Rant:3D Graphics are Eroding the Imaginative Aspect of Games

[Parvini]

I have been musing of late. Here I am sat in a room with an XBox 360 and a Nintendo Wii with, when you include Gamecube and original XBox games, over 20 games for them, I also have, here to my left on my shelf, about 100 PC Games. So why last night did I spend 5 hours, with a notepad and a pen ready to "take notes", playing the absolutely ancient Sid Meier's Covert Action? Why a couple of weeks back, 3 days after getting Oblivion, did I reinstall Planescape: Torment onto my hard drive? And why, rather than playing the Hitman game I bought earlier, am I on here writing this rather than playing it?

My thought, one that answers these questions, is that it is because gaming has changed, somewhat incontrovertably, over the past 5 years. I have touched on this in my recent Big Themed Manual and Machoness in Gaming threads but I want to explore this idea further. What is it that has changed? Why is it that I can't get into these new much-raved about games?

I contend that it is because of the advent of the first perspective 3D "virtual gaming world" experience that games try to offer now - games are getting much more like films, they leave very little to the imagination, they try to do everything now through the game itself. Whereas a book gives you a certain amount of information in its text, the "experience" of the book is actually lived in the reader's imagination - the reader puts all of the elements together in his mind and then fills in all the gaps himself - he creates "a virtual world" from what he is given. This is why, for many people, reading is a deeply personal and exquisite form of escapism - it is a more properly "interactive" form than film because it remains incomplete until it is read and realised in this "virtual world". Film, on the other hand, provides many of the things that a book can only hint at - the actual faces of its characters, their voices, their environment, the extact form their emotional turmoil might take and so on. The viewer of a film still has to imagine a few things - he has to imagine that the representation of the world in front of him is actually "reality" to become involved and engaged with it, he has to fill in certain other details too - like for example, if we are shown a room that there is a living, working street outside. But watching a film is undeniably more passive than reading a book. A merely good book will excercise your imagination far more than even the most mesmirising of films.

Now, as a PhD student of English Literature you might expect me to favour the book over the film as an artform - but I don't, I probably - if I was going to be 100% honest - prefer movies to books. This isn't because I'm lazy but because I think that movies can get into places that a book would struggle too - think of something like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the fierce intensity of the drama in that would be difficult to reproduce with the same authenticity in a novel, I'd argue that the visual impact of seeing the huge battles in Lord of the Rings has the edge over what one can imagine in the novels. So if games are getting more like movies, what is the problem??

Well - the problem is two-fold: the first is simple, while we've had Movies for over a 100 years, gaming has only really been around for 30 years maximum. While Hollywood does churn out generic crap by the bucket load ("It's a Boy-Girl Thing" anyone?) the film industry also has the capacity to produce powerful works - philosophical (e.g. Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen), emotional (e.g. Kramer vs. Kramer), tragic (Godfather), epic (Lord of the Rings)... and so on. The games industry in comparison remains emotionally stunted and obsessed with guns - the trouble is we've all seen and loved great films and so no matter how good the graphics get in Oblivion, no matter how flashily directed Fahrenheit is, as an emotional experience it's never going to hold a candle to film.

This brings me to my second point: the one thing that the book holds over the film (as an artform) is the autonomy of the reader and the involvement of his imagination in the creative process. The game too holds this advantage and it has the added advantage of interactivity. But the problem with many of these newer 3D games is that they leave so little to the imagination because they are trying so hard to give some form of representation of reality by actually recreating reality in a virtual environment. Old games couldn't do that, so they relied on the gamer's imagination instead.

In Civilization, you as the gamer play as the ruler of a kingdom - Civ is a game based entirely on the gamer's imagination to live and breathe. You never "see" your population, you only ever see one or two archers representing thousands, you only ever see small representations of the many buildings and wonders you construct. And yet there it is, a full living, breathing kingdom that you made - when they celebrate "WE LOVE THE EMPEROR" day in Paris, you can imagine the scenes of jubliation, when civil disorder breaks out, you can imagine the carnage.

In Baldur's Gate 2, aside from a few small video sequences and a few still pics, we never get to see people's faces. Every NPC and creature in the game is a small representation of a person or creature, with minimal animation, all based on a limited range of models and colours. But when you play Baldur's Gate 2 it never feels like you're meeting the same basic model again and again, when you take your party into a tavern you can feel the atmosphere, hear the festivities, when you sleep outside and the birds sing, you feel you are outside. David Warner gives us a masterclass in voice-over acting to craft a wonderfully realised main villain, we never need to actually see him up close to imagine what sort of ******* he is.

And this is what Civ has over Republic: The Revolution, this is what BG2 has over Oblivion - both Civ and BG2 rely on the gamer to fill in the details - their worlds are as real and deep or as shallow you wish to make them - YOU are the limit of their representation, in Oblivion they try to do all that for you... and such an endeavour though impressive, is only ever going to fail - why? Because we all live in reality already, we see in more than pixel perfect vision and we can watch films which recreate the world in a more or less perfect emulation of what we see with our eyes. The Book can't compete with the film on that level and it shouldn't strive to, but it can take you places a film can't. A game can also do that and some games achieve untold depth in taking you to places you haven't been before - but most of the travelling is done in your mind.

To return to Covert Action, this is a game that came with a thick manual. In that manual it provides reams of superfluous info on the various Terrorist groups in the world, their political leanings, their leaders and other info. The game itself features some primative VGA graphics - the overhead combat sequences by todays standards are abysmal. But it doesn't matter, because you have a motivation for breaking into the base: this is the hideout of Yasr Agha in Baghdad who is the paymaster in a complex plot - you need to arrest him, and capture his "payoff" before he can get to Zara Said, the purchase master, in Beruit who will use that money to acquire a gun which she will deliver to Hasan Akhbar who's waiting in Athens to use that gun to assinate a US Ambassador at the Olympic Games!! And all of this was planned by the notorious Marxist criminal mastermind Olga Baader who has since gone into hiding. And all of this info I've teased out by following a few leads, tapping up some phones, following cars, decoding messages and so on. Even though all I've seen is text and primative graphics - I've just spent the night as a CIA agent. Compare that experience with Splinter Cell... yes, the complex plot is somewhere there in the background, but don't worry your silly little heads about that - YOU JUST WANT TO SNEAK ABOUT AND FOLLOW ORDERS. Splinter Cell tries to give you an understanding of what being a special agent is about through actually trying to recreate what an operative would see on a mission. But the true work of the intelligence services is probably closer to Covert Action. Do you understand what I'm trying to get at here?

Sometimes less is more because when you leave something up to suggestion, the gamer can make it real in his imagination - the ugly mugs of the people you meet in Oblivion, the poor voice acting and the limited writing serve to take you out of the reality that the game has created, bizarrely, it is a victim of its own verismilitude: the world of Oblivion FEELS less real than the world of Baldur's Gate precisely because (amongst other things) you can't see people's faces in Baldur's Gate.

[Scythe]

You almost make me wish I'd had the manual for Covert Action - I might have seen it as more than a puzzle game.

In my eternal quest to play every single RPG ever created for the computer, I can only agree that graphical detail does not make for a better experience, not when it comes at the expense of pretty much everything else. I've completed Oblivion, but it's been nowhere near as enjoyable as many graphically inferior games in the genre (newer ones too - I'm not saying good RPGs are a thing of the past), due to that "dead" feeling you also describe. It's like a lifeless terrarium - fun to fool around in for a while, but you soon miss all the things that aren't there.

In my case though, I blame it on Oblivion being so emotionally dead. The story is clinically detached, characters are lifeless dolls. How can you enjoy a story that is so uninvolving?