Shades of game reality
symbolism and consistency
Legos are awesome. When I was a kid, they were one of the few toys to let my story-fueled imagination come to life. They fit perfectly with childhood narratives — they’re elegant symbols for the intricate plots overflowing from young brains. A playful mind can take a carpet and a piece of plastic, and go on a journey. Don’t touch the floor — it’s lava! But this brick is a lava-proof boat!
Symbolism
The ability of objects to represent something more interesting is what I’ll call symbolism. This word is sometimes used for different ideas; in this post, I’m talking about expressions that are superficially vague, but that invite deeper interpretation. This definition works for games as well as art and Legos. The art term expressionism is similar, but includes purely abstract forms. This post is about the non-abstract reality of games.
Symbolism might be used out of necessity. Books, for example, invite us to fill in countless details about characters, places, and implied action. Early games had low resolution, but we could see a light cycle in a pixel-wide line; or a set of deadly alligator teeth in two rows of blocks framed by a crude kinda-sorta jaw.
This style of symbolism feels dated now. The latest Grand Theft Auto touts an elaborate world we can explore at will. It’s an homage to reality through details.
But an evolved symbolism lives on. The uncanny valley is a scary place, and careful game builders keep their distance with touches of not-quite-realism. Minecraft takes the path of a consistently blocky feel. When I first played it, I experienced a mental disconnect between the immersive 3D environment and the old-school pixelated look — previously those elements lived at opposite ends of the game spectrum — but after a while, it made sense.
The Zelda series has consciously avoided photorealism. At first, there was no choice to be made based on the 8-bit capabilities of the NES. As technology advanced, the style became more deliberately focused on a shapely graphic novelish look that some call impressionistic. It’s a cool art direction that’s easy to take for granted.
The examples go on: the anime-style Okami or the Studio-Ghibli-style Ni no Kuni. Have you seen Dragon’s Lair? The original arcade version’s animated graphics were a world ahead of other games at the time. But the gameplay was a discrete, sparse sequence of meager button-pushing choices. Winning the game was a matter of memorizing this sequence.
Which brings up a doubt tied to suspiciously gorgeous games: the sense that incredible art comes at a cost to fun. There’s no obvious trade-off between beauty and fun, but historically it’s rare for a game to excel at both. I suspect that game makers tend to, perhaps subconsciously, prioritize one over the other. This danger reminds us that aesthetics are less important than the experience itself. Don’t lose the fun!
Consistency
Superficially, a heavily symbolic game style pulls the experience away from realism. Pulling in the other direction is consistency — the sense that a game’s world follows common-sense rules, and that your actions have permanent, rational consequences.
Like symbolism, consistency was tricky to fit into early games. Mario can’t walk backwards in the original Super Mario. Why not? It’s not part of the game’s story — it’s part of the game’s physics. Consistency is about a set of rules that make sense together and to the player. Arbitrary rules don’t fit well with how the player thinks and shatter the illusion of the game as its own reality.
Some examples are obvious. The Creepy Watson video below shows the character Watson seeming to teleport instantly from place to place in the supposedly realistic world of the game Sherlock Holmes — Nemesis.
Other examples are more subtle. In the Final Fantasy games, monsters appear randomly with an apparently fixed probability depending on where you are. The unrealistic element is that the monsters keep appearing at the same rate no matter how many you kill.
The worlds of books and movies often feel more consistent than games. It’s easier to include consistency in a linear, non-interactive narrative because the creator has full control over the flow of the story. Books also offer less technical challenges to consistency. Instead of grappling with limited GPU memory for rendered surface textures, authors can push the extent of their imagination.
Compared to linear narratives, game consistency is hard.
Freedom
An easy road to consistency is to restrict player freedom. This can make the game more predictable — easier to build, but less fun as an interactive experience. On the other hand, if you give players too much freedom, you can also lose what made the game fun. Players like to turn on god mode if they can, but that kind of power drains the challenge of gameplay. Even if you avoid an explicit god mode, too much player freedom can result in dominant strategies — basically gameplay hacks that make it ridiculously easy. Another cost of freedom is the added difficulty of debugging. If a player has 100 choices at any moment in the game, their potential decision tree is impossibly huge for testers to explore. It’s unrealistic to test the vast majority of that tree.
In my opinion, consistency is underrated and photorealism — as opposed to symbolism — is overrated.
How can these both be true at once?
We’re always experiencing a game through an imperfect lens. The physical screen we look at covers just a portion of what our eyes can see; the actions we take, like pressing buttons, are disconnected from the actions of our character, like jumping or running; the game choices we can make are more constrained than our imagination. A heap of limitations like these can be hard to look past.
But these superficial qualities are not what define the sense of reality of a game. A game is truly immersive when its world has a life that’s rich, complex, and independent of us. Consistency makes a game feel alive. Inconsistencies make a game feel shallow; they reveal the cheap trick for what it is.
At the same time, symbolism is perfectly compatible with a complex and independent game world. So what if the world looks cartoonish, pixelated, or flat? These superficial limits don’t steal meaning from the world’s characters or the journey the player embarks upon. In fact, limits that are integrated artfully into a world can push game-makers and game-players to explore realms we might have otherwise left unexamined. Like the open world-grid in the mind of a Lego pile, or the lore of distant mountains in a riveting book, a great game can carry with it an energizing balance of imaginative freedom, rules that make sense, and an invitation to play with the symbols and expressions that bridge our lives to something new.
