Sunday Thoughts: Art

Firstly let me make this clear, this isn’t going to be a discussion of games as art. I honestly don’t care that much whether or not anyone thinks they’re art. Games are to be enjoyed, we enjoy them, does much else really matter? The same can be said for anything that’s art as well, I enjoy looking at works of beauty, does it matter whether or not someone decides they’re art?

No, what I’d like to talk about today is the artwork used in games, the graphical styling of titles. It seems clear to almost any casual observer that the goal for a lot of developers over at least the last two generations, possibly longer in some cases, is the continual evolution of graphics, bringing them closer and closer to photo realism. We, as gamers, seem to salivate any time a publisher or developer releases screenshots of a game with better textures, a higher pixel count, smoother edges, etc… I know that I fall for this as much as anyone, I distinctly remember the excitement I felt when I saw the first shots of Halo: Reach, the evolution of graphical power that it showed over Halo 3.

[drop]The thing is though, looking at it, this approach isn’t particularly challenging. That’s not to say it isn’t difficult. Even as a coder, I can’t conceive of the huge volume of work that goes into developing a new graphics engine that has something to put your title over its rivals. Tuning your code to make hardware sing and dance like no other developer is quite clearly a Herculean task, and something that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

However, just because something’s hard doesn’t necessarily make it challenging. Adding more graphical power to your engine, working out how to get a few more polygons from the hardware or however you chose to go about it, is the obvious route, the simple choice. You don’t really have to think about how you’re going to make your make your game look, it will just be shiner, brighter or newer than its competitors. It will certainly help it sell, there are many of us who like that approach, but it’s still the decision that doesn’t take much thought or bravery to make. Perhaps you’ll still have some specific art direction, but at its core the idea is to make the game look as real as possible.

That doesn’t really grab hold of me as a concept all that much. I’m sure I’ll be wowed by a demonstration of any game or engine that does this well, but I wouldn’t say that it will necessarily stick with me. I’ll think something along the lines of “Wow, look at the way those shadows are falling.” and then all will be forgotten when the next title that draws better shadows comes along.

[drop2]If you want your game’s look to stick with me then take the approach of Kirby’s Epic Yarn, Paper Mario or Fancy Pants Adventure; do something that seems new or fresh. That’s not to say that if a game looks like any of the aforementioned titles I’ll instantly fall in love with it but rather that I want to see games that takes an approach that I haven’t seen before.

It’s fair to say that we’re seeing more of this sort of approach recently, although realistic styled games are clearly still the dominant force in modern gaming. Just look at the titles that really dominate the market and most of them are going for some sort of realistic approach. Even games like Halo, which could easily look completely odd and still fit in sci-fi, go for some sort of realistic looking approach. It seems that even games which are critically praised for experimental art just fall down when it comes to sales time.

What does that say about gamers as a whole? We cry out for something that doesn’t feel like a carbon copy of the current big hitter, and when someone attempts to do just that it falls drastically short when it comes to actually selling it to us. There are, obviously, other factors to take into account, no game is just about how it looks, but it would be nice to see those developers who take a real risk with their creative process getting the rewards they deserve.