Photorealism: A dream or a nightmare?

Photorealism is supposedly a goal of the gaming industry, and potentially other various areas of culture. Its the idea that we have so much power that we can almost become worldy creators, making something so close to the world we truly do live in that we cannot see a difference. It means that our graphics would be unbelievable, textures that you could feel just by looking at them, real reflections, and believable emotions. At least in theory, this is an incredible dream. Yet the more I think about it, and the more I hear of it, it actually sounds like quite a nightmare.

Okay so lets set aside what should be the obvious pitfalls. Lets ignore the ridiculous budget demands, numbers like resolution and framerate, and the implications it would have on the market. Those are all very important consequences, but lets return to them later and start with a very simple and basic concern that shatters this idea of photo-real gaming. Ever heard of the Uncanny Valley effect? It looks kind of like this, or this (especially the dude in the middle). Its a real effect where something can look disturbing if it is very realistic yet still evidently mechanical in some slight or even subconscious way. I don't actually believe it to be as big of a deal as some do, and can tolerate movies like Final Fantasy Spirits within without ever truly feeling creeped out. Actually I kind of appreciate how surreal it looks in the occasional movie. Meanwhile a video game... uh... I just can't... no. We admittedly don't have a perfect example, but I'd kind of like to keep it that way. Considering we have a social community that whines and pretends a game is broken if it runs at 30fps, I can't see them handling the uncanny valley effect either.

The thing is we can see something realistic from a movie because... its a movie. We're not using it, we're looking at it and we see everything just as intended and captures and sold to us. If they wanted it to look real, they film it and actually capture real living people for the scenes. If they wanted to fake something, its never actually the people they turn into CGI but rather monster, explosions, mechanical things, or they just outright animate the whole dang thing. Meanwhile a game never is promised or locked into running consistently, and cannot actually capture real life and drag it into a programmable and interactive game. The closest is motion capture and scanning replications. Everything is artificial in some way, and that especially goes for the straight forward visuals and the rate at which they perform. You're in control of the game, and as such you're working within a space of programs that you as a sole individual (unless its multiplayer) influence. Naturally you can go beyond what is expected, or cause numbers of strange variables to mess with something. Whether this is a simple 5fps drop in performance, or outright falling through a wall or floor, you can usually break a game in some way without even intending to do so. The more expensive things get, the more we rely on online (and depend on servers and players), and the longer and more complicated games get to make, the more issues we're going to see in games. That's why games have been getting sloppier and need patches these days as it is. So imagine having your hyper realistic unharted suddenly teleport to the wall during a cover animation hiccup, or lagging in your realistic COD game. Heck let me ask you in both of those examples if you'd still be okay with killing waves of enemies, when it looks like you've got a lot of "photoreal" dead people lying around you at the end of every battle... assuming they don't creepily fade out. The worst thing though just might be having a photo-real Team Fortress 3...

Games aren't just a matter of looking real, and as more people come out to push the tech I get worried we hit a period in which some lost the desire to work with restrictions. That was before the major indie boom, so naturally that's not the real case in the whole picture, but still its a shame that the more we move on in gaming the more people just want to talk about how "serious" and "emotional" there game will look if they can make it look so close to the real world. Nobody ever talks about how cell shading might look with reflective waters, or how a comic book style might benefit from advanced particles, or how far 2D games have come, or how modern textures would improve say Mario 64, its instead all about using that tech to make your vision look stupidly like something we already have: real life. Yeah I have that vision to, its called my eye sight, but when it comes to gaming I'd rather see something more unique and fun. Its why I think that Killzone 2 always looked better than uncharted, while Uncharted just tried to be serious looking Killzone at least had a crazy art direction with its industrial torn sci-fi world, glowy lights, and exaggerated dark tones. It was cool to see, and many fans actually hated the change in tone with Shadow Fall. Then there's some truly amazing art styles where the game doesn't look serious at all, like Okami, Ratchet & Clank, Mario Kart 8, Borderlands, and more. If photorealism took over, we might just lose even more of what we have left in these stylish games. Art is one of those areas where restriction is supposed to breed creativity, but instead we just have a bunch of people flying close to the sun only to burn before they touch it. I don't want even more of that!

Look its nice that tech is advancing and I can agree that Shadow fall, The Order, and Infamous all look good on the PS4, but the biggest thing to surprise and impress me with its graphics out of all the newest generation games I've played would have to be Mario Kart 8. Seriously, its just so happy! The cartoon world of mario elevated perfectly onto higher hardware. It has brighter colors, high resolution, great particle and motion effects, having things splash up on screen in a racing game, and incredible textures that just give a certain pop to the TV screen. I just love it, and its the only game out of all the new stuff that consistently puts a smile on my face by just its graphics. Meanwhile the serious stuff.... just looks too close to serious stuff to actually enjoy it. Maybe the first playthrough of them would amaze me. I love the reflective surfaces, the perfect textures, and that amazing art style of level 9 for the first time in Shadow Fall, but quickly the whole thing just kind of became ordinary. Aside from the wonderful level 9, very few things there really impress me anymore because it just kind of became normal. On the other hand going back to Okami always leaves me playing with the paint brush just because its so visually different, and again MK8 just always keeps that smile on my face because its just so darn happy in its HD cartoon style. Now if Ratchet & Clank takes Nexus' graphics up a few levels further, then my eyes may not be able to take its awesomeness.

Beautiful!

However lets move onto the other implications, because its not just a matter of performance and alternative graphics. Lets try to pretend I know what development is actually like. Okay, sarcasm aside we do know that games are harder to make today so that we could achieve the hardware and complexity we have now. Heck Atari games could be made in months by one person, and now we can barely have a well functioning game made in two years by hundreds of people and they're expecting sales of up to 3+ million and they can't even be expected to work complete and make the best of the hardware we have now. So... you expect this exact same industry to be on the road to photo-realism!? That road sure has a lot of curves, turns, and needs some paving to fix a few holes. The budgets would be ridiculous, and dev time hitting a new ceiling. Oh and lets consider that the only game that has the sort of polish required to meet photorealism might just be The Order 1886, which is 6-7 hours long with a terrible ending, only a linear campaign, and a tried and true formula and that was after delays and 4 or so years of development. Do you expect that to work for 30+ hour RPGs, and open world games? Now to play against my skepticism, if scanning technology or capture stuff gets so good maybe we will see a lot of this stuff streamlined and cheaper. Though then again we'll also probably see people hiring major actors (sure we get one or two names on occasions now, but imagine entire hollywood type casts) so... nevermind, its still too expensive and ridiculous. Its AAA, you can count on them to overblow things where it doesn't help and to cut corners in frustrating places.

At te end of the day I just don't sympathize with this desire to go all the way or go home with graphics. Photo-realism just seems destined to mess things up in some way or another, and nothing is really accomplished besides saying you can do it. Some games are blessed to be held back by their restrictions, or make us of an art style. Minecraft is blocky for a reason: Its about building a world out of those blocks. I think more games would feel right at home following a similar pattern, taking what they are and going proudly stylish with it rather than looking so serious. Of course there's exceptions and moments now where serious stuff isn't bad, and I feel somewhat hypocritical with my article around talking about how awesome some of the serious games look because of how stupidly dated they are now, but ultimately my question is why are we asking for photo-realism? Is that really going to help improve our games? I can't help but feel like the only people that would truly, really, and honestly answer that with a yes are the same ones that pretend animation is for children only. Yet Team Fortress 2 still looks damn fine to me for an M rated FPS. I wouldn't exactly give that up with more bills to pay and scaring half the audience, rather I'd encourage the art style to stay awesome.

Just perfect!