Art and video games
I’ve been thinking recently about how the visual appeal of a video game has so little actually to do with the technical details of its graphics. Last week when I was complaining about some damn thing I ended up linking to screenshots of Super Mario Galaxy and Halo 3 to make that point, and I’d like to expand upon it here.
There really isn’t any game on any hardware that I’d rather look at than Super Mario Galaxy. Even a year and a half after its release, I think it’s the most attractive video game on the market. The Wii — whatever strengths it may have — is not renowned for its graphical muscle in comparison to the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3, but it does possess what is, to my thinking, the best-looking game on any of those systems.
This is not unrelated to something I noticed several years back with World of Warcraft and Everquest 2. My computer could run World of Warcraft with all the pretties cranked up without a hitch, but it would choke on EQ2’s high-quality mode, so EQ2 was clearly the more demanding game. And yet… World of Warcraft looked (and looks) better. Granted, there are fewer polygons being drawn, but they’re using their polygons for niceness instead of evil.
A lot of people seem to evaluate graphics purely from a technical perspective; if it’s pushing a lot of polygons and it’s using fancy-ass shader techniques and texture layering to make that dried brown blood smear really look like it’s smeared across that big grey slab of concrete, well shit, them’s some good graphics! I humbly beg to differ. The real measure of a game’s graphics is not in the power of the system but in the skill of the artists. Blizzard understands this. Nintendo understands this. Both companies routinely get derided for using "old" technology to make their games — people cry constantly on the World of Warcraft forums about how it’s not taxing the latest-and-greatest hardware, and we still get doorknobs like Mike Capps talking about how the Wii is "going backwards." And yet, World of Warcraft and Super Mario Galaxy look terrific. And World of Warcraft runs on a computer people actually own. And Super Mario Galaxy runs on a console that doesn’t cost $600. So maybe it’s time you jackasses stop sweating over your triangle fill rates and start hiring some people who can take what’s already there and make it look good.
