Features

Videogame Aesthetics: The Future!

Faddish Allure

Whether you equate "concept" in games with narrative or the ludic elements of gameplay, it's clearly possible for game aesthetics to have a deeper tie to the nature of a game. Despite that we use shinier visuals each year to neaten up yet more iterations of established concepts, aesthetic design is more than just caked layers of whorish make-up; though such unfavourable comparisons could be made of many franchises and genres.

None of the rendering methods and artistic idioms of the games above need be a one-off; in theory they are as reusable as photo-realism. However, retreading any such territory seems to earn condemnation as a novelty bandwagon hopper for anything that isn't trying to be photo-real or explicitly different. At least, such accusations were levelled at cel-shaded games in recent years. Soon after Jet Set Radio had emerged, there came a plethora: Viewtiful Joe, XIII, Zelda: Wind Waker, Sly Cooper, to name a few.

	Jet Grind Radio

The glut had it derided as a faddish rendering technique, with anti-cel-shading rants and musings popping up. Such detraction could in part be because the addition of black lines to the outlines of 3D models is a purely aesthetic inclusion, whereas it's a necessary part of the physical production of real cel-animation. For example, compare any cel-shaded game with Out From Boneville, a comic adaptation where cartoon aesthetics are created purely by form and colour. 2D graphics, such as menu items, icons, cursors, speech bubbles, and eyebrows still have (or are) black outlines.

	Out from Boneville

A similar retention of black lines on 2D art can be seen in Lego Star Wars. Bad Day LA also utilises black lines in 2D artwork, notably including the skins for 3D models. Nevertheless, despite black outlines being an entirely aesthetic addition to 3D games, current titles such as Killer 7 and Okami seem to indicate that cel-shading is not just a fad, nor, in the latter case, a cliché.

A possible explanation of the allure of photo-realism, as well as the tolerance of aesthetic similarity in offerings of that ilk, is yielded by an aside from Scott's picture plane. He points out text as the utmost iconic abstraction, because though writing was developed from pictographic representations, in modern languages a written word retains meaning while exhibiting none of a physical form it might denote.*

*p46 and 47, Understanding Comics.

This means that between text adventures and Tetris, games have already moved quite far towards the extremes opposite photo-realism, and those areas are now open for free roaming exploration within present technological limits. In contrast, the absolute photo-realism of the bottom left corner beckons to us as territory that we are currently denied. It's a clear goal, toward which each wave of technology takes us slightly closer. Being such a comprehensible objective, it is also inevitably more comfortable than pondering the relevance of subjective aesthetic choices.

So will photo-realism be a Garden of Eden? Yes and no, I think.

There are a number of problems and hopes with photo-realism.

Though the technological limits of displays are gradually diminishing, their shortcomings are still significant. VDUs are simply not a comfortable thing to use, and incoming technologies such as electronic paper offer the prospect of electronic content with the comforts of print media.

Furthermore, even our largest current screen resolutions are significantly impoverished in terms of visual quality when compared to print, and while present technologies allow for the variety of it to cross into games, much higher display resolutions will allow for its richness to also be transferred.

For instance, they would make possible a Pointillist renderer, the likes of which would simply be unfeasible at lower resolutions. To extrapolate: higher screen resolutions backed up by more GPU power and RAM will not just enable higher poly counts and texture resolutions, but also more complex and detailed ways of rendering and seeing entire worlds.

Art assets as we know them are expensive, with costs rising in each generation of hardware. This is a catastrophic obstacle that cannot be ignored, as it means that only the largest publishers will be able to afford photorealism with current production methods. The upward spiral of development costs, so far offset by a downward spiral in quality of life for some developers, means that the blinkered push for photo-realism using traditional management and production techniques seems to be the enemy of mental health, interpersonal relations, ethical conduct and the medium itself. If commercial game development is to make use of photo-real capabilities within reasonable monetary and ethical bounds, art will have to be licensed or made with smarter tools and methods. Will it be so expensive to develop actual photo-real games a decade after they are fresh?

Even if the rising financial hurdles of production can be destroyed, games may have an existential crisis to overcome. When actual photo-realistic games descend upon us*, will alternative modes of aesthetic design seem more credible to developers, publishers and players?

* Insert as applicable:
- "like a glowing musical spaceship"
- "from the malodorous viscera of the industry".

With regard to the rendering of humans, another problem that photo-realism may face soon is that of the Uncanny Valley. The roboticist Masahiro Mori asserted that near realistic humanoids are repellent to people. This might also be true of virtual representations.

However, the Uncanny Valley is a disputed hypothesis; and it doesn't seem to have been a major obstacle to film-makers using pre-rendered CGI. Even if true, it begs certain questions in relation to game design: Does it operate only when a near real humanoid is contrasted with real humans? How does a screen affect such perception? Does the negative response depend on the comparison of things in a single context, and if so would not the harmonious rendering of all entities in a game world make it irrelevant? If not, we might be forced to explore other aesthetic options until we can produce realistic imagery and animation with ease.

As mentioned earlier, we have a way to go until we actually get to full 3D photo realism. For now, no matter how close our work is, everything we produce in games is to some degree abstract or iconic. Some have sought to circumvent this with games that are based on video footage or contain portions of it, such as The X-Files or some of the Myst series:

	Myst IV

However, using film of live actors inevitably places limits on the amount of interactivity such a game or scene can have, as shown by the manifestation of the X-Files as a point and click adventure, and the FMV in Myst IV being, typically, relegated to cutscenes. Also, CGI imagery and photographic imagery tend to clash unless large amounts of money are thrown at them, as with film production. With game assets, such mixtures have tended to look conspicuous, though the gap is closing, as demonstrated below by Nick Bertke's HDRI renders of Half Life 2 characters on photographic backgrounds:

	Nick Bertke's HDRI renders of Half Life 2 characters on photographic backgrounds.

Though materials and lighting are currently moving very close to photo-real rendering, we don't have real-time photo-realistic geometry yet, simply because our hardware can't spew enough polygons. Artistically, this means that those producing assets for real-time 3D rendering just don't have the same freedom of line that an artist with a sketchbook has, or the freedom of form possessed by a sculptor. At their past and present levels, texture and poly budgets are an unavoidable hindrance to the aesthetic quality of games.

We've come a long way since the flint-carved figures of early 3D games, but there's still progress to make before we're producing the game equivalent of sixteenth century marbles. At that point, poly budgets will afford us much better opportunities to experiment than we are allowed by the present but rapidly shrinking necessity of abstraction.

	Unreal in 1998 (pictured left) and in 2005 (right).

So maybe the growing hostility toward photo-realism should instead be directed at the effect it is having on the development community. Though it makes for a myopic obsession when compared to the vastness of the picture plane, photo-realism is nonetheless a worthwhile technological achievement to aim for, because it is through this that games will attain the sensation of a lucid dream. Furthermore, far from being an eventual dead end, the technology behind visual realism could actually be an avenue that opens up other interesting aesthetics by creating emergent possibilities at all points on the picture plane. While it obviously isn't the only route for discovery, many technologies developed in the cause of photo-real rendering, such as HDR lighting and normal mapping, could be fed back into abstraction and iconography to produce effects that are both subjective and surreal.

To an extent this is already happening in some titles, where current level photo-real worlds and characters are distorted in decidedly non-photographic ways. For instance, in F.E.A.R. refraction is used for entirely mundane simulations of glass, but it is also applied to explosions and bullet trails to create cinematic effects:

	F.E.A.R.

Conclusion

Much like the rest of the medium, game art is a maturing phenomenon; the aesthetic variety shown here is a fraction of what is and will be open for exploration. Thanks to Scott's Triangle, we have the map. Technological development does not solely equate to the development of photo-realism. While the aesthetic development of games will to some extent occur in conjunction with improved technology, and while the corporate games industry will continue the photo-real push, what's already been done shows that utilisation of newer hardware is by no means the only boundary to be pushed. Though commentary, management and markets may have an effect on the aesthetics and culture of games just as they do any other form of media, discovery will remain squarely in the hands of artists and programmers. Among students, professional employees, indie developers and mod-makers, there is a minority out there experimenting, as people have been doing with computing and visualisation for decades.

The saleability of such fruits in game form is a complex and erratic proposition, but it seems scarcely relevant. Such exploration is surely an interesting objective in itself because aesthetics are inevitably a part of this medium, and as such transcend any industry trends or catastrophes. Theoretically games could host a period of aesthetic experimentation comparable, at least in visual diversity, to the artistic movements of the last century. Perhaps a quixotic hope, but I think it's a worthy one.

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