
Graphical fidelity is ruining video games - davezatch
https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is-ruining-video-games/
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kstenerud
"I just don’t understand the game industry (and game culture)’s fanatical
obsession with realistic graphics. They make games worse."

I just don't understand talkies. They make movies worse.

I just don't understand TV. It's worse than radio shows.

I just don't understand 60fps filming. It just makes the props look fake.

Every entertainment form has its visionaries, master craftsmen, and then the
other 95% made up of crap (not to mention the industry learning curve as
people discover what works and what doesn't).

This has nothing to do with graphical fidelity. There were shit games on the
Atari 2600, and there are shit games on the PS4.

Good entertainment immerses you in the environment, such that you don't even
think to question how things work. If it fails in that, the designers are
doing something wrong.

~~~
Tiksi
While I more or less agree with you, and there's nothing wrong with graphical
fidelity in itself, I think the argument is more one of priorities.

If you have 6 months to build a game, do you spend 3 on graphics and 3 on
gameplay or do you spend 5 on graphics and 1 on gameplay.

Personally, I have no insight into the game industry, so it's very possible
that it's not a zero sum tradeoff, and crappy games would just be crappy games
with crappy graphics if they focused on graphics less, but I wouldn't be at
all surprised if gameplay was at least somewhat scarified for graphics.

~~~
mohaine
The argument is NOT one of priorities. It is that if you go for too much
realism, then you have have to start making things real instead of fun.

Example from the article: Run speed in Doom is stupid high which is fun and
seems normal, but would look silly and off-putting in a photorealist game.

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georgeecollins
One of the reasons why Minecraft is so revolutionary is that because it was an
indy game, it could peg its graphical fidelity to same crude level as the
simulation. The whole world is WYSIWYG in a way that high graphical fidelity
FPS games aren't. High res games are showing you all sorts of details that
can't be simulated in any detail.

A commercial game would never have been made with such blocky graphics and low
resolution textures, because they would be scared to market such a clunky
looking game. But the clunky-ness of the graphics enables the fidelity between
the look and the simulation. The irony is it is so successful it made low res
graphics a style.

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galfarragem
What the author really misses is the ingenuity he had when he started playing
video games. Playing an old videogame now is not nearly as fun as it was when
I was a kid so it can't be only a graphics issue. Without ingenuity a
videogame will never be fun.

How I wish I could play Dwarf Fortress when I was a kid. Now is too late for
me. Ingenuity (and free time) had gone.

~~~
grimoald
Yes! I have the theory that everybody likes the kind of games they grew up
with. I started playing video games around ~2000 and I can't really enjoy
these 2D platformers or simple 3D games like Doom. They just look too …
ridiculous and unrealistic to me. Current games on the other hand are just
needlessly shiny and … realistic to me.

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Kristine1975
Very interesting article. A few nitpicks however:

 _I’m sure there were other true-3D games before it, but I challenge you to
name one off the top of your head_

Descent was published in 1995, one year before Quake. And it was fully 3D,
even moreso than Quake since you could rotate around all three axes.

 _Before Quake, games couldn’t even simulate a two-story building, which ruled
out most realistic architecture._

The Build engine (used e.g. in Duke Nukem 3D) was capable of faking multi-
story buildings with the creative use of teleporters.

~~~
pYQAJ6Zm
I believe one of the earliest 3D games is Elite, from 1984. (Example of
gameplay:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmCaNwBwXoQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmCaNwBwXoQ))

But I too didn’t know of it until very recently, when Elite: Dangerous came
out. In my social environment, the Quake series was however very well known. I
have the impression that Elite was more restricted to the British market.

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calferreira
Well, games with high graphics and realism have cars that you cannot use and
other things to give the sense of immersion. If your playing let's say GTA and
the buildings where you cannot enter were simply gone it would be very weird.
What i think take from the article is that game development moved away from
it's roots. Every game is for the eye candy instead of being fun, the only
company that comes to my mind at the moment is nintendo. Yeah, things don't
look too good for them at the moment, but one of the most popular games of all
time has simple graphics and simple gameplay and it's fun. It's called Super
Mario Bros.

~~~
qrendel
I think it's more that the intent of games has been diverging for a long time,
to the point where they are really several different art forms all getting
lumped together under the category "games." The most obvious that come to
mind:

\- interactive fiction, both movies ( _Heavy Rain_ , _Beyond: Two Souls_ ) and
novels ( _To The Moon_ , MUDs)

\- simulators of various kinds (most FPSes are basically war simulators, or at
least laser tag simulators, but also stuff like racing and flight sims)

\- pure gameplay (platformers, 4X games)

\- puzzles ( _Tetris_ , _Bejeweled_ , _The Witness_ )

\- others...

Then those get combined in every imaginable way by the developers, yielding a
huge spectrum of games so that it's very difficult to put most of them into a
single category. At the edges they're still fundamentally different things.
They're never going to evolve into a single Platonic ideal that can be called
"games" (that was closest to being true back in the Atari days, where
everything was fairly similar to Pitfall or Donkey Kong) - just keep diverging
into different experiences (especially with VR coming around now), while still
maintaining a continuous spectrum of different types that borrow from the best
(and worst) parts of the purest genre forms.

The extreme focus on high-end graphics and realism is mostly due to the
influence of a few of those genres - simulators and interactive fiction.
That's a huge portion of the market, so it seems like all games are just about
graphics now, when that really isn't true.

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eggy
Doom was the last video game I played regularly. Obviously, I am not a gamer.
Strange, but I have spent more time with If (interactive fiction) these past
few years, and any games that have more 'artsy' or abstract visuals. Hell, I
even like the demo Breakout clone on the Pythonista app more than realistic
games. I was into viewing Machinima at one time, and I think there the realism
works better than in games, although there were some really cool Machinima
works done in a zany forced-perspective, or cartoon style that were fantastic.

I think the point is that we have focused too much on high frame rates and
realism, and drifted away from the creative, storytelling side. I think that's
why the animated movies, like The Incredibles, or Despicable Me and Zootopia
do well. They use the old animation tricks that don't actually mimic real
physics, but our cultured sense of movement. I don't have much interest in the
second wave of VR either; I am trying to continue to find awe in the real
world around me, and would prefer to be in an immersive world of crazy Bugs
Bunny and Jessica Rabbit!

~~~
brobinson
>Doom was the last video game I played regularly. Obviously, I am not a gamer.

This comment is great since I don't think you're aware a major studio game
called "DOOM" was just released in the last few weeks. ;)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQpxDFExwhU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQpxDFExwhU)
(it was renamed from Doom 4 to just DOOM since this demo was shown)

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rajahafify
The problem is not the fanatical obsession with realistic graphics. It's the
lack of fanatical obsession with unrealistic graphics or whatever else you
care about. Everyone is free to do whatever you want nobody stopping anyone to
do anything. Build your game and let gamers vote with their money.

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Joof
Would still recommend Halo. It has diversity in enemy types in a similar way
to DOOM.

Graphical fidelity prevents experimentation by making things too expensive to
try. That's why we have indie games! Go play some! It's like Sundance, there
is a bunch of crap and a bunch of incredible creativity.

~~~
qrendel
Game Maker's Toolkit had a really good video on DOOM and enemy types not long
ago:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q)

The entire channel is golden, especially for those interested in game design
or criticism.

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cairo_x
It seems like every time there's a new game I need a new goddamned computer.
And then the game is like 90 bucks!? Where's the fun in that? They are games,
not god damned niche specialty hobbies. Imagine if films, or music, or books
were like that? It's ludicrous. I guess it's a different thing, but damn.
Computing has managed to become affordable, while gaming has become a hobby
for the middle-classes, like skiing, or yacht racing, or formula one. It's
like a vomitorium of the senses, and a lot of it is not particularly
inspiring.

~~~
theandrewbailey
> It seems like every time there's a new game I need a new goddamned computer.

Shiny new games come out about every other week. A nice computer should play
every one of them well for many years.

> And then the game is like 90 bucks!? Where's the fun in that?

90 bucks? Do you live in Australia? (fair enough) Do you feel compelled to buy
the collector's/deluxe edition of every game? (don't)

Ever heard of Steam sales? Or indie games? Or Humble Bundles? Like zamalek
said, ignore the hype and marketing. Get games after a year or so when the
prices have come down. If said game is actually good, people will still be
talking about it.

> Imagine if films, or music, or books were like that? It's ludicrous.

A good game is enjoyed for over 10 hours. A great one might be at least 50.
Imagine listening or watching any other media for that long of a time. You'd
likely be bored or insane. You can get ludicrous value per hour gaming very
easily.

> It's like a vomitorium of the senses, and a lot of it is not particularly
> inspiring.

Indie games are maybe $20 each, and tend not to be your copy-paste $90 shooty-
fest.

~~~
Vaskivo
I have to reinforce something you said:

> A good game _is enjoyed_ for over 10 hours. A great one might be at least
> 50.

This is not about the game length/duration. It's its lasting appeal. The game
I most consistently replay (and that I consider the best game ever) is the
original Portal, a 4 hour game.

~~~
theandrewbailey
Yes, indeed. Portal is great. But when I wrote that, I was thinking more about
open worlds and multiplayer games where game length is entirely irrelevant,
and you can easily play hundreds of hours without realizing it.

~~~
Vaskivo
Open world is a mixed bag. Some of my favourite games are open world and I
love exploring game worlds. But the current trend of making every single game
open-world usually backfires.

I'd reather have a carefully designed closed spaced with backtracking (Metal
Gear Solid, Metroidvanias) that an open world with a dozen of hand-designed
places.

The biggest contrast I found was between Arkham Asylum and Arkham City. In the
former you are contantly traversing the old places and trying out stuff with
your new abilities. On the latter, you just fly in a straight line to your
objective. AA is better at gauging your curiosity while in AC, you must
actively explore stuff.

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aphextron
This is spot on. I recently played through Doom again in OpenGL mode with the
Project Brutality mod, and it was better than any FPS I've played in years.

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touristtam
So the author is discovering this about the video game industry right now?
This has been apparent for anyone to see, if you cared to, for the last 10
years at least.

