The computing power of game consoles developing as it is, graphics are seemingly always at the front of a given “console wars” debate. If you’ve visited an Internet forum or other such network discussing the topic, the question of the sheer number of polygons a console is capable of rendering on the screen will soon present itself as among the most important. The amount of detail in character models and textures escalates every console generation, and any platform lagging behind what’s considered the standard, as the Wii did a few years ago, is the subject of some mockery for it.
Defenders of the Wii in the aforementioned debates were quick to point out that graphics aren’t as important to the experience as gameplay. The viewpoint became so parroted that the PS3/360 crowd (I lump them together at my own risk, but not incorrectly in current context) would make “graphics > gameplay” as much a source of mockery as the Wii’s graphical capability simply because the point grew tired.
I don’t think it was exactly wrong, per se, but the better consoles get at graphics, the more I realize that it lacks nuance as a mantra. Graphics are absolutely important to the development process. Of course, when people say “graphics” in the context of video games, they’re usually simply talking about “the visual component of games.” This in and of itself requires further distinction, because what most people lump in under “graphics,” which is actually simply the technical aspect of displaying a game’s visuals, is better called “aesthetics.” Extra Credits has a very good argument on that subject.
But I would go a step further and say that while a unified aesthetic identity is important to delivering a polished product, that still doesn’t do any good when the identities all start to coalesce and become the same one every freakin’ time. In a word: photo-realism. Even many of the cartoonier games in the last couple generations have seen fit to try and portray “real” people or the “real” world. When your only focus in visual design is how detailed you can make something look, reality will inevitably become the prime benchmark. What the identity is in the first place is at least as important as whether it’s unified.
When you have harsher technical constraints in your aesthetic process, it becomes a question, for example, not of how we should stylize these human beings, but whether we should portray human beings at all. Maybe the protagonist should be a small cartoon animal? A constrained project will force you to question its every property at a fundamental level, and sometimes being shut out of the more comfortable ideas is healthy for devising truly memorable ones. MacGyver was entertaining because of his imagination, because he didn’t have the resources to brute-force anything. And so in a way, graphics profoundly influence the formulation of aesthetics even before they serve them in delivery.
In one design course in college I was tasked with duplicating an impressionist painting using only two colors of paint, plus black and white for values. Needless to say there were “more” colors in the painting proper than what I was allowed to work with, so I had to carefully test the waters and see how combining them would work every which way. It was one of the single most frustrating creative projects I’ve ever undertaken, but I’ll eat my hat if it didn’t humble me and teach me a lot more about the creative process than a less constrained assignment.
I know this sounds like a “you kids these days and yer new-fangled toys” argument, but back in my day game developers could only put sixteen colors on screen at one time. And they had to like it! Visual designers had to stylize everything to make it stand out, and they had to pick and choose what to exaggerate on a canvas without unlimited space that could present everything with equal detail (I love pixel art because it boils an image down to only its most essential parts). And in the case of 2D sprites, they had to employ whatever optical illusions they could to literally provide more character depth.
This all caused a huge variety in video game visuals. I think that’s at least partly because the impetus was to make it look lifelike, a destination that can be reached by many paths. But too many developers now equate “lifelike” with “like life.” And generally the only way to make something match up with reality is to throw out the stuff that doesn’t.
This is important to keep in mind about video games: the first thing they engage is often our sense of sight. I would wager that the games you’re going to remember most and consider the most timeless aren’t the ones that founded genres, or the ones that were the “best” as games overall, and certainly not the ones that had the most accurate portrayal of human anatomy and real-world physics. They’re going to be the ones that showed you something alien and bizarre, something unnaturally colorful or strangely animate. This can and should be done in a sense through every medium, but the visuals are so often at the front line of this whole battle.
Mirrors are great, but they can’t show you anything other than what already is.
Gems and Relics 