Jimquisition: Photorealistic Sociopathy

lacktheknack

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Jan 19, 2009
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Some of my biggest gaming tragedies (often bringing tears to my eyes as I shout the names of the fallen and weep for their deaths) have been in Dwarf Fortress.

I'll let that sink in.
 

RaziTheRed

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Jun 15, 2010
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I realize the point of the video and I agree with Jim on most if not all the points he made. However, the thing that got my attention most in this video was the Minecraft reference because the footage he used was from some of my favorite filmmakers!
 

likalaruku

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Nov 29, 2008
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I like a more cartoony style. Personally the more realistic they try to make games look, the further they slip into the uncanny valley. They look as unsettling as rotoscope animation. Besides, isn't the point of games to escape reality & not be reminded of it?

Yeah, if they want to tug at our heartstrings, maybe they should make character development a top priority & hire a professional writer to work on the story long before they even start working on the game.

Hmm...I think I'll replay Telltale's Back to the Future tomorrow...
 

5-0

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Apr 6, 2010
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To be honest, I thought this point was so stupid it didn't need to be addressed. The person who said it clearly hadn't thought things through. You don't create emotion with graphics. You create it with great writing and storytelling. The ending to RDR's emotional punch wouldn't be diminished just by having more cartoon-like, stylised graphics. Great episode as usual.
 

jmarquiso

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Nov 21, 2009
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-|- said:
Anyone who would tell a developer they are full of shit for wanting photo-realistic graphics is somebody that doesn't think games are art.
Art managed to not be photorealistic for a very long time, and when photography came around, other art worked on separating from it as much as possible.
 

Doclector

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Aug 22, 2009
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Oh, I see what you did thar with the end bit and the religion and the thanking god. Clever.

I agree fully. How 2K even came out with that is beyond me, because some of their games have been the poster child for art design and writing over pure FOTOREALISEM! Look at bioshock, its graphics don't look anywhere near as impressive as they used to, but it's still great. The story's still awesome, and in fact, it still looks great. Sure, in terms of graphical quality, we've moved onto shinier things, but the design is fantastic.

That's another thing people keep forgetting. I can look out my window for a photorealistic city street. I cannot, however, look at a stunning art deco underwater dystopia, with both signs of its former glory, and its decay. I cannot look at towering mountains with ancient burial sites built into the sides of them, and a dragon circling the one of the peaks. I cannot switch my vision to colourful cel-shading, nor to the rough, cartoony, but appealing look of kingdoms of amular/WoW.

Like in film, I consider mimicking real life in a videogame to be a massive waste. Why settle for it when working with a medium that allows you to show more? Make something unique.

And then there's the fact that, seeming as we've never had a photorealistic videogame before, we don't know what our minds will do with such an optical illusion, and the societal issues of what happens when any image can be made realistically. Say, like generating a popular politician's image into a picture of a brothel, or replacing one person seen at a crime with another? But that's a whole other side of the issue to explore.
 

FoolKiller

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Feb 8, 2008
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Hmm... I'm hoping not too many care what Crytek says. These are the idiots that create a game (Crysis) that requires such an advanced piece of hardware that it was its own running joke for a while.

And I was emotionally attached to many characters from the SNES era of games. The only one I'll disagree with is Heavy Rain... I got hooked into that one, but not because of graphics, just because I thought the writing and the scenario was provoking. They made players have to make choices that had significant consequences that you couldn't predict
 

irishmanwithagun

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Mar 6, 2012
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What disturbs me is that as soon as devs catch wind that customers want to be able to emotionally invest in their games they immediately make up this bullshit excuse that they can't make emotionally rich games because the graphics technology hasn't developed far enough. Ignoring for a moment decades of emotionally rich games that supported themselves without photorealistic graphics or the graphical plateau that this generation's consoles have reached, this is like someone saying that they can only write an emotionally rich novel once the latest typewriter has come out, and then using the same excuse once they got said typewriter. Now that's just insane, you can't blame your own shortcomings as an artist on the current level of graphical technology when ten years ago Goichi Suda and Team Silent managed to (probably) cause suicide pacts by mining the technology they had for what it was worth.
If Neon Genesis Evangelion can send me into depression with a few crappy cells, if Silent Hill 2 can make me shit myself with PS2 graphics, if Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy can make me laugh with just INK ON A PAGE then (THEN send me into depression) I'm pretty sure game devs can make do with the graphics that they have and stop being such self-entitled little pussies.
 

Ritchian

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Jul 29, 2009
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The idea that we need more realistic graphics in order to make 'better' or more emotionally moving games has been, to me, the most distressing attitude in game making for more than a decade. Don't get me wrong. Graphics are important, and innovating in visuals is a necessary thing for the games industry. But it takes far more than pretty graphics to make a good game. Visuals are just one ingredient in the formula.

If done right, any game can emotionally move a person. Photo realism or top-notch graphics are a tool, not an end. Older games may not have had more than a character sprite and occasional character portrait to work with in graphically depicting their characters, but there are many games from my youth that have moved me far more than some newer games. That's not to say that there aren't newer games with fancy, top-of-the-line graphics that have similar emotional resonance. But they have that effect not because of their graphics, but because of how they presented their subject matter as a whole. Writing, music, gameplay and everything else that goes into making a video game are as important as graphics will ever be.

Many times, great art can arise where an artist has to struggle against their limitations. The same can be said for video games. The tools available do not dictate the quality of the game or what kind of emotional resonance it will have on it's player. It's how the developer uses the tools that does so. I hope more game developers figure this out so that the industry can quit focusing all of it's attention on the old graphical arms race and put some of those resources into making better overall games.
 

ShadowKatt

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Alterego-X said:
I'll just leave this there from the previous topic on that issue:

Alterego-X said:
I think the quote was misconstructed as "we" won't care about games until they are photorealistic, while it was intended to talk about expanding the market. "We" might love abstract games until our face is blue, but that won't magically make them more accepted.

All the counterexamples about non-photorealistic emotional things are either tiny niches, or seen as childish.

There is western animation for children, and anime for otaku.
Garfield Comic strips in newspapers, and Superhero comics for nerds.
Cartoonish party games for casuals, and arthouse indie games for hardcore gamers.

Paintings themselves are made by and for conisseours, while the rest of us couldn't tell a Van Gogh from a Hitler. As soon as we invented photography, ordinary people started to use that everywhere from portraits to landscapes, simply becase photorealistic is seen as superior.

So yes, I could actually agree with him, that if gaming wants to be recognized in the mainstream as an art form, it needs photorealistic dramas, romances, epics, and mysteries, not even more 2D platformers that look like expressionist paintings.
I'm not saying that pursuing photrealism is a GOOD THING for gaming as an art form, or that any of these things that the people above me are wrong.

Yes, minimalistic games can be expressive, animated films can make us cry, it's all about technique, etc.

But does the public see it that way, too? The people who sneer at the omnopoteia of comic books, and at the "bug-eyed" anime characters? Because that's what a studio cares about. 2K couldn't give a shit about the artistic merit of Braid and Bioshock, if CoD sells more, and that is what will make more people to be more invested in gaming.

And for the normal people that we call "casual gamers", this might very well be the way to connect them to gaming beyond flashy childish party games.

Given how they prefer live action entertainment over books, animation, and every other medium, it very well might be true that more identifiable facial expressions are a part of the Lowest Common Denominator for them.
Edit: Ignore that. Apparently the quote button is at the TOP of the post now >.> what the hell.
 

RobfromtheGulag

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May 18, 2010
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The message I took away was from this Jimquisition was that good graphics are not required to convey emotions. I don't know if anyone is going to disagree with this, even the 2K guy who made the statement.

I don't think good graphics detract from conveying emotions either though, by the same token. Games that come to mind are Silent Hill, Dragon Age, or Oblivion. They're going for the realistic look in these games, but they couldn't quite get it, and the result is the dead-eye syndrome that affects games to this day. Assuming they could perfectly tailor a face to a human's when a loved one dies or they fall in love or something, that'd be nice. Graphics are certainly not a crutch or a stand-in for story, but done well I think a game with realistic graphics would trump base graphics trying to convey the same scenario.
 

Captain Trek

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Jul 21, 2011
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Could someone tell me what the name of game we briefly see from 2:20 to 2:25 is? I can't quite make out what Jim says...
 

-|-

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Aug 28, 2010
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Denamic said:
-|- said:
What I mean is that it's not up to us to decide what artistic style they should use to convey the meaning they intend to convey. If they say they need photorealism then they need it.
There's a big difference between "I want photorealism to convey emotions" and "You need photorealism to convey emotions."
My view is that the gaming industry needs photo-realism as a stylistic choice open to developers. Also, a corollary of this is that this ability also implies that any graphical effect imaginable can be achieved.

"Recreating a Mission Impossible experience in gaming is easy; recreating emotions in Brokeback Mountain is going to be tough, or at least very sensitive in this country... it will be very hard to create very deep emotions like sadness or love, things that drive the movies," he said. "Until games are photorealistic, it'll be very hard to open up to new genres. We can really only focus on action and shooter titles; those are suitable for consoles now."

He continued, "To dramatically change the industry to where we can insert a whole range of emotions, I feel it will only happen when we reach the point that games are photorealistic; then we will have reached an endpoint and that might be the final console."
Is what the 2K actually guy said and I mostly agree with him apart from the final console bit.

I know that the escapist community is a bit reactionary and prefers to go from the headline rather than read the story, but jim is no better here. His faux reactionary "look at me" take on things has sunk to a new low. Yet, another rant about an opinion that doesn't actually exist that we can all agree with? Amazing Jim, truly amazing - really pushing the envelope this time.
 

Epona

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Jun 24, 2011
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I agree, as I am playing Secret of Mana and can't wait to play Secret of Evermore again right after I beat SOM again, I can't help but to wonder why I don't have this attachment to any current gen games.

I came to a half ass, probably wrong conclusion but here it is. This generation has been great and terrible, we have seen great games and terrible business practices. So if the games are so great (and they are), why do none of them make me smile like some SNES games, mostly from Squaresoft? I think it's that current gen games are great but only the first time through. In 20 years I doubt I will be playing any current gen game.

So yeah, pretty graphics aren't everything.

About the Chick-Fil-A thing. I think it's the homosexual side that is being pushy but I don't have a dog in this fight. I may not be seeing the whole picture because I have little interest in following it but what little I have seen makes the homosexual crowd look overly aggressive.

You know what I find amazing? Just how quickly the homosexual movement has grown. It's like one day it shows up everywhere and people won't shut up about it. The same people who didn't give two shits about it a week earlier. I think some people are tools for those pushing this movement.