Graphical fidelity is ruining video games

&quot;I just don’t understand the game industry (and game culture)’s fanatical obsession with realistic graphics. They make games worse.&quot;<p>I just don&#x27;t understand talkies. They make movies worse.<p>I just don&#x27;t understand TV. It&#x27;s worse than radio shows.<p>I just don&#x27;t understand 60fps filming. It just makes the props look fake.<p>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&#x27;t).<p>This has nothing to do with graphical fidelity. There were shit games on the Atari 2600, and there are shit games on the PS4.<p>Good entertainment immerses you in the environment, such that you don&#x27;t even think to question how things work. If it fails in that, the designers are doing something wrong.

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&#x27;t. High res games are showing you all sorts of details that can&#x27;t be simulated in any detail.<p>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.

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&#x27;t be only a graphics issue. Without ingenuity a videogame will never be fun.<p>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.

Very interesting article. A few nitpicks however:<p><i>I’m sure there were other true-3D games before it, but I challenge you to name one off the top of your head</i><p>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.<p><i>Before Quake, games couldn’t even simulate a two-story building, which ruled out most realistic architecture.</i><p>The Build engine (used e.g. in Duke Nukem 3D) was capable of faking multi-story buildings with the creative use of teleporters.

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s fun. It&#x27;s called Super Mario Bros.

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 &#x27;artsy&#x27; 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.<p>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&#x27;s why the animated movies, like The Incredibles, or Despicable Me and Zootopia do well. They use the old animation tricks that don&#x27;t actually mimic real physics, but our cultured sense of movement. I don&#x27;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!

The problem is not the fanatical obsession with realistic graphics. It&#x27;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.

Would still recommend Halo. It has diversity in enemy types in a similar way to DOOM.<p>Graphical fidelity prevents experimentation by making things too expensive to try. That&#x27;s why we have indie games! Go play some! It&#x27;s like Sundance, there is a bunch of crap and a bunch of incredible creativity.

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&#x27;ve played in years.

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.

It seems like every time there&#x27;s a new game I need a new goddamned computer. And then the game is like 90 bucks!? Where&#x27;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&#x27;s ludicrous. I guess it&#x27;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&#x27;s like a vomitorium of the senses, and a lot of it is not particularly inspiring.