Learning to Love the Dawn of Photorealism

In Features by Chris Durston

In August, GameInformer ran an article titled ‘Take-Two CEO Says Next-Generation Consoles Could Achieve Photorealistic Graphics‘. A slightly clickbaity headline, perhaps, and indeed the quotation given in the article doesn’t say that except by fairly distant implication, but it made me think. It doesn’t seem all that unreasonable, given the rapid advancements in the technology used to create and render gaming visuals (cf. Moore’s Law), that we are approaching a not-too-distant point wherein we might start expecting to see in-game visuals that are difficult, or even near-impossible, to distinguish from live-action footage and recordings of the real world.

What this made me wonder was whether that’s a good thing. The distinction between ‘graphics’ and ‘aesthetics’ isn’t a new one in gaming discussion – heck, Extra Credits put out a video on the topic back in 2012 – but I think that the advent of near-photorealism is going to make it increasingly important. By way of a quick recap, graphics includes the technical aspects of the software and hardware that produce the image: pixel and polygon counts, draw distance, texture quality, lighting, all that sort of thing; aesthetics covers the conscious decisions made in the artistic process of designing the produced image. Graphical considerations are, I think, properly considered as part of the overall aesthetic realisation, or perhaps as a channel through which the representation is made possible. I suppose graphics are sort of like the quality of the canvas, the texture of the brush, the range of colour in the paint: without canvas, brush, and paint, there can be no painting, but they’re only elements used to create rather than the actual artistic output.

I bet the lady who did the one on the right had decent brushes, but… it didn’t help.

These days, it’s pretty easy to create. Back in Ye Olden Days of Yore, you could have had the potential to be the greatest musician, or artist, or writer the world had ever seen, and it wouldn’t mean a muffin if you didn’t luck out on getting the right socioeconomic situation to go through the right education, secure yourself a patron or be able to afford to support yourself, and then find willing buyers. If you weren’t making a living from your creation, you couldn’t afford to create. Simple as. In Modern Times of… Yore, however, the technology to make things is more available to those of us living in places that have the Internet and things like that. It’s also advanced to the point that technology actually does much of the work for us; if you’ve got money to throw at it, you can pick up a professional digital audio workstation (DAW), a bunch of plugins, and a ton of samples and stuff, and just kind of put something together, and it may well end up sounding reasonably similar, at a distance, to something that might have been made by a professional.

Similarly, it’s becoming increasingly possible for anyone with access to the right sort of visual creative technology to create something that looks ‘realistic’. The tools are there to make art with phenomenal levels of detail, with beautiful lighting and shading, with… I dunno, other Good Visual Stuff. In the hands of someone who knows the fundamentals and knows how to use those tools to their best effect, truly astonishingly lovely things can be crafted. In the hands of someone who maybe doesn’t know as much about those things, perhaps something can be turned out that looks ‘realistic’, or ‘good’ on a technical level – in the graphical sense, as we’ve just outlined, but not in the aesthetic.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It’s not. More power to anyone who wants to make their own art, music, games, whatever, and who is now more able to do that than they might otherwise have been because of technology making it easier. That said, I think the accessibility of highly powerful engines enabling the creation of very graphically impressive work poses a risk where graphics and aesthetics continue to be conflated, and where the distinction between them isn’t sufficiently appreciated.

We’ve been through a couple of reactionary phases to this already, actually. Remember the absolute slew of brown-grey games around the heyday of the seventh console generation? We had a ton of works coming out which were doing their best to look ‘gritty’ or ‘real’, but which as a result were both visually unappealing and, at worst, inaccessible where a lack of cohesive visual direction made it difficult to even tell what was going on. It’s a far remove from, say, something like Bastion, the release of which in 2011 was right in the middle of the Xbox 360’s lifespan and the uptick of sludgy visuals; Bastion embraces vivid colours and sharp, stylish shapes to make sure that it’s always clear what’s happening on the screen. Given that visuals are a functional part of a game, the aim of which is presumably to be played, the role they play in illuminating or obfuscating the player’s ability to interact with things often seems vastly understated.

There is a peculiar association in the popular conception of what constitutes quality in gaming between technological advances and qualitative improvements, by which I mean I think there’s something of a tendency to assume that ramping up numbers like polygon count, size of game world, and ultimately just sheer quantity of bytes will correlate to an improvement in the quality of the game itself. I don’t dispute that, to a point, improvements in the technology and hardware we use to make and experience games have been necessary; if we’d never moved beyond the oscilloscopes used to create Tennis for Two, it’d be exceptionally hard to imagine how someone might tell the kind of story pulled off in Shadow of the Colossus, Chrono Trigger, or God of War. (Other games with good stories are available, but these three happen to spring to mind right now. Fight me.) Still, I can’t help but think that there’s a point of diminishing returns on improving hardware, and graphics in particular – a point at which people will continue to think that upping the tech will just naturally result in upping the game’s overall excellence, but in fact the difference it makes is minimal (despite, presumably, costing an absolute fortune) – and we’re probably long past that point already, to be honest.

I mean, how much impact does a bit of extra GRAFFICSNESS really have on how much you actually enjoy a game? If the game’s well-made and doing its job right, that should be pretty low in the list of things that affect your experience.

Games are in a really weird position, as a new artistic medium: they’ve had the opportunity to learn from the cultural development of the forms that have come before. Like, games didn’t go through the phases that other media did during significant historical shifts (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment); because ways of thinking about art in other media were already established by the time gaming comes around as a new way of presenting the same sort of thing that’s been discussed for years, and around which a vocabulary and a mode of criticism has had the chance to develop and become established and part of cultural consciousness, games were able to skip over a bunch of other milestones. The form moved pretty quickly from simple representation to more complex works, then (to my mind) skipped a bunch of the development that might have come next were they the first way people had told stories; we get games heading straight to modernism and postmodernism, deconstructing their own tropes and forms without having the history that other art forms have usually had before arriving at that point.

(The fact that, thanks to the Internet and accessible technology, more people have been able to make, and join genuine critical discussion about, games than was possible at the same stage of other forms’ history probably also contributed to the rapid movement.)

This has been mostly on the indie scene, though; few triple-A developers have delved into surreal, abstract, metatextually-aware work, although that’s not to say that it doesn’t happen. The mainstream direction of games development still seems to be shooting for realism in every sense (Red Dead Redemption II being a good recent example of this), but perhaps less as a means to increased artistic expression than a perceived end in itself. It’s interesting. We haven’t reached that lofty height yet, but it’s obvious from the fact that discussions about ‘achieving photorealism’ are still prominent that gaming is still shooting for this as a goal; I think we’ll see games reaching something like a pinnacle of realism, in terms of detail in every aspect, before too long. I think that’ll be hailed as some sort of culmination of the medium, an ultimate artistic achievement… and then I think developers and audiences will stop treating realism as the ultimate and most best metric of goodness and start focusing on other goals, other prospective artistic achievements. I’m really looking forward to that, actually.

Still, we’re left with the question of how to make the best use of the tools we have available for presenting games’ visuals. Given that we are able to create all sorts of unbelievable images with greater ease than ever, we’re limited only by our imaginations, so the onus is on designers to make good use of that imagination and skill, to be creative and to remember the fundamentals rather than relying simply on lots of pixels or whatever. We’ve got the ability to turn out ‘real’-looking things, and that isn’t to be feared or avoided, but it’s more important than ever to make sure that we create things which, whether ‘realistic’ or not, are distinctive, appealing, and enhance the player’s experience of the game.

Thomas Was Alone is a peculiarly affecting game with visuals which are, while basic, sometimes genuinely beautiful because of their context in the story. For those unfamiliar with the game: all its characters are quadrilaterals. Somehow, this works.

I’m not saying that nobody is in fact doing this at the moment. There are a bunch of games with fantastic visual design, and I’m no designer myself. I don’t want to hold the design profession to account and accuse every member of the industry of lazily relying on the tech rather than the skills and creativity that they can bring to make a game special, because that’s simply not the case. That said, I still think it’s worth considering how we might feel positive about what seems the inevitably impending dawn of realism, and what steps we can take to ensure that it doesn’t inadvertently make us complacent in how we think about what makes a game good, particularly from a visual angle. Ultimately, it’s about recognising the graphics-aesthetics distinction in a proactive way that makes the most of the technology available while also maximising the level of thought and appreciation that goes into developing the visual language of each work.

One really basic tool available to games is a varied colour palette. The real world may tend to paint with subdued hues, but there’s no reason a game world needs to: in the shift towards realism, we’ve moved away from the bold, distinctive colours that games had to use back in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras if they wanted to create recognisable images.

Look at this! Look how pretty it is!

This is also one of the most basic things that can be adjusted to make games more accessible to people who might have trouble distinguishing close colours – or even those who grew up on bright, contrasting colours in their games and for whom working out how to interact with a murkier world presents a problem. Or just a less enjoyable experience.

The great thing about colour, too, is that it can be used to stylise even a visual approach which is aiming for a fairly high degree of fidelity in other aspects. Supergiant’s games (Pyre, Transistor, and the aforementioned Bastion) are examples of games which employ a strong colour palette with heavily stylistic shapes and figures, but even one which employs ‘realistic’ design in the way it presents most of its visual elements can enhance the user’s experience with a splash of colour. This might be diegetic (‘in-world’), or non-diegetic (part of the presentation to the user but not part of the game’s internal fiction); something like Mirror’s Edge‘s ‘Runner Vision’, a red representation of protagonist and parkour expert Faith’s interpretation of her environment, occupies a space somewhere between the two, and works beautifully to jazz up a game that could have gone for industrial dullness in its colour presentation.

I haven’t played Pyre, so I’ve no idea what’s going on here, but it’s nice to look at.

Something else to consider is the way shapes are formed. I got to thinking about this lately after watching New Frame Plus’s video on Spider-Man 2018‘s ‘zip-to-point’ animation: a ‘realistically’ rendered movement of a ‘realistic’ human body, but one which learns from the tenets of classic animation to convey a sense of movement more effectively than might otherwise have been the case. For non-moving shapes, think back to the Extra Credits video I mentioned near the top of this piece: each member of the Team Fortress 2 teams has an incredibly distinctive silhouette, which not only suggests traits about the characters purely from the choices the designers have made in how angled or rounded to make them, whether to use triangles or squares or circles in composing them, and so on, but also allows easy recognition (and therefore more seamless play and interaction) even at a distance.

The final – and probably most basic – point of wide, beautiful possibility is encompassed simply by the term ‘style’, although this doesn’t quite capture the point. It’s to do with the type of representation the game aims for: do you opt to present a 2D world with cel-shaded graphics, a 3D space filled with bright blue stick figures, a series of still images featuring photorealistically rendered human faces, or something else entirely? The possibilities are genuinely endless here; I think we tend to imagine that certain genres are attached to certain aesthetic choices (lately, the 2D platformer is often retro-faux-8-bit with bold colours and stylish particle effects, for example), but really there’s no limit on what kind of design a game could employ. Maybe one day someone will make a side-scrolling beat ’em up which just happens to have incredibly realistic 3D character models, or a 16-bit flight simulator. Maybe someone’s already done both of those. I’unno. Wouldn’t be surprised.

I’m still not sure whether I’m gonna get Death Stranding, but I have a feeling its high-fidelity visual approach and dark colours will in fact be the most appropriate presentation for its narrative and themes. Unless it’s secretly about befriending happy bunnies, which knowing Kojima doesn’t seem all that implausible.

Bit of a tangent, but you know what else I think is a lost art? Instruction booklets.

(Albeit that the decrease in the amount of paper being used to print them is probably a good thing.)

I used to love getting home with a new game and just reading through the manual for, like, an hour or two before ever booting it up. Weirdly, the obvious extratextual nature of the thing (it’s so clearly outside the game’s internal world, with its comments on things like controller layout and that sort of thing) never actually made me feel any less excited or immersed. If anything, a good manual got me more immersed in the experience of a game, perhaps not even despite but because of its lack of commitment to verisimilitude, and I think visuals are in a similar space. Sure, a heavily stylised visual presentation might mean that I can glance at a game and go ‘well, that’s obviously not real‘, but why should it be? If something less ‘real’ is more conducive to me becoming fully invested in the experience, then I’m all for that.

Look: this isn’t a new point by any stretch of the imagination. This is stuff people have been talking about for ages, and heaven knows I don’t have anything new to add, really. I’m no visual expert; I don’t get art, as I was painfully reminded when I recently popped into the Tate Museum and found myself just completely nonplussed by Things On Display What Were Apparently Art. That said, I do think it’s increasingly important as we reach a point where it’s not only possible but easy to make something that looks ‘real’ that we remember the importance of aesthetic design, not just graphical specifications. Most importantly, every element of a game needs to cohere with the story it’s trying to tell and the things it’s trying to say; if that happens to mean that your themes are best represented in a dull-coloured, dull-shaped world with a heck-ton of polygons, then more power to ya.

But if you’re doing something that’s best expressed in a way that makes me forget the real world and get totally lost in the experience you’re presenting to me, then I’m probably gonna enjoy that more.

Chris Durston on Twitter
Chris Durston
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Aspiring non-procrastinator; amateur writer of odd fiction and Thoughts About Games.