Facing the music - (the myth of) realism in gaming

In a post on Game Design Advance, Frank Lantz writes...

Shouldn’t games be an opportunity for players to wrap their heads around counter-intuitive truths? Shouldn’t games make us smarter about how randomness works instead of reinforcing our fallacious beliefs? … And isn’t it therefore our job and our responsibility to guide players along that rocky path, no matter how uncomfortable it might seem… ?….

[I]f we have used computers to build intentional flaws into the numerical heart of our deepest and most cerebral games instead of using them to elevate our understanding of the computational heart of the universe, then we’re doing something wrong.

One of the greatest gaming experiences of my life was the way that Poker forced me to re-program my own kludgy understanding of probability. It took me a few years of dedicated play and study, years that included as much suffering as they did joy, and moreover in which the joys were somehow uniquely bound up in the suffering. But eventually I got to a place where sometimes I get a little glimpse of the world-as-probability, of the Bayseian logic that boils beneath the solid cause-and-effect surfaces of my everyday, results-oriented consciousness.

The problem with "truth" in video games is that games like STALKER (a realistic shooter from an Eastern European developer) are considered "clunky" and "broken" while games like Modern Warfare are celebrated for their “realism” and bombast.

There are a few problems with the poker example... poker is a *social* interaction, and the rewards come from that (and joining that "club") in a far more realistic way than joining the "hardcore" gaming crowd... I understand his point about simulations, but in many ways gaming has evolved (in the positive sense) *away* from these kinds of truths b/c the only way they can be expressed is the "do it again stupid" (DIAS) style of gameplay.

In point of fact, games were designed to *exploit* the DIAS mindset, and the cultural legitimacy of the medium has come to be (equated with? compared to?) the drop in this sort of DIAS gameplay. In a lot of ways the lasting cultural impact of games lies in the ability of early games to get more coins out of arcade players, and so proficiency in gaming came from being the most proficient at unforgiving gaming systems.

With gaming in the public eye defined as a hardcore, niche activity, the only way for gaming's onus to spread was outward and away from unforgiving systems, even alongside a concomitant push for "realism".  Within this framing device, the *only* way for games to get "easier" was naturally for designers to soften or bend the rules of "reality", and any push for more "realism" must almost by definition include a ramping up of DIAS, "hardcore" gameplay.

I can't imagine these associations disappearing any time soon, and until they do, we're stuck with the false dichotomy forced on us by our own history - where accessibility and realism are on opposite ends of the spectrum.

I have some more thoughts on the weight of video games' history on its present, and also on the way that so many aspects of culture, not just gaming, caters to the distortions about reality that we comfort ourselves with, and I hope to revisit those themes again soon.

Comments

[Dylan Micah Nix]

Games by their very nature are, among other definitions, abstractions of systems we encounter in real life. They are, therefore, the essence of accessibility and realism fused together in a stress-free* space that allows us to experience and practice decision-making and other life skills with consequences typically lasting no longer than to the end of the game,
(*Compared to actually using them in, say, life-or-death situations in the real world)

So where do we lose this idea? When does the connection between accessibility and realism become severed?

Here again we run smack into the wall that is the "inbreeding" in video game development. In order to save time, make more money, gain notoriety quickly (whatever the cause, you get the point), some developers tweak what has worked in the past, developing games as if they were a ten-piece jigsaw puzzle, assembling components they know fit together in a way that's not exactly the same as the game released last month, but close enough to be sure to sell. Those that try to do something new ( I'm assuming S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fits nicely here ) end up jamming a piece into the ten-piece puzzle that doesn't fit. Tah-dah! Broken, clunky game. What you end up with are a large number of accessible, soft games that sell really well, which attracts other publishers; the system ends up folding in on itself.

Maybe it's the long time, high cost, and heavily niched market associated with video game development triple-A, "hardcore" titles. Maybe it's the attitude of the gamers themselves, unwilling to sacrifice the comfort of a franchise in its twelfth iteration of a game for something new, especially if that new game is clunky or broken. I do think that if developers (and I'm [prematurely?] including myself here) approach design by remembering the roots and evolution of game development, we will see games that end up as classic as Chess, Go, Poker, Super Mario Bros., etc..