04. Realistic vs Stylised

Should video games focus on realism or should they be more artsy – more stylised? Realism in games can produce fantastic environments and worlds that look photorealistic, but also may contain humans that just don’t look right. ahh yes, the uncanny valley situation. The uncanny valley is a common unsettling feeling people experience when androids – or in games – characters closely resemble humans in many respects but are not quite convincingly realistic. You get taken out of the experience when you see a character that’s been modelled to look realistic but just doesn’t come together or seem right. Then there are games that focus on a stylised look and feel – like Borderlands for example – yes, there are humans and human like beings, but its stylised in a way that makes it look cartoony, for lack of a better term, and the world has its own set of rules that may not apply in real life. It knows what it’s trying to go for and we as the player know what the developers were trying to go for style wise.

Generally, we see indie developers create stylised games and big companies focusing on realism. Of course, this isn’t always the case, as with the previous example of Borderlands. A factor that contributes to that is money. Its more expensive to create big action blockbusters or even any realistic looking game, with things like motion capture, voice recording, marketing, etc. Indie developers can have more artistic ideas come to fruition, they are not held back by AAA publishers telling them what to do and what sells. Indie developers have all artistic freedom of their game. There are many people/gamers, that only play AAA games, and never touch what is foreign to them – they never pick up an indie game and start playing nor do they want to, some just wait for big titles like Call of Duty and/or FIFA every year and only play them and there’s nothing wrong with that. Others play all kinds of games from Big AAA games to small indie or even one man team games.

Should we just choose one – Realistic or Stylised – for the video game industry? My opinion, why choose when we can have both. This art we call video games is just that – art. We need developers to strive for realism and realistic environments, to move forward with technology, to see what we can achieve, to see every piece of grass move on a windy day or to see the ocean move in realistic fashion, to have high resolution textures so you can’t tell the difference between in game or real life. And we also need games that focus on style from developers’ imaginations and dreams. We need push the boundaries of the human brain, we need to be imaginers, we need to look up to the sky and dream of other worlds, other possibilities, and if we don’t the video game industry will become old, stale, with the same games releasing year after year as the industry loses money and the interest from consumers. Realistic and Stylised games can co-exist forever and we shouldn’t want it any other way.

References

Borderlands, 2009, Gearbox Software, viewed 10 March 2017, <http://www.gearboxsoftware.com/games/>.

Rouse M, 2016, uncanny valley, WhatIs.com, viewed 10 March 2017,

<http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/uncanny-valley>.