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Original post by Raloth
Want reality? Open your front door and go outside, there''s a whole world out there .

Graphics matter whether people want to believe it or not. Sure they don''t make the game more fun, but bad graphics can ruin any game. You don''t want to stare at a model of a human made of 50 triangles and textures with a resolution of one texel per meter for 10-20 hours a week, do you?

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Dunno. Look how many people play diablo2. Imho, graphics are merely representations of whatever reality the game is trying to portray. As long as the graphics let me distinguish what they game is trying to say, I don''t care how pretty they are.

Take first person shooter games for example. At least on multiplayer I typically play them with every graphics setting turned off or down so I can get every advantage possible.

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Original post by Raloth
Graphics matter whether people want to believe it or not. Sure they don''t make the game more fun, but bad graphics can ruin any game. You don''t want to stare at a model of a human made of 50 triangles and textures with a resolution of one texel per meter for 10-20 hours a week, do you?

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believable graphics are, imo, the least important part of realism. i''m more concerned with cause and effect. to me, it is the consequences of one''s actions, and the breadth of actions possible, that most determines how realistic a game is.

And herein lies the problem. Some people want graphics that are so detailed, you can see the individual beads of sweat dripping down the player''s face, and others would simply be content with Pong.

It all boils down to opinion. While I, personally, am a fan of games that tend to be more unrealistic and cartoony (read: wacky), I do not begrudge other, more realistic games. In my mind, they are just as much games as the others are. I suppose it''s just like art, isn''t it? Some people like realism, others like abstract, some impressionism, and some (...*shudder*)...enjoy post modernism. Now, I bet you can all tell where my opinion lies, but in my mind, each style has equal validity as being art.

And I suppose that''s what we have to accept about the gaming industry. Some games attempt to directly reflect reality, while others are mere shadows of it, but that does not make them lesser games.

Thank you. *steps down off of his soapbox*

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Original post by _buu_
Huh? Theres a huge difference between computer games and movies.

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Actually, there''s a huge difference between computer games and the board game called chess.

To put it bluntly, if you want to design board games like chess, then have at it. If you aren''t up to the challenge of pursuing realistic graphics, don''t cry for the rest of the inddustry to abstain from their attempts.

I am actually eagerly awaiting any computer game which can evoke some sense of realism with regard to human emotion in a visual sort of way.

No game to date comes close. All computer games until now look very fake. No game has yet portrayed the full gamut or even 1% of the human condition on any respectable level with regard to realism.

Perhaps you confuse the cheesiness of today''s rendered characters as something even remotely visually appealing or realistic and believe since it doesn''t satisfy, then realism isn''t where it''s at, so instead cry for ''gameplay'' at the expense of realism.

The reason it doesn''t satisfy is because it isn''t realistic.

When things are truly realistic, then you can raise your case again. Until then, pursuing the matter of realism will be a high priority.

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Original post by irbrian
It''s very simple. What I want in games is not reality, but immersion . There''s a fine line between the two, but there is a definite separation.

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Sounds logical, but consider this for a moment. Imo, and in some other people''s opinions, Marshall McCluhan for one (the most revered master of perception and communication), you are so immersed already in reality to think you are not is to not recognize who you are where you are when you are there doing what you are doing. The immersion you experience in reality is so complete and total we frankly mistake it, and thus look for escape in non-realities, or illusions, surrealisms, fantasies, etc.

That does not mean you cannot have a highly detailed realisitic simulation of reality running before your eyes on your monitor in the game loop and not be having an amazingly escapist, entertaining and immersive experience. Twilight Zone proved this decades ago, and there are probably better examples to cite.

There is not even a comparison between the degree of immersion your self has in real reality and any other medium you can name, at least until you can program the peceptual cortex of the mind.

The difference is that you have tons of preconcieved notions, expectations, reliable experiences and evolutionary traits that make the reality your self is completely immersed in appear predictable, boring and unimmersive. But the truth is, there is no other thing extant you could be more immersed in than reality.

McCluhan used an image metaphore to convey this distancing we set up from the reality we are immersed in and the fantasy we seek escape through via the parable of Narcissus and the pool of water.

We pay more attention to our reflection in the pool of water back to ourselves, and project upon that reflection all sorts of imaginative alterations (I''m handsome, strong, wise, immortal, pick-your-archetype, etc.) that we completely forget we are there, and begin to see the reflection as reality. this is how badly we want to escape our boring lives. Reach out too far and touch the reflection, and the perception is destroyed, and, you might not ever come back to reality in the perceptual sense. Your body will still be on the planet breathing and moving, but your mind and perception are no longer here. Losing touch with reality is essentially the loss of your mind, not exactly my personal preference. Escaping in digestible degrees of fantasy or surreality we tend to call entertainment.

This is a big reason why movies are shown in the dark, for the comfort and anonymity they give us while we escape, allowing perceptual anchors through destimuli enhancing the experience of projection (staring into the pool) for the viewer. Early films were not shown in the dark, the house lights were kept up and the screen was highlighted. It was discovered frankly by accident people liked movies better when they saw them in the dark, and exhibitors and producers got better response without having to enhance content quality.

To argue against simulations of reality is to deny that ultimate immersion is already going on around you, you just happen to be paying more attention to the reflection than the self due to the familiarization reasons cited above.

Perception is a tricky thing, if you really investigate it. It is said that perception is reality, but that is for weak minds; the minds who believe the reflection is reality and not the self stooping by the poolside, imo. Reality is reality. Nothing can be a substitute for it that is not a surreality or fantasy or projection.

That is why McCluhan arrived at the notion that the medium is the message ultimately. If that is true, then immersion is the degree to which you buy into the message the pool of water and what you see in the reflection gives back to you, but your total immersion is still stooping beside the pool looking in. Now, that''s playing games.

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Immersing a player in a game may be facilitated by making certain elements feel more realistic, but that doesn''t mean we''re trying to simulate reality. For instance, in designing a First Person Shooter, I might choose to incorporate one-hit kills and location-based injuries. But in such a case, the decision would be made on an educated assumption that the player''s emotional experience would be intensified. On the other hand, I would not incorporate, say, one-hit fatal injuries -- meaning a player who is critically wounded lies helpless on the ground waiting indefinitely for medical aid. That would be realistic, but would not very fun for a player who''s character has been heavily wounded.

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Whoever said reality had to be fun? a lot of us would say it''s not all the time. Fun is not the test of immersion, immersion is only the degree to which we invest ourselves in the suspension of disbelief in the fantasy we are engaging interactively in.

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I say, by all means, endeavor to immerse the player in your game, and heighten the emotional experience in any way you can. But DON''T put your focus on realism unless you''re specifically building a simulator.

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Or, the game you are designing can be told best in the context of a realistic looking gameworld. It''s not a either or, it''s a design decision chosen to best support the experience you are developing for the player. Oregon Trails would have been a big disconnect if played on a starship. GTA would have been silly and probably not have sold may shipped units if it had been played on an alien planet. It''s what the design calls for that is best for gameplay and the user experience you are developing, not whether you totally invest in non-realism or realism.

In fact, the two are not essentially competitive, so I don''t even know why you are arguing them against each other.

Adventuredesign

****************************************

Brian Lacy
ForeverDream Studios

Comments? Questions? Curious?
brian@foreverdreamstudios.com

"I create. Therefore I am."

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The OP(

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Original post by _buu_
No one ever says "OMG i wont play chess the knight doesn''t look realistic at all!".
Discuss.

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) leaves a gapping hole of further questions and after reading the post by bishop_pass
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Original post by bishop_pass
<SNIP<
When things are truly realistic, then you can raise your case again. Until then, pursuing the matter of realism will be a high priority.

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)

I was left wondering what each of them meant when they used the word realistic .

I had a discussion on Mud-Dev in which we contested the value of realism in games – our discussion focused primarily on AI in games and was it worth doing properly. What we ended up debating was realism.

So, my point is what are we referring to when we use the word realistic as it relates to games, are we talking about things looking realistic or are we talking about events having a believability or are we merely talking about what the player wants?








Dave Dak Lozar Loeser

"Software Engineering is a race between the programmers, trying to make bigger and better fool-proof software, and the universe trying to make bigger fools. So far the Universe in winning."
--anonymous

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Original post by syn_apse
looks like someone is living in the past...

face it fools, this is where the industry is heading. i''ve seen enough science fiction movies with reality simulators to realize that there is an incredible market waiting to be exploited. ever seen minority report, where the guy wants to get in the booth and simulate killing his boss? eventually the technology will get to the point where that becomes possible. and when that happens you can be sure that everything else truly will be a "game", with all of the negative connotations that the word carries.

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Good grief. This is like the arguement for pop music, "Everyone else wants it, so you must be defective". Listening to Belle and Sebastian means you''re either sad, or some sort of musical pervert.

Ironically the reason that was in the movie was the same reason a lot of writers at the time ( MR was written that is ) put that sort of thing in: to illustrate the potentially degenerative properties of an overly sybaritic society. It was meant to be negative, not encouraging!

But back to our times and context. I really don''t like ''real'' games. They bore the living day lights out of me. Even when considering the fantastical situation they present ( RB6 might be realistic, but your character is far more capable than you are personally, so really, it''s still a fantasy ), realistic scenarios I find to be banal. I want my imagination stretched and fed with new sights and sounds, not an almost accurate reproduction of my back yard.

Calls us btw syn_apse, when you finally clear the sim mortgage payments on the sim house you bought in that sim suburb. And remember, until then, while you''re waiting 45 sim minutes for the sim train to show up in the sim morning so you can get to your sim job that you can sim hate to earn sim money to clear that sim mortgage... always have some sim aspirin to hand.

Actually, video games and VR have been temporarily(or possibly permanantly) conjoined as a side-effect of technology. Gameplay is the "grease" to allow a believable VR with existing technology.

What supports this?

-Video games are structured so as to be a "easy" technical challenge to develop. Everyone knows that a full, to-scale detailed simulation of a world with fantastic physics and AI and long-term world changes is still more-or-less an impossibility. So our solutions are to either dumb down the simulation - focus it towards specific things like shooting people or an adventure story - or to abstract parts of it, so that logistical questions like "how the adventurers rode their steeds from town x to town y, 1000 miles away, without the player spending days at the monitor holding down a button to go along the road" are resolved neatly and without complaint.

-Video games often use challenge not as an end in itself, as classic games of solitare and competition do, but as a means of extending the player''s VR experience. It''s usually very satisfying to get a game "reward" for achievements, whether it be the effect of a base getting blown up or a princess being rescued, or tangible gameplay benefits like money or items. So risk and reward are used as a means to drive the player along his VR journey in the correct path, and to keep him away from the "wrong" things that the game isn''t equipped to handle.

-Video games often become a continuous "highlight reel" containing one fantastic stunt or set-piece fight after another. This is what you might call VR poetry - it''s the most thrilling, the most emotionally charged experiences handled with the fewest "words" possible.

Certainly, there is a blurred line between a VR game and a "pure game" but those cases are rare. You might apply the metaphor in Chess that the players are commanders of opposing armies, and call it VR, but to what end? You make a useless metaphor. Chess conveys neither the horrors nor the glories of war to its players. It is a game of strategy, and the emotional investment each player has made is not towards a virtual world and its inhabitants but towards testing and advancing his skill at defeating the other. Similarly for games like Tetris.

DDR is worthwhile to inspect with these criteria, for it is a most interesting case - at first the game hooks people by being a "dance simulator," but at its highest levels of tournament play it becomes two very divergent games - one a "platform" for a complete judged dance performance, freestyling, a very different sort of skill from that which video games usually test - and the other a game in the classic mode, perfect attack, where players compete and are judged by the computer''s measurements for precision, much as if they were running the 100m or another track-and-field event.

I''ll leave the discussion of story-oriented games open, cause I''m a bit tired right now, (1:38 AM) but I think I''ve made the case pretty well that there are some distinct mediums emerging here.

I think a lot depends on the definition of realistic we use. I, personally, would consider realistic to mean simmilar to(NOT exactly the same as) the real world in a few simple ways - Graphics(appearance), World Interaction, and Agent Interaction. Graphics is simple and it is pretty easy to see that many games currently try to look realistic but they miss a lot due to low polycount and lack of various forms of lighting (using lightmaps just doesn''t cut it, but it was a good try for the technology of the time they were first used for games). World interaction essentially means physics. When you apply a force to an object, the object should react accordingly, collide properly with things, etc. Agent interaction essentially means AI. I want agents in a game to react reasonably. I can walk around in real life and find all kinds of things that react at least somewhat intelligently, like most pets, but in games the NPCs seem to generally act less intelligent than the pet rat I had. I mean, if you let the rat out, it would at least look for food, water, shelter, etc. In many games, NPCs just stand in a single spot forever, don''t react when you injure them, etc. They''re like talking rocks or something.
I, personally, think that realistic graphics, world interaction, and agent interaction will be very helpfull in creating immersian for many game types. I also think that ''plausible reality'' is a better setting than ''actual reality'' because most people consider reality boring. I wouldn''t want to play an FPS that made sniping almost literally impossible because the bullet trajectory is actually simulated. I want to play games where the result is plausible - maybe a little scope sway, and accuracy that starts low and goes up as you sit in one spot without turning for a sniper rifle. It should probably hurt a lot, but not kill things with lots of health/armor in one hit because that might be unbalenced, etc.

I think we pretty much all want to see games with a plausible reality, at least for certain genres, but it needs to be done in balance and not 100% plausibly realistic graphics with 0% WI and AI as it seems things are heading now.

I've said it before, I'll say it again....who says we're only here to develop "games"? For me, my ultimate goal is to create an interactive experience.

When the majority of people think of a definition for game, they think primarily one of two things: competition or entertainment. But really, this is an extremely gross simplification of what computer programs (notice I didn't say game ) can provide.

As I get older I see more and more that competition and entertainment are not truly worthwhile endeavors. What is competition? Here in America, we practically worship it, feeling that it brings out the best in people and that it is the fastest way to improve one's self and learn. And yet little thought is given that it also brings out the worst in people, and that the concepts of cooperation and working for the whole are gone. Oh no...that stinks just a little too much of socialism or gasp! communism! Why capitalism and democracy are founded upon the notion of forging your own path and destiny through one's hard work. This is all fine and good as long as you realize that everyone can climb to the top together...but unfortunately most people believe that for someone to be a winner, someone else has to be a loser. And this is the danger of competition. Instead of rewarding cooperation and harmony, we have reality TV shows that reward those that stab in the back, and ambition has become almost synonymous with backstabbing.

And entertainment? While having joy in one's life is a good thing, entertainment to me is a purely superficial and temporary feeling of satisfaction, much as one would get from eating a candy bar or dessert. Sure it feels good, but it's really a very empty thing when you get down to it. But when we experience something, for ill or gain, and we make it a part of our thoughts or our psyche, then we internalize and learn from it. It becomes something that we can use in all aspects of our lives rather than simply to put a smile on our face for a few hours. I don't like the word entertainment and instead prefer to use experience. Afterall, watching a sad movie can be a positive experience as can reading a good horror novel. There's an old Roman saying about breads and circuses, meaning that if you keep the people fed and entertained, they won't realize how bad in life their lot really is. Entertainment is the gaming equivalent of eating a dessert...yes we can have them from time to time, but that's not to say that a nutritious entree can't be both palatable AND good for us at the same time.


Many designers feel that linear stories are a waste of computer resources since they can offer a freeform of entertainment. This is a worthy goal to pursue, but do not forget that linear modes of interaction are also possible. Think for a moment after watching a really good movie like The Last Samurai or Lord of the Rings trilogy. For me, when I watch the protagonists and the unfolding of the story, I absorb myself into their world and try to relate to it and what I would do in their shoes. While I can not control the protagonists actions, I do interact with their experiences (with their characters being a proxy for my own sense of self).

Lastly, do not confuse realism with plausibility . Realism generally means modeling things to our own real world physics. But what's important isn't so much hard-core realism as plausibility which is the sense that given the context of the game world, everything makes sense and is therefore believeable. Tolkein's world was obviously unrealistic, but it was extremely plausible. Dune is a world that has some unrealistic (to our real world know-how) elements to it, and yet it is extremely consistent with its technology and the story. Realism for a game world should not be based necessarily off of our own real-world physics and laws, but on those of the game world. The hard part is making sure you haven't created loop-holes or other inconsistencies which makes the game world feel unbelieveable. there is one last consideration though, and that's on the looseness of the game world "reality" itself. In other words, if the genre is purposefully meant to be campy or unrealistic, then make it well known it's to be so.

Let me use giant mecha as an example. Now, there's two schools of thought on mecha. One is the giant robo school of thought in which plausibility is thrown out the window because the emphasis is not really on technology, but on character story and how these fictitious mecha amplify the character story. The 2nd school of thought is much more hard sci-fi, and the focus is more on how technology has changed human society. In these stories mecha tend to be much smaller (think Masamune Shirow) or in games like Heavy Gear in which the mecha are only 10-15' tall. They follow the same physical rules that you and I live in and these laws affect the mecha equally. In the giant-robo sub-genre however, most physical laws as well as common sense (why make a giant target that can't be as well-armored as a tank of the same size?) are thrown out the window because the mecha are there for window dressing and to be able to tell more gand stories. Another genre in which realism and plausibility are thrown out the window is in pulp fiction (the TRUE kind unlike that piece of Trentin Tarantino garbage which unfortunately has made today's generation not know what the original pulp-fiction is all about). As long as it's made known up-front that reality and plausibility are tossed out in favor of storytelling, then I have no problem with it. It's when a game world comes across as being grounded in realism (which happens often with the giant mecha story type) and yet being completely implausible that I have great issues with such game worlds.

Powerful, epic and emotional experiences can be achieved through genres which are both realistic AND plausible. In my paper and pen roleplaying experience, by far the most poignant and memorable campaigns we played were set in the Vietnam Conflict using an extremely realistic set of rules called Phoenix Command. It was a brutally realistic PPRPG set of rules in which hitting someone was hard to do, but if you did get hit, more than likely you were going to be dead or at least out of combat. And that very simple fact...the utter realism of what guns can do to human flesh made the roleplaying very real. I can remember the players feeling true fear for their characters everytime they got into combat, and feeling the gnawing dread of choice when a wounded comrade lay out in the open. I remember how they greeted every village they came to with suspicion for fear of the village hiding VC sympathizers. I have never experienced more true drama with this very realistic system than I ever had with White Wolf systems or and D20 game. Realism can enforce the human condition because it makes us look at our own frailties and weaknesses (and strengths) head on, rather than escaping more easily into game worlds which feel less real and plausible.

[edited by - Dauntless on January 3, 2004 7:56:21 PM]