The Ludologist

Are game graphics at a point of diminishing returns?

In that case, what do we mean by “diminishing returns”?

• Does it mean that an increase in the graphical budget of a game does not increase sales correspondingly?
• Or does it mean that, subjectively, we are at a point where things look “good enough”?
• Or are we talking negative returns? That increasing polygon count makes humans look worse due to the uncanny valley?

We could also look at a case study. Megan Fox and Stuart Compton have an article in the latest Game Developer Magazine about Ambient Occlusive Crease Shading.

(Disclaimer: I certainly respect the work done here, and I do not mean to pick on these authors. The stated goal is even of moving away from the “imitative” towards the “illustrative”, which I find good. And perhaps things will look different once they start moving.)

Nevertheless: How big a difference do you see between figure 5 with, and figure 6 without ambient occlusion? How much effort is it worth going from figure 6 to figure 5? Is this not diminishing returns?

(Illustration by Fox & Compton, from Game Developer Magazine, March 2008)

If you are interested in video games, game design, and emotions, Aki Järvinen‘s complete PhD Games Without Frontiers has been made available here.

The Polish Journal Kultura i Historia has been kind enough to publish a translation of my article Without a Goal: On Open and Expressive Games.

The Polish title is: Bez celu. O grach otwartych i ekspresyjnych.

In the sense that today I am speaking at the Clash of Realities conference in Cologne with the talk Video Games: The Most Emotional of all Media.

And on Saturday I am in Finland as official opponent on Aki Järvinen’s PhD which is very much about emotions in games.

Emotions, emotions everywhere!

I have been looking at the rhetoric surrounding console launches. This is, for real, from Sony’s 2005 press release announcing the Playstation 3:

Gamers will literally be able to dive into the realistic world seen in large screen movies and experience the excitement in real-time.

The same old drab way of selling a new console, of course, promising better graphics (joy!). But spot the really wonderful mistake of using literally as a modifier for emphasis: The selling point is not that games will feel more like movies, but that diving in is not a metaphor at all! You will literally be jumping headlong into your television set. Wow! Can’t wait!

PS. On the other hand, since we all so massively seem to agree that realistic 3d is not the way to go, I am beginning to hope that someone will actually stand up for 3d photo-realistic graphics. Any takers?

As speculated, Microsoft today announced at Game Developers Conference that they will open XNA and Xbox Live Arcade to developers.

It is called Xbox Live Community games and was described like this:

• Developer makes and submits an XNA game using their “developer“´profile.
• The game is “peer reviewed” by other developer to be screened for misuse of IP and “objectionable content”.
• Game is made available to the public.

Details were spare on monetization, but the titles shown did say “limited trial” etc., so there seemed to an economic model in place.

Notice the good-guy rhetoric used: Community (obviously), the democratization of development and distribution, peer review (academia). As always, there may be some devil in the details.

The other interesting thing was that the games shown really did have an indie aesthetic – “low-fi” hand drawn graphics, offbeat themes. In other words, it seems that we do have an audience for games with an indie sensibility.

A few years ago I felt that half of the barrier for “indie games” was not distribution but the lack of an audience, and now it does looks like the “Youtube” phenomenon: Low production values, the feeling of something different, but a personal connection to the creator.

Indie has arrived, hasn’t it?