Great analysis. I think the secret truth to the appeal of 'realism' lies in a misunderstanding, a conflation of two totally different things: the novelty of superficially 'realistic' games appearing near the turn of the century, and the much more important concept of verisimilitude with regard to the GAME'S universe, and not our own.
There's a concept in screenwriting and fiction writing in general of 'cracking' a story or a character or a scene - not constructing it according to some blueprint, but ruminating on it until THE 'correct' version emerges. It's the idea that, rather than laying things out very carefully, dotting all your i's and crossing all your t's, you have to sit on something until your subconscious either gently aligns the image in your mind, or draws it out from elsewhere. And I think the same is very generally true of a lot of aspects of creativity, and extremely true of certain parts of game development, not even counting the narrative. I think a good example is the physics of the game world - Mario FEELS right having a standing jump of many times his own height, because that's the sort of game Mario exists in. It would be weird and incongruous for Mario to psyche himself up and maybe get a few inches vertical, landing with an awkward amount of arm waving like you'd expect from a squat Italian plumber in 'real life.' But finding that 'correct' amount of ups requires something other than conventional logic or simulation of the real world - it requires an intuitive understanding of the game world and goals the developer is trying to express.
And I think that's how most well-received games work - they simulate the parts of the game world that are relevant to the process of playing the game, within the framework of that alternate reality, which is rarely directly comported with our own, even if it superficially reflects our own. But around the time of Crysis and Half Life 2, gaming, which had always had an on-again-off-again relationship to 'reality' suddenly became completely obsessed with the idea of verisimilitude with regards to the physical world. New versions of DirectX would tout screenshots of compellingly detailed human faces, reviewers would glow about the sway and discreteness of foliage, and artists pushed polygon counts towards the frontier of monitor resolutions, trying to hit the threshold where their brush strokes could no longer be visible. I think it started as novelty - graphical fidelity means you can create a game world that looks and sounds a lot like a 'real' place, which you can then ground your gameplay in in an unreal way. But it quickly became a sort of arms race for GPU manufacturers and developers, all straining to outdo each other in how many wrinkles on the horse's nutsack they can demonstrate.
RDR2 felt like the tipping point - the most resources ever spent on populating a game with unnecessary and inconsequential details, in lieu of meaningful choices. A lot of very, very superficial 'realism' for realism's sake, reduced to window dressing for an otherwise banal third-person shooter. If I wanted to be very charitable towards Rockstar, I'd suggest that the swelling of horse genitalia is less to do with adhering to the real world realities of horse balls, and more to do with making sure every aspect of the experience is 'realistically' in flux, that nobody ever looks at the horse model and goes 'you know, this is just a static model of a horse' and breaks the illusion, for the same reason all NPCs have 'dynamic schedules' so you can always see people wandering in and out of bars instead of having bars populated by a static host of Bar NPCs. But I don't want to be very charitable towards Rockstar, so I'll express my assumption that some intern or artist at some point got caught reading Twitter all day on their phone while they were supposed to be tweaking 5000 horse models, and to stave off the jokes about how they were looking at horse asses for several hours came up with an excuse like 'actually horse balls blah blah blah' and got themselves or someone else assigned to make horse nuts change over time.
It's been remarkable to watch how this discourse has evolved since the seventh hardware generation when graphics themselves became priority selling points. I have an intuition that, before HL2 and especially Crysis brought ultra-high-fidelity graphics into vogue, verisimilitude was more or less the frontier of innovation in game design. All sorts of major releases tried to reflect reality in previously unexplored ways toward improving a specific, designed experience — the gritty dismemberment in Soldier of Fortune, the healing system in Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth, most of what Kojima was up to...
It seems now that the highest levels of game design have pivoted toward cutting-edge 3D graphics and/or extremely fine-grained polish (as in RDR2) more or less toward the exclusion of all else. I suppose this reflects the risk-averse incentive structures of big-money game dev and it probably goes quite a ways toward explaining the homogenization of AAA gameplay. It's funny to imagine how much time Nintendo spent perfecting Mario's 2D movement in the 80s, especially while trying and failing to steer John Marston or Arthur Morgan through an ordinary doorframe because it's so desperately important that their legs articulate realistically.
There could hardly be a more apt comparison than Mario against RDR2 when it comes to design priorities these days. It'll be fascinating to see whether Rockstar somehow advances the trend even further with GTA VI and, if they do, whether it'll be positively received. I get the sense that most folks who loved RDR2 loved it for reasons largely unrelated to its hilariously granular polish, and I doubt that *yet more polish* will be worth the (presumably vastly increased) price of admission for their next big-ticket release.
Great analysis. I think the secret truth to the appeal of 'realism' lies in a misunderstanding, a conflation of two totally different things: the novelty of superficially 'realistic' games appearing near the turn of the century, and the much more important concept of verisimilitude with regard to the GAME'S universe, and not our own.
There's a concept in screenwriting and fiction writing in general of 'cracking' a story or a character or a scene - not constructing it according to some blueprint, but ruminating on it until THE 'correct' version emerges. It's the idea that, rather than laying things out very carefully, dotting all your i's and crossing all your t's, you have to sit on something until your subconscious either gently aligns the image in your mind, or draws it out from elsewhere. And I think the same is very generally true of a lot of aspects of creativity, and extremely true of certain parts of game development, not even counting the narrative. I think a good example is the physics of the game world - Mario FEELS right having a standing jump of many times his own height, because that's the sort of game Mario exists in. It would be weird and incongruous for Mario to psyche himself up and maybe get a few inches vertical, landing with an awkward amount of arm waving like you'd expect from a squat Italian plumber in 'real life.' But finding that 'correct' amount of ups requires something other than conventional logic or simulation of the real world - it requires an intuitive understanding of the game world and goals the developer is trying to express.
And I think that's how most well-received games work - they simulate the parts of the game world that are relevant to the process of playing the game, within the framework of that alternate reality, which is rarely directly comported with our own, even if it superficially reflects our own. But around the time of Crysis and Half Life 2, gaming, which had always had an on-again-off-again relationship to 'reality' suddenly became completely obsessed with the idea of verisimilitude with regards to the physical world. New versions of DirectX would tout screenshots of compellingly detailed human faces, reviewers would glow about the sway and discreteness of foliage, and artists pushed polygon counts towards the frontier of monitor resolutions, trying to hit the threshold where their brush strokes could no longer be visible. I think it started as novelty - graphical fidelity means you can create a game world that looks and sounds a lot like a 'real' place, which you can then ground your gameplay in in an unreal way. But it quickly became a sort of arms race for GPU manufacturers and developers, all straining to outdo each other in how many wrinkles on the horse's nutsack they can demonstrate.
RDR2 felt like the tipping point - the most resources ever spent on populating a game with unnecessary and inconsequential details, in lieu of meaningful choices. A lot of very, very superficial 'realism' for realism's sake, reduced to window dressing for an otherwise banal third-person shooter. If I wanted to be very charitable towards Rockstar, I'd suggest that the swelling of horse genitalia is less to do with adhering to the real world realities of horse balls, and more to do with making sure every aspect of the experience is 'realistically' in flux, that nobody ever looks at the horse model and goes 'you know, this is just a static model of a horse' and breaks the illusion, for the same reason all NPCs have 'dynamic schedules' so you can always see people wandering in and out of bars instead of having bars populated by a static host of Bar NPCs. But I don't want to be very charitable towards Rockstar, so I'll express my assumption that some intern or artist at some point got caught reading Twitter all day on their phone while they were supposed to be tweaking 5000 horse models, and to stave off the jokes about how they were looking at horse asses for several hours came up with an excuse like 'actually horse balls blah blah blah' and got themselves or someone else assigned to make horse nuts change over time.
It's been remarkable to watch how this discourse has evolved since the seventh hardware generation when graphics themselves became priority selling points. I have an intuition that, before HL2 and especially Crysis brought ultra-high-fidelity graphics into vogue, verisimilitude was more or less the frontier of innovation in game design. All sorts of major releases tried to reflect reality in previously unexplored ways toward improving a specific, designed experience — the gritty dismemberment in Soldier of Fortune, the healing system in Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth, most of what Kojima was up to...
It seems now that the highest levels of game design have pivoted toward cutting-edge 3D graphics and/or extremely fine-grained polish (as in RDR2) more or less toward the exclusion of all else. I suppose this reflects the risk-averse incentive structures of big-money game dev and it probably goes quite a ways toward explaining the homogenization of AAA gameplay. It's funny to imagine how much time Nintendo spent perfecting Mario's 2D movement in the 80s, especially while trying and failing to steer John Marston or Arthur Morgan through an ordinary doorframe because it's so desperately important that their legs articulate realistically.
There could hardly be a more apt comparison than Mario against RDR2 when it comes to design priorities these days. It'll be fascinating to see whether Rockstar somehow advances the trend even further with GTA VI and, if they do, whether it'll be positively received. I get the sense that most folks who loved RDR2 loved it for reasons largely unrelated to its hilariously granular polish, and I doubt that *yet more polish* will be worth the (presumably vastly increased) price of admission for their next big-ticket release.
Thanks as always for thoughtful reflections!