« A Small PvP Design Thought | Home | How Much Information is Too Much Information? »
Graphics in Games: Relevant or Not?
By Cameron Sorden | October 4, 2007
This post started as a comment on Darren’s post, Graphics are teh suck, but when I got to about four paragraphs I decided to shift over to my blog to respond. In his post, he quotes a Gamasutra article where they’re discussing the impact of browser-based games and comparing them to client based games. Here’s the quote:
“Aside from incredible graphics, there is nothing inherently better about client-based gaming (vs browser-based gaming). And great graphics does not appear to be a purchase driver for a casual consumer. My favorite quote about this was from Daniel James at the Virtual Goods Conference. He said, “Graphics don’t matter - the mind models the situation”… and he is right.
Darren disagrees:
A statement like that kind of reminds me of people saying, “Its not looks that matter, its personality”. Poppycock! Looks matter because its the first thing you experience when you see a person or when you sit down to play a game. Denying that is somewhat foolish. If graphics didn’t matter in games we’d all still be playing Pong.
I don’t necessarily agree. Example: Many people still play Pong. I love Pong. It’s as fun as it ever was when you’re playing with a friend. I don’t think graphics matter… but the key to that statement is what you mean when you say it. Graphics do matter as a feature of the game. It’s a specific feature, like number of players or genre of the game, that will appeal to specific players and influence their purchasing decision if they like great graphics.
But graphics are irrelevant to the actual gameplay. Why do I say that? Because games are abstractions. Always. You’re not trying to recreate the mundane world of the player when you present him or her with a game scenario– you’re inviting them to have fun enjoying an experience you’ve carefully constructed to achieve that purpose.
Graphics in games serve as symbols that are meant to represent ideas. A 3D animated dragon like Onyxia isn’t any more of a “real” dragon than a large green square is. If the game says it’s a dragon, then it represents a dragon in the game experience. They both serve their purpose equally well, which is to play their assigned role in the constructed experience of the game.
Graphics which aren’t as detailed require more suspension of disbelief and a more detailed imagination than more graphically advanced games, but that doesn’t make them any less fun or relevant as a game experience. It’s like the distinction between plays and movies. When you go to a play, especially a community production or a high school production, the costumes, sets, props, and acting can all often be fairly bad (and obviously not who or what they’re pretending to be). However, you can still enjoy the play for what it is and the story it tells without getting bogged down in the trappings.
It’s all perspective. Graphics are important if they’re important to you, but they don’t make or break the game experience. As proof for that, I can just point you towards any number of games with killer graphics and sucky gameplay. What happened? They bombed.
The game itself is what’s important– graphics are just one possible way to contribute to the experience of your game.
Topics: Random |
October 4th, 2007 at 8:45 am
Agreed that gameplay must also be with graphics in order to round out the experience, however, saying that “graphics aren’t important” is not true at all, and they can make or break the experience.
How long do your pong session last compaired to VG? How long can you look at a beautiful women compared to one who is not? Sure, like gaming, if she’s a ditz that’s where it stops, much like gameplay. But what attracts you to a game (you or your friends haven’t tried) in the first place?
Main point, graphics are part of the equation of a fully immersive game…like it or not.
October 4th, 2007 at 8:52 am
No, I still disagree. What’s immersive for you isn’t necessarily immersive for another person. Just because graphics enhance your game experience every time, doesn’t mean that they enhance everyone’s game experience every time. Depending on the constructed experience, stellar or extremely detailed graphics can even be an impediment to an enjoying game.
Comparing VG to Pong is unfair because Pong is constructed to last a short amount of time while Vanguard is constructed to require enormous amounts of time, but neither is inherently a “better” game. They’re different games, with different pros and cons.
What attracts me to a game initially is not usually graphics. They can contribute, sure, but what honestly really gets me excited is someone I trust telling me it’s a great game experience. I, like many gamers, have been burned plenty of times by getting suckered into a game that “looked great.” I’m jaded enough to understand that beauty is only skin deep at this point, man.
October 4th, 2007 at 9:00 am
OK…challenge for you then, if graphics really don’t matter to you.
Go play Dwarf Fortress then report back. There is a gmae that uses ASCII characters, is extremely deep in its gameplay. Google it. Give us a review on how the visuals impacted your experience.
…visual stimuli and the response to it is not just a “Darren thing”, its a human thing. To the vast majority of gamers (i.e. not you are I), this is a huge factor to their choices. Gaming press, same thing. Whats the first thing that mentioned in a review or preview…sure the hell isn’t gameplay.
October 4th, 2007 at 9:17 am
I agree that game play > Graphics, but I highly doubt you will get the scale of players who raid(ed) Onyxia to play the same game if it was in a less than 3d environment.
“great graphics does not appear to be a purchase driver for a casual consumer.”
Casual consumers don’t play 4 hour sessions of a MMO on a regular basis. Casual consumers like the quick fix with interesting and challenging content.
October 4th, 2007 at 9:17 am
Sure, but my point is that graphics are not necessary to a fun game experience. I’m not trying to say that all games would benefit from a lack of graphics or that specific games are great because they don’t have graphics or even that games with great graphics are bad. They’re not. I like good graphics.
The argument I’m making is that games, as an abstract concept, have nothing to do with the quality of the graphics. I’m separating graphics from games and saying that a game is no more or less legitimate because it does or does not have graphics.
Poker is a game with very simplistic graphics. Chess is a game with very simplistic graphics.
Monopoly is a game with very simplistic graphics.
I would argue that the worldwide popularity of these three games combined far outweighs the popularity of all the videogames in the world put together. How many people do you know that haven’t ever played one of those three games?
Games are not dependent on graphics to provide a good experience.
October 4th, 2007 at 9:23 am
By addressing this as an all or nothing issue, we’re sort of missing the point, as well. We don’t have to be talking about interactive fiction or Nethack versus MMORPGs and Vanguard.
Consider Baldur’s Gate versus Neverwinter Nights II. One game has arguably superior graphics, but ask me which was the better game in my opinion. (Hint: It’s Baldur’s Gate.) That’s because the graphics serve as representations for concepts, and an isometric lizardman is just as convincing to me as a 3D lizardman.
The graphical quality doesn’t need to impact the immersion of the game. It can, depending on the player, but it doesn’t need to.
October 4th, 2007 at 9:50 am
First, how much graphics matter depends on the type of game. Like I said, Habbo’s graphics are just fine for the sort of game it is, and Pong’s graphics were just fine for what it was. But there are other games in which graphics are absolutely pivotal. Imagining visuals and absorbing visuals are two very different experiences, even if there is usually some crossover.
For example, my favorite game at the moment: Battle for Middle Earth: 2. A huge part of my enjoyment of that game is watching what happens. If left to mere symbols, I might be able to vaguely imagine one character attacking another or one army attacking another. But there’s simply too much happening at once for me to picture even a quarter of what can happen on the screen at once in that game. And even if I could, no human being’s going to get the same experience out of a bunch of placeholder icons representing the armies or soldiers as watching them.
Hell, just imagine playing Pac-Man without color. Even that would be a very different experience. Even RPGs can vary in how dependent they are on graphics, but the graphics definitely change the gameplay. In an MMO, it’s only through graphics that another player can communicate his or her imagined character appearance to me.
Second, graphics can focus more information into an easily digestible message than words or other methods. It’s only through intricate visuals that the player can be given 20+ bits of information simultaneously and be expected to absorb it all. Just think of a face-to-face conversation, the body language and everything else you get from your eyes. In a glance, you’re aware of elements of the person’s background, their personality, their mood, their immediate thoughts, etc. Human beings rely on their eyesight more than any other sense, and it shows in gaming.
But you are right in that even the best graphics can deter players. Aesthetic preferences vary considerably, and it can sometimes be hard to predict who you’re going to win over and who you’re going to turn off with your artistic style and presentation.
One of the benefits of the move towards realism in Western graphics is that nearly everybody likes realism once you fully accomplish it. If it wasn’t just the fantasy creatures but also the human characters in the Harry Potter or LOTR movies that were animated, would you care? Even in Asia, they produce and watch a lot of movies that are based in realism. Everyone can accept realism because it’s our own, it’s what we’re used to. If a game was completely photo-realistic, people might gripe about the violence and such but they wouldn’t say they don’t like the graphics. They might say they don’t like the creature design and such, but they’d accept the graphics without a second’s thought.
October 4th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Cam…would Halo 3 have sold as much as it did if it didn’t look good. What about HL2, TF2, Crysis…etc
Sure, graphics don’t need to impact the experience…and I agree with you. However, I dismiss that arguement because its a purely theoretical. The market thinks graphics do matter…even cute ones like Habbo. The majority of gamers will not invest in a game if it looks like ass.
October 4th, 2007 at 9:51 am
…of course, those gamers aren’t you and I
October 4th, 2007 at 10:11 am
This is important (nice, Aaron): “First, how much graphics matter depends on the type of game. Like I said, Habbo’s graphics are just fine for the sort of game it is, and Pong’s graphics were just fine for what it was. But there are other games in which graphics are absolutely pivotal.”
Graphics are important to games, yes. But they’re irrelevant when you’re talking about “a game.” This is why both Pong and Vanguard can be fun at the same time. One draws more heavily on graphics to provide the experience than the other, but they’re both fun. It’s not a purely theoretical argument. It’s a perspective issue from the point of view of the player.
I think that’s what they were getting at in the original quote, too: “Aside from incredible graphics, there is nothing inherently better about client-based gaming (vs browser-based gaming).” No one game has any more inherent merit as an activity than any other game because the fun to be had in play is highly subjective. It doesn’t matter if however many million people love Halo 3. I don’t like Halo 3.
I’m not arguing with the premise that graphics can be important in certain types of games. I’m challenging the idea that games with fantastic graphics are somehow superior to games with simple or no graphics. Just because more people like them has nothing to do with how inherently good they are.
October 4th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Its not “just” graphics. Graphics matter! So do gameplay, sound, story, UI, (less)bugs, patch cycles. I’ve not played a game for any one of those reasons.
The graphics equation is understood by most casual and hardcore. We all know each year graphics are going to get better in our games. You take what you get.
No one buys a game on the graphics only equation.
October 4th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Graphics are important to the degree that they add to the players’ experiences of the game. A game’s quality is the quality of the experience of each individual player. Therefore, the quality of a game is based on the experiences of the players.
Graphics may or may not be important depending upon the audience that you are trying to sell the game to. If you are trying to make as much money as possible, then perhaps you should make a game with lots of eye candy to wow over the masses and sell millions of copies.
If you are trying to make a game for the enjoyment of a much smaller audience, then graphics might not be as important for them as other factors.
Luckily, there are enough games produced that some of them manage to have good enough gameplay to appeal to me.
I’m also glad to have signed up for GameTap and be able to play so many classics and also some of the newer games that look interesting and actually are… for about 4-5 hours. Definately good value for my money… download game; play game for a while; if it gets boring: stop.
And a big thank you to all those independant developers out there for sharing your works of art with us.
October 4th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Yes, graphics matter, but as a few have already said, it’s only part of the equation.
I’m firmly in the Gameplay > Graphics camp myself. One of the fondest computer RPG memories I have is with Ultima III. Talk about looking like ass. Even at the time, it looked like ass. I can look back fondly all I want but would I actually be able to withstand playing it today? No. There comes a point when you just can’t “go home again” as the saying goes, and the graphics do matter more. We’re playing *video*games after all, and video is *surprise* a visual medium, therefore we want nice visuals to both impress and immerse us.
(I’m excluding MUD’s and other text-based games because they don’t have graphics, you can play them on old TTY terminals or even on your phone via WAP so I don’t consider them videogames, as such)
When eye candy comes at the expense of performance and overall enjoyment of the gaming experience (EQ2 and VG in particular are good examples) then it’s gone too far. Unless we’re all women playing Myst, I don’t think a gorgeous slideshow is what we’re after in a game.
October 4th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Absolutely, some of the best games have simple graphics. Excitebike and Arkanoid are still high on my list of great games.
By the way, the “casual consumer” part of that first quote is probably meaningful. I think they were talking mainly about casual games. Most of the time a developer talks about “casual” games, what they mean is something so simple and slow-paced that my grandma could play it, rather than a game that can be played casually (low-stress).
October 4th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
>
Sure… but if consumers have to pick between the green square and a full 3D DirectX 10 monstrosity, all other considerations being equal, they’ll pick the latter. Old movies are “just as good” (if not better) than the tripe Hollywood creates today but there’s still a strong market to colorize (or completely remake) old films.
Additionally, you can’t really discuss graphics vs gameplay as if they are completely orthogonal. If I see a gnoll in EQ2, I know what to expect immediately. If I see a ‘d’ in a roguelike I have to remember whether its good or bad, and how it differs from the ‘b’s and the ‘D’s. To some degree, graphics affects gameplay because better graphics lets you convey more information.
Its true a game where the gameplay is good and the graphics are bad will be more successful than a game where the gameplay is bad and the graphics are stellar. So, to that extent, I agree with you. But the fact is, looks DO matter.
March 11th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
[...] I said, this is a graphics problem. And here’s the dirty little secret: graphics don’t matter! They don’t. They might help sell your game initially. They might spin some great press [...]