The Escapist Bulletin: Brown and grey

The relationship that gaming has with realism is a curious one. Of all the entertainment media, gaming has the hardest time modeling the real world. It’s possible to interpret the history of video games as a constant quest for realism, as developers reach for more accurate depictions of the world.

While not actively harmful, the pursuit of realism in gaming is less helpful than you might believe, because it limits the designer's imagination. If you’ve ever felt like gaming has become an unrelenting wall of brown and gunmetal grey, with a whole heap of bloom lighting thrown in for good measure, then you’ve likely played plenty of ‘realistic’ games set in some industrial complex or military base or a city surprisingly devoid of colour.

It’s not entirely the fault of developers, of course; if Gears of War is what sells, then that's what publishers will pay to be made. It’s all very detailed grey and brown, and it looks amazing the first time you see something like it, but you very quickly lose your taste for it.

Even in fantastical settings, realism intrudes. According to Legend of Zelda series director Eiji Aonuma, the development of Twilight Princess was hampered by the team feeling they had to make the world relatively realistic, and that they actually had to leave gameplay ideas out of the final game because they’d constrained themselves with the setting they’d created.

As another example, Dragon Age: Origins’s drive for realism – in this case ‘gritty’ realism – led to the almost universally mocked blood splatter effects, and a sort of dingy, grubby setting without that air of magic you’d expect from what is supposedly a fantasy title.

While this generation of gaming platforms certainly is capable enough to model physics and shadows and all those other real world forces, and has the horsepower to make something that looks an awful lot like a human being, that in and of itself does not make a game great.

Is Red Faction: Guerilla more fun because you can knock down all the buildings? Sure it is, but is the game more fun because they fall down in a realistic fashion? Not really - it’s just using up processor power that could be used somewhere else.

That’s not to say that realism has no place in gaming, and indeed for some games the more realism the better – Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport would be much less appealing without it - but in many instances, the addition rarely makes the experience more compelling.

As nice as photo-realistic graphics are, they can sometimes feel like the end goal rather than the means to it. If you look back over the games we consider to be our cultural touchstones, there are plenty that didn’t have the benefit of next-gen visuals and physics engines that are still perfectly playable today.

Gaming already assumes a layer of abstraction, but rather than embracing it and using that leeway to make much more compelling experiences in terms of storytelling, developers keep trying to remove it, and all we get from that is brown and grey.

We have all this power at our disposal, and all we’re using for is to make things fall over properly. We’ve pretty much got ‘making things look pretty’ in the bag. With whole new decade in front of us, maybe it’s time to turn our attention elsewhere.