Reinterpreting "Realism"

Dissecting Video Gaming's Most Ambiguous Selling Point

BALLS TO THE WALL

You know, it’s already been the better part of seven years since Red Dead Redemption 2 was released amidst of one of gaming’s biggest-ever hype cycles. I was surprised when I came to that realization earlier, because it feels like just yesterday that games media was collectively gawking at Rockstar’s commitment to designing the most grounded portrayal of equine testicular physiology in the history of interactive media. If you’re scratching your head at that latter clause, then get ready to be further puzzled by its explanation: in RDR 2, the horses’ nutsacks not only have detailed 3D models, but are also programmed to dynamically grow and shrink in response to changing weather conditions.

After a month spent writing variously about tabletop roleplaying, the mechanical reproduction of reality, and a strategy game that simulates several billion years of planetary geophysics, the concept of “realism” in game design has been very much front-of-mind for me. I tend to believe that great game designers simulate the parts of reality that serve to elevate the experience of playing their games, but I’m realizing that there isn’t much of a semantic foundation for the concept as yet.

See, the games industry and the gaming public have spent decades in pursuit of “realism” in much the same way as Western democracies have pursued peace in the Middle East: hungrily and at great expense, but without a discernible strategy or even any stable agreement on what would constitute such a thing in the first place. As it stands, the term describes little more than an amorphous vibe of being “truer to life” than other games that a given correspondent has personally experienced. This conception, being founded on subjective experience rather than collective observation, is problematically vague even by the relatively modest standards of the still-young gaming discourse. Lots of us claim to want “realistic” gaming experiences, but few can claim to know what precisely they mean by that. It is pursued as an end in itself even though that supposed end is not thoroughly characterized.

With all that in mind, my plan for this week is to take a stab at rigorously interpreting the concept of “realism” as it is used in gaming discourse. In preparation, I trawled the Internet for contemporary takes on what manifestations of realism do and do not excite the gaming public. After much synthesis, I came up with three specific categories that I think capture a broad majority of what specifically the modern gaming public is looking for in a realistic experience. Consider this more an early hypothesis about the discourse than a theory of realistic design, and please do contribute your own perspective if you’d like.

My provisional offering is this: gamers expect one or more of graphical fidelity, simulation of reality, and verisimilitude in the design and presentation of a “realistic” game. This is all highly speculative, but don’t worry — I’ll include plenty of examples as I attempt to hammer this out. Let’s begin by discussing each of these categories in turn, and then we can try for a strengthened interpretation of “realism” writ-large.

GRAPHICAL FIDELITY: THE VISUAL REPRODUCTION OF REALITY

“Can’t wait until I have to download a 800 gigabyte game and 20 gigabytes of that alone is making the eyelash’s on a character look ultra realistic”

-- Robross888, YouTube Commenter and philosopher of modern graphics design

I think it’s fair to say that the most obvious facet of realistic game design is the level of graphical fidelity on display — or, more specifically, the observed correspondence between a game’s visual presentation and its players’ intuitions of how a given asset or environment should look given their understanding of its real-world or hypothetical¹ equivalent.

But it begs the question of why this is so broadly appealing to gamers in the first place. What practical justification incentivizes game designers to invest in cutting-edge graphical presentation? Other than “because it gives us something to flex in the promotional material,” I mean — I want to know why it’s postured as something worth flexing.

My hypothesis — and I think you’ll agree — is that high-fidelity graphical presentation is a straightforward (if costly and resource-intensive) route to player immersion. I can offer 2004’s Half-Life 2 and 2022’s Ghostwire: Tokyo as era-spanning examples of games whose designers thoughtfully employed contemporaneously state-of-the-art 3D graphics. In those cases, the underlying goal was to create a sense of place through believable environment design. I like this as a non-cynical and culture-positive justification for the vast expense, since it gives the buying public some agency beyond “shiny thing look neat so I buy thing.” When people say a game “has realistic graphics,” they almost never mean that they literally can’t tell it apart from observable reality. What they mean is that the presentation puts them in a mind of familiar reality in a way that stylized or exaggerated presentations do not.

Above: A promotional screenshot from Bodycam’s Steam store page. The game’s main selling point is, without a doubt, its extraordinary graphical fidelity.

I gather this is the strain of realism discourse that motivates projects like last year’s Bodycam, which teases a burgeoning niche for photorealistic graphics in high-level game design. Such extreme fidelity doesn’t necessarily make for a uniquely fun first-person shooter, but I can’t deny that there’s something inherently compelling about bringing a game’s visual presentation so tantalizingly close to the world as it appears before our eyes. I’d give it a play to tell you whether it’s worthwhile, but it’ll have to wait until I can afford a modern graphics card. For that reason, let’s tentatively schedule my review of Bodycam for the week after the heat-death of the universe. For now, let’s move onto the second-most obvious manifestation of realism.

SIMULATION: THE REPRODUCTION OF REAL SYSTEMS

“It’s like all the secondary mechanics are trying to be realistic… But shooting people? The biggest part of a fps? You can magdump 7.62 into a guys chest and if his armor is high enough level he'll just turn around and one tap you with ammo that costs more than your entire kit.”

-- u/bigtiddygothbf, Reddit Commenter and Escape from Tarkov polemicist

Bodycam also conveniently illustrates the multifaceted nature of realistic game design by nature of its mechanics. Like many shooters postured as “realistic,” it goes for an extremely grounded simulation of human kinematics rather than traditional 3D physics.² The momentum and inertia of the characters and their weapons are deeply simulated, so an action even as simple as aiming at an enemy requires considerable forward thought to pull off successfully. For example: holding the “aim” input doesn’t just snap the sights in line with the player character’s eye as in most first-person shooters. Instead, it painstakingly simulates the physical act of articulating shoulders and elbows to bring the weapon up to eye-level, after which the player must still manually account for depth and relative perspective to get a shot on target.

Then, of course, there are umpteen simulation-heavy titles for which graphical fidelity is a secondary consideration, or is even de-emphasized completely³. But this subcategory of realism also finds its way into individual systems or game mechanics even when the holistic experience isn’t itself a simulation. Let’s reach for a simple example and consider the simulation of a bullet fired from a gun. In the earliest shooters, as well as in many core-gameplay-focused shooters of today, bullets are strictly imaginary — a hit registers if the player was pointing at an enemy when the “fire” input was actuated. Later shooters simulate bullets as physical projectiles that continuously check for collision with solid objects. Nowadays, it’s relatively common to additionally simulate the impacts of gravity, wind, and atmospheric resistance on a projectile.

In a discussion of how “realism” is understood, then, we can argue that a game whose primary gameplay relies on grounded simulations exhibits realism independent of its graphical fidelity or lack thereof. I could point to an example like 2012’s Receiver, widely perceived as “realistic” by sheer virtue of its commitment to a grounded simulation of gun-handling even though the rest of the game around it is almost entirely divorced from reality. Or, for that matter, games like 2016’s Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, & Hand Grenades have a realistic edge on the basis of their mechanical simulations even as they actively reject realism in almost every other context.

That’s all well and good, but graphical fidelity and mechanical simulation only go so far in explaining Rockstar Games’ peculiar obsession with horse goolies. That brings us to the most subtle manifestation of realism to which gamers seem responsive.

VERISIMILITUDE: THE “TRUTHLIKENESS” OF UNREAL SYSTEMS

“In the end game creation is all about a proper balance of realism and authenticity… what [games] all should be is authentic in some way or the other.”

-- tiberius8390, YouTube Commenter and aestheticist

Game design is a difficult and time-consuming process even when it isn’t also profligately expensive. Even with the most runaway AAA budget imaginable (looking at you again, Rockstar), concessions must always be made to practicality. What recourse has the game designer who wants to create a realistic player experience when the aforesaid strategies don’t fit the bill? Or indeed, what recourse has the gamer who wants a realistic experience but can’t afford a suite of luxury products to run a near-photorealistic simulation?

The answer, as has always been the case when artists and consumers must meet practicality halfway, is evocation. This is more subtle than what we’ve discussed above, but you probably have some intuition of what I’m talking about — you look at Guernica and instantly recognize a scene of violent carnage even though the subjects bear only incidental resemblances to their real-world equivalents. That painting is so well loved largely because of how evocatively it portrays the horrors of war in its abstract composition. Game designers have done something similar from essentially the beginning of the medium, which I’m tentatively calling “verisimilitude (of evocation)” in order to emphasize that reality can be evoked without “realistic” graphics or “realistic” simulation. Let me try to explain what precisely I mean.

In the philosophy of science, verisimilitude⁴ refers to the idea that, given an undiscerned truth and any number of incomplete (i.e., false) propositions seeking it, some such propositions are “closer to the truth” than others. For example: our current understanding of quantum physics is pretty good at modelling the universe, but we know it to be incomplete because it doesn’t account for the physical mechanism of gravity. Nevertheless, Quantum Theory is undoubtedly “closer to the truth” of fundamental physics than was the theory of Luminiferous Aether that preceded it, just as that theory’s comparative rigor made it “closer to the truth” than any medieval theory of the universe. Modern physicists therefore prefer Quantum Theory because, even though it’s not a wholly realistic conception of the universe, it nevertheless reflects a rational conception of observable reality as we currently understand it.

That’s the hook on which I’ll hang this section: in contemporary discourse, gamers respond to mechanics or premises that display verisimilitude (or, alternatively, that “are truthlike”) because these reflect rational understandings of real or hypothetical equivalents regardless of their outward resemblance to the real things they evoke. This is how “verisimilitude” differs from “simulation” in our working context. An intuitive example might be the act of getting pulled over and ticketed for speeding in the Mafia games, which doesn’t quite rise to the level of simulation but still contributes to a more “truthlike” urban sandbox experience than doing 120 in front of a police officer in Grand Theft Auto and facing no consequences.

For a more rigorous example, let’s consider the act of chopping down a tree in a survival- or crafting-focused game. In Minecraft, you can fell a tree by repeatedly slapping the trunk with the fat of your hand, so the lumberjacking mechanics in Minecraft display next-to-no verisimilitude. Cutting down a tree in The Forest requires that you repeatedly strike it in roughly the same place with an axe, after which its conversion into lumber is abstracted — treecutting in The Forest is relatively truthlike, but not entirely so. In Farming Simulator (at least in the edition I can remember playing), virtually every step of the real-world process is mechanically represented in gameplay even though the “simulator” aspect is pretty thin on the ground. The mechanic is grounded in reality and reflects a rational understanding of timbercraft even though it doesn’t outwardly resemble the process as it is actually done. It isn’t very highly “simulated,” but it doesn’t need to be in order to be notably “truthlike” and therefore “realistic” in character.

And that is where I locate the motivation for Rockstar’s professional interest in Clydesdale clackers. I don’t think it was as simple as going for ultra-high-fidelity visuals, because the scrota are frankly the least detailed parts of the horse models. I also don’t suppose they were trying to maximally simulate the sexual characteristics of your mount just for simulation’s sake, or else we probably would’ve heard about some kind of inquest into the designers’ mental health. I believe it instead descends from a realization that, given how thoroughly and enduringly truthlike the rest of the game feels, the whole illusion could suddenly unravel if the player encountered anything that was notably untruthlike in presentation. Whether or not they were right to think so is a discussion for another day.

SO, IS IT WORTH IT?

Let’s quickly recap. In contemporary gaming discourse, “realism” broadly implies a game’s reliance upon one or more of the following:

1. Graphical Fidelity, i.e., the direct visual reproduction of observable reality

2. Simulation, i.e., the game-mechanical reproduction of real systems

3. Verisimilitude, i.e., the truthlike evocation of reality in an otherwise gamey system

To this point, I’ve written under the assumption that directly evoking reality is an effective tool of emotionally powerful storytelling and of engaging game design when responsibly applied. But any discussion of realism in game design is incomplete without mention of when it simply isn’t the right design choice. Some of my favorite games of all time are also among the most fantastical and dreamlike and, given the sudden and tremendous popularity of Expedition 33: Clara Obscur, I think it can go without saying that strict obeisance to the laws of nature is by no means a hard-and-fast requirement in the design of excellent games. So, then: given the difficulty and expense involved in its realization, when is realism a worthwhile pursuit in game design?

To a certain extent, it depends on who it is you’re asking. Any representative of a AAA publisher will probably tell you “whenever it’s remotely possible, because the shit sells.” I guess that’s fair enough, but it rather begs the question of why it sells and whether it will continue to sell as big-budget games become ever less differentiated from one another. That’s the essential reason why I considered this a worthwhile subject: as long as we’re stuck with this system of market-incentivized game design, we as players and consumers should strive to develop more rigorous understandings of why we enjoy the things we enjoy. So many of the important decision-makers in high-level game design don’t even play video games, for God’s sake — they shouldn’t be the ones dictating what gamers do and do not like.

My apologies if the dynamic mustang marbles were your favorite part of RDR 2, by the way.

Til next time <3

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What do you look for in a “realistic” gaming experience? What don’t you? Let me know below!

1. By “hypothetical,” I refer to sci-fi, fantasy, and other speculative settings in which graphical fidelity is used to make fantastical objects/environments appear grounded to a modern audience. For example, you might say that a given weapon in Warhammer: 40K is “realistic” based on the particulars of its design language even though the object itself is a deliberately absurd exaggeration of reality.

2. See also Escape from Tarkov (2017), Squad (2020), and so on.

3. The recently popular drug-trafficking simulator Schedule I comes to mind.

4. Also called “truthlikeness,” presumably because we needed an adjective form and “verisimilitudinous” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.