want realism are contradictory notions.

[arrr_matey]

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/06/13/news_6100558.html

This is an interesting article by GameSpot about whether high-res realism in graphics makes for a better game. I like this part at the end:

"Wright encouraged the audience to recall that "a level of physical abstraction invites the use of imagination" and to put that knowledge to good use, in tandem with the newfound tools of computer graphics technology."

[Jake]

Go game designers!

[Intrepid Homoludens]

And STFU!, graphics slut gamer whores*!!

* Well, I'm kinda one myself, part-time, but I never let that supersede what should be the most important aspects of any game: gameplay and fun.