2K: New Genres Impossible Without Photorealism

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

If a cartoon can convey emotion without photo realism, give me one reason a video game can't.

QFT

Hartmann didn't really think this through.

He also sounds like someone who's never read a book in his life.

Emotional impact in any visual medium comes down to atmosphere, characterization and dialogue. One of the best love stories I've seen was between Wall-E and Eve and they're just two robots in an animated film. Get your head out of your ass Hartmann.

 

[elvor0]

You don't need good visuals to covey emotion or to get players to identify with your characters. How many of you had tears welling up when Aeris died in FF7? You felt the loss that Cloud was experiencing because you identified with him.

Oh god, I balled my eyes out like a little kid (well I was I suppose) at that, everyone did, it was just so shocking, being only 8 or 9 at the time, it was my first big RPG, I'd never experienced /anything/ like that before. Hell FF6, Celes attempted suicide made me cry and the graphics are quite obviously shite these days. Even doing the scene agin with Nanaki realising his father actually stood his ground fighting the Gi Invaders, his whole life hating his fater, replaced with immense respect, his transition into an adult brought a tear to me eye, and that was only last week.

If you can build good characters, and a strong narrative, you don't need flashy graphics. Saying that, I find it really hard to ever feel that sad for characters in films, 2 hours is never long enough for me, after growing up on a diet of tens of hours of RPGs. It's such a unique medium for conveying attachment and emotion, far more powerful than films. But these days, none of the big studios ever seem to make use of it, though I've heard good things about Spec Ops the line, and I look forward to checking it out which I can afford it.

Even RPGs these days seem to have boring characters in them, especially the ones with blank slate characters. I can just never get attached, as my character never really interacts with anyone, he's just sort of /there/ to move the story along. At the moment, I think Bioware has the best way of representing a self built character with the Mass Effect series. You can choose how you want to act and stuff, but Shepard still has his own personality and thus actually exists in the world, you see him interacting with people and doing things, so you actually feel his presence. Until we have holodecks, or well as the technology to make a truley open D&D style world open world RPG, with AI that can actually comprehend, as opposed to a few preset dialogue options, were still really limited to what we can do.

I take it that To The Moon [http://freebirdgames.com/to_the_moon/] is the living proof this guy is wrong.

...although not as wrong as some comments here what you to think. While what you say might be the most important, body language can add one more enhancing layer of connecting with characters in games.

I just wanted to say cheers for pointing that game out, looks pretty interesting, I shall get the demo forth with. And yes, fucking BODY LANGUAGE. The last game I saw that had decent body language was the Legacy of Kain series, in fact I'd go so far as to say that game has had /the/ best body language and facial expressions of all time, and nobody in that game is even human!

I think this guy both has a point and doesnt. Currently games are extremely bad at setting up things like facial expressions which are key. If they cant properly show emotions its really hard to create a serious game like he is talking about. A game kind of loses all emotional impact when you can see the protagonists blank emtionless face.

You don't need good visuals to covey emotion or to get players to identify with your characters. How many of you had tears welling up when Aeris died in FF7? You felt the loss that Cloud was experiencing because you identified with him.

You mean the chick who got shanked after joining me a whole two hours ago? Yea I didnt really give a shit about her when she died since she was barely even a character. She was never focused on, her character was never expanded, she was just a throw in who had no reason to be there and whos only purpose was to get shanked.

Yeah, you really wern't paying attention to...anything, if you're gonna say that. Never mind the fact that the first disc of FF7 is about 12 hours long if you don't just mash X during the conversations and don't do /any/ exploring. I mean, she joins you at about the 2 hour mark, so that's about 8 ish hours she's with you (if we take into account the sections where she gets kidnapped and leaves you to go pray)

 

[Navarone9942]

Jimquisition made a great point when he talked about horror games scaring the crap outta players and its that they look like crap, not shiny and polished to a mirror shine and all that, that enables them to scare the bejesus out of players. Like others have said its not about how many polys are used in the facial animation or how epic the realtime dynamic lighting is, its about what you do with the tech available. Devs being too lazy to create a story that holds the player and engages on more levels that "shoot the bullets till the peoples fall over" and being content to stamp out a new COD or Fifa every year only leads to stagnation. Fahrenheit looks like crap by todays standards and it went a bit bonkers at the end but it was an excellent story with characters that were more than tolerable and even became very likable, mainly because your shown their fears, aspirations and motivations that very soon after playing a couple hours or so, become the players own reasons for continuing.

The main problem I think is actually the fact that so many devs these days are too interested in graphics rather than gameplay, look at FF13, I loved 7, 8 and 10 but 13 just felt insulting. Square Enix spent way too much time making sure they had amazing gfx and forgot that no-one really wants to run down corridors for 20 hours to get to the good bit. I traded that game just after Snow left the party and have never looked back but I still play games like MGS2&3, the Oddworld series and even Max Payne 1&2, back when Max looked like a paper cut out of a man trying to pass a kidney stone with dignity.

 

[samahain]

Hartmann claims that the problem revolves around empathy, or lack thereof. Speaking in an interview with GamesIndustry, he said that videogames are still inferior to movies in terms of conveying emotions, particularly the ones that drive characters and let the audience connect with the people on the screen.

Has this mug played Journey?

Or The Longest Journey?

Or Dreamfall?

Or The Binding Of Isaac?

Or Myst III? (No, it wasn't photorealistic. Some parts of it look downright silly today.)

Etc, etc. I don't believe this guy at all.

Thanks for mentioning "Binding of Isaac", I was going to but I only saw other people play. *Shudder*. Hard Stuff.

 

[Andy Waugh]

Celes from FF6, Jak from the Jak and Daxter series (specifically 3), almost ALL of Persona 3 FES, almost ALL of Metal Gear Solid 4, Albedo from Xenosaga, and the list goes on! We don't need photo-realism in games to provoke emotion! It's all about how relate-able the characters are!

 

[Doclector]

Sounds like bullshit to me. An excuse to disregard innovative gameplay for shiny pretty.

Pretty much. It's BS that we can't innovate outside of shooters. We've had emotional experiences, we've had non action games that worked on consoles, this is more or less an excuse. Sure, when we reach photorealism, we'll have more, and easier, possibilites, but that doesn't mean that we should sit around making samey action games until that happens.

However, photorealism is an interesting subject. How do we know gamers will cope? Right now, there's only so far we can go without reaching the uncanny valley. There's only so close to human we can make something before it becomes disturbingly unhuman. When we reach the other side of that valley, when we can create close simulations of people, close enough to be photorealistic, how can we be sure that our minds are ready for that? Imagine a WW2 game with photorealism. We'll form friendships with characters, who, to look at them, are real. Then they will be shot to death, gone in instants or dying in our arms, how can we be sure that it won't be possible at that point to create an experience so realistic, it traumatises those who play it?

 

[DaWaffledude]

Animated movies. Your argument is invalid.

 

[Maxtro]

Anime is hardly photo-realistic and it has no problem drawing out emotions. Hell, one of the most recent anime that got me emtoional was Ao no Exorcist (Blue Exorcist) at the part when the little cat demon thing was crying for its old master.

Needing photo-realism is just a cop out.

 

[Arakasi]

I once felt so guilty for killing a character during a certain playthrough on Geneforge that I had to stop playing.
This is Geneforge's grahpics:

So, no 2k, modern gaming just has terrible writers (for the most part).

 

[Right Hook]

Someday technology will be at a level that allows me to butt-ram a cowboy in a tent through a quick-time event...Someday my life will be perfect.

 

[VoidWanderer]

This makes as much sense as Irrational thinking Metacritic is valid for gaming experience criteria.

 

[WaterDancer]

There is so many things wrong with that. Clearly, he has never seen Toy Story, Up, or any Studio Ghibi films. Graphic styles don't make genre's nor do they make emotions. It is how everything is presented from the art style, animations, sound, and writing that creates the feeling. Heck you don't even need any visuals or sound to evoke emotions. Books have done that for ages including paints. What he says is completely ignorant. The real reason why a lot of games don't evoke emotions is because of how they were made. Games like Call of Duty don't evoke emotions on the same levels as games like Katawa Shojo, Journey, Metal Gear Solid, and others games do. CoD's focus is the shooting and multi-player. They might create scenes to evoke some emotion but those feelings happen only at certain periods rather then a entire game. Some games were never meant to evoke emotions and that is okay too. It all depends on how they are made which clearly this guy fails to understand.

 

[Jolly Co-operator]

I, Shax, hailing from the kingdom of Escapistland, doth proclaim bullshit.

Battlefield 3 went for realistic graphics, and the protagonists might as well have been bricks with faces drawn on them. Disgaea 4, on the other hand, is made in a vibrant anime style, and the cast is very colorful and entertaining. I don't know where he got the idea that photo-realism is needed to convey emotions or invoke feeling, but he's definitely wrong.

And as for graphical fidelity leading to innovation; Well, I hate to come back to Battlefield 3, because I really do enjoy the game, but despite it's impressive graphics, it really didn't break the mould and knock the gaming world off it's heels.

 

[Rooster Cogburn]

Hey, Christoph Hartmann!

 

[MrCalavera_v1legacy]

Looks like Mr. Hartmann is really dissapointed that games are not live action movies(Who'd have thought?). Wrong career choice, perhaps?

 

[Smokescreen]

Sounds like bullshit to me. An excuse to disregard innovative gameplay for shiny pretty.

Pretty much. It's BS that we can't innovate outside of shooters. We've had emotional experiences, we've had non action games that worked on consoles, this is more or less an excuse. Sure, when we reach photorealism, we'll have more, and easier, possibilites, but that doesn't mean that we should sit around making samey action games until that happens.

However, photorealism is an interesting subject. How do we know gamers will cope? Right now, there's only so far we can go without reaching the uncanny valley. There's only so close to human we can make something before it becomes disturbingly unhuman. When we reach the other side of that valley, when we can create close simulations of people, close enough to be photorealistic, how can we be sure that our minds are ready for that? Imagine a WW2 game with photorealism. We'll form friendships with characters, who, to look at them, are real. Then they will be shot to death, gone in instants or dying in our arms, how can we be sure that it won't be possible at that point to create an experience so realistic, it traumatises those who play it?[/quote]

That's an interesting question. I don't know that it's all too different than how we connect to characters in books or movies but it is definitely an unusual path that will have to be charted. It starts to ask bigger questions too: What happens when you have no-shit AIs, characters that don't have to follow your script anymore?

But that's well beyond what's being talked about here and I don't have any easy answers anyway.

But I think that we already do connect to the characters in games and we do it through gameplay; graphical fidelity aside.

 

[vasudean]

Yeah, claiming that photorealism is required in order to make a connection is flat-out dumb. To me, this person representing his company seems to be talking out of his ass. Even in movies there are ones that in which characters aren't what you call human, but we get an emotional connection to them rather quickly. Case in point: WALL-E. The main character is a trash-compacting little robot with no obvious facial expressions, no human-like body, not even elbows, just a pair of eyes that resemble binoculars, a few hinges, and a cube-like body. Yet we are immediately touched by how hard he's trying to find love. We can't help but feel heartbroken when he gets broken towards the end of the movie and when he doesn't initially remember the one he tried to romance throughout the movie after he is fixed.

I know I'm cutting a few corners with it, but the gist is that WALL-E, a robot with not obvious facial expressions, generated an emotional connection with his audience and he doesn't even have a face. The reason why we developed an emotional connection to him is because he was a well-designed character that was immediately endearing.