Long Tail Gamer

I don't know much about art, but I know what I like. Right now, I like this collection of World War II Soviet paintings.  (Thanks for turning me onto that, BoingBoing!)  Browsing this gallery, I found myself reflecting on the emotional power of these brilliant pieces:  Moving to the New Position and Fire of the Guard Artillery.

And being a gamer, I naturally thought to myself, "I'd love to play in a world that looked like this."

Personal computers were not tightly associated with graphical prowess back in the day.  Video games were blocky affairs -- they resembled flickering mosaics of bloated pixels roughly knocking next to each other in a 320x240 grid. 

It was enough to get by.  My friends and I spent many hours around a TV set playing M.U.L.E. on a Commodore 64.  We imagined and enacted ourselves as colonists; we bartered and built and tamed the planet Irata with our robotic multifunction droids.  In this action-packed screenshot of one of the most acclaimed video games of all time, you can see me play as the dot in the middle of the black box.

Yes, the blue one.  Right there.  That's me!

So during most of the early years of gaming, the art was in our heads.  Heck, even simple representation was a stretch in those days.  Metaphor was the master: mostly mental.

Even the most powerful supercomputers -- yea, even unto the very Cray II -- were producing, at best, razor-sharp, inhumanly perfect geometries that imitated artistic vision.  The movie The Last Starfighter is a good example of early computer-driven graphics.  By using complicated mathematical descriptions worked out by clever animators enamoured of calculus, a cutting edge supercomputer could ray-trace a single frame like this one in less than a day. 

In the late 1980s and especially the 1990's, when the Commodore Amiga took flight and dedicated 3D cards began hitting the shelves, the graphical emphasis veered hard toward realism.  Suddenly, game elements had to look like something.   Polygon-pushing silicon, trigonomically correct positioning in a virtual space, accurate-enough lighting models, and motion capture technology were invented and boosted to levels that could create realistic, dynamic action.  Frames per day dropped to frames per second.  The race was on.

During the evolution of desktop 3D, that quality of realism was paramount to game designers.  Even more so to marketers.  Every little advance in rendering was a selling point of the game.

As a gamer, I found that, right about that time,  screenshots began to lose their powers of pursuasion.  Am I supposed to get excited about another slightly more realistic set of hands holding a gun?  Or the glistening of drops around yet another bloody corpse?  The more realistic definition there was, the less emotion it evoked.

The designers of Max Payne seemed to recognize this trend, or at least, cleverly exploit it.  The game straddles the line and capitalizes on two modes: one of photo-realistic textures that pushed the 3D cards of the day; the other, an unusual narrative style that pauses and reflects in artful style.

The artful mode endures the passage of time, but the realistic mode does not.  Quote Chris Comisky at Game-Central of the revisited 3D gamic renderings, "Max Payne looks like Max Shit."  Yet in the same review, he swoons for the graphic novel-informed, painterly storytelling, writing that "you could skip these interludes; or you could buy champagne and throw it away."

Interrupted storytelling seems to be the vehicle of choice for carrying the emotional meanings of realistic games: not just plot, but character interconnections and moralistic responses are revealed mainly via venues such as the cutscene.  But this leaves a hole in the emotion of the gameplay itself, where the most time is spent as a player.  Fear, thrill, and tension seem to be typical of the emotions that dynamically generated gameplay sessions are really good at focusing on, since those feelings rely on immediacy. 

In contrast, art may be where the lingering emotion lives.  Video games are becoming more visually artful, if I can use that term.  Game designers have taken their cues from film directors in so far as they create cinematic effects with space and light, but they give the computer the power do so with the dynamism of a game controlled by the player.  The contemporary crop of game designers seem to be reaching for something poigniant, if not evocative and fantastic.

The celebrated game Braid uses artistic style to create a lingering emotional impact, which is unusual in platformers.  Revisiting 8- and 16-bit graphical tropes is just the beginning.  The impressionistic characterization of the world compounds a timelessness quality that fits perfectly with the manipulative mechanic of the gameplay.  Braid even creates doubt in the player as to the authenticity and reliability of its own narration.  The result is a brooding, reflective game that plays to fantasy, delusion, and dreams: a tacit rejection of the realism the gaming hardware had been striving toward for years. 

I really want something I'll call "Dynamic Impressionism."  Braid, for all its beauty, is still relatively static in how its vision appears and transforms. I want the game to render dynamically, unpredictably, and beautifully -- all of this is by way of producing powerful, reflective emotion as I play.

Graveyard might be closer to such an experience: graphically, anyway.  While it is substantially more scripted than Braid, Graveyard looks and feels more alive.  As my avatar moves forward, away from me, the game becomes like an chiaroscuro painting into which I am constantly falling.  The graphic stylings support a deepening of emotion.  The swell of the experience comes when I reach the center of the graveyard, where I reach a still point --  I am then treated to a sympathetic, evocative, painterly moment of reflection. 

As a game, however, Graveyard is straightforward, lacks challenge, and has negligible replayability.  It is to be experienced, like life itself, only once and in the moment.

The Path is more gamic and yet still feels artful and reflective.  Self-direction, exploration, consequences, interacting between man and machine; it's all there.  The avatars are compellingly sculpted, and they move through a world tinged with psychological terror.  The visualization of the game opens and closes, framing the world to create uncomfortable perspectives that are easy to dwell on.  The game is self-described as "slow horror." 

Slowness seems to be at the heart of the art that intrigues me here.  Lacking definition, the impressionistic images become smeared in time -- they take on a quality of memory over that of redition. 

With that in mind, could action-filled games like a WWII FPS be rendered meaningfully and playably in a style like impressionism, with all the reflection and emotional inertia that entails? With the computer as the 30+ painting-per-second artist, my instinct tells me no, but I remind myself to distrust the easy answer.

Surely there is some gaming arena that would support active yet reflective imagery, and allow me to hold on to lingering impressions.  Perhaps a beautiful, yet historic, flying ace game rendered in the whipping, strafing style of the painting simply titled IL-2?  I hope at least that some talented game developer will take the challenge to try.  Informed by some technical, visionary genius, the dynamic, hard action that impresses with a haunting image may drive new games.

So the upshot:  I'm starting to think that a quality of photorealism is that of being a passing fad.  As any visualizing technology reaches past the uncanny valley, it seems to me that realism is relegated to becoming a stepping stone.  After all, there's an entire universe full of real things -- no scarcity there.  Fantastic visions, however... artful things are in rare supply. 

Perhaps that's what we really want from any sort of storytelling technology: not to render our fantasies realistically, but to bring our fantastic visions into the real world where we can share and experience them.

Links:

• Soviet War Paintings
• Graveyard, a Tale of Tales
• Samy's review of Braid at Game-Central.org
• Chris's review of Max Payne, ditto.