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The Curse of Voodoo
By Corvus | June 18, 2008
You’ll need to do at least one of two things while reading this post. Either get ready to put on your tin foil hat and join in some good ol’ fashioned cloak and dagger conspiracy theorizing or bring along a salt cellar so you’re well prepared to notice that at some point during the post, I plant my tongue firmly in my cheek. Plus, bonus, salt rings are known to ward off evil, so you’ll be well prepared either way you decide to react.
It all begins with a legitimate, if somewhat bitter, observation. There are those, within the industry and without it, that claim our technology level is not sophisticated enough to handle quality participatory storytelling. They say that we’re doing pretty good, considering… you know–everything… and stuff. Not surprisingly, I find that argument to be underwhelming at best and downright blind at worst. I simply don’t see the state of our industry in such an optimistic way. I look at games from a quarter of a century ago and I’m amazed at how much atmosphere they provided. I’m in awe at how they allowed the player to build the narrative experience, from gameplay moment to gameplay moment, and wrap their own story experiences around the developer-provided plot structure. I look at how these games shone under tight technical constraints and managed to provide compelling glimpses of storyworlds with only a handful of sprites or mere hundreds of polygons.
We shouldn’t be grateful for the quality of story in today’s games. We shouldn’t be appreciative to the studios for the mere story-crumbs they allow to be sprinkled into our games. We shouldn’t cut anybody slack due to the allegedly primitive nature of their tools. The decision to de-emphasize the importance of story in our game narratives was exactly that–a decision. Somewhere, at some point in time, someone decided to move away from a focus on story. We haven’t come a long way, despite the challenges inherent in the task. We have, in fact, backslid–tremendously. None of the big studios seem to be sinking large amounts of money into telling better stories via gameplay. There are no successful middle-ware story engines. All of our focus as an industry has been elsewhere–photo-realistic graphics.
Why is this? Publishers complain about the costs associated with developing for the high-poly environments of the next generation of consoles. Paying artists to generate realism isn’t cheap–particularly if you want them to generate realism that stands out from the other photo-realistic games out there. But they aren’t veering off the polygonal course. They aren’t, by and large, reversing the quest for visual “perfection.” Why?
[this would be a good point to put on the hats or start taking things with a grain of salt]
I blame Voodoo. Not the black magic sort of Voodoo–the graphics acceleration sort of Voodoo. The sort of Voodoo that Glide’d into our lives thanks to the silicon from the labs of 3dfx. Those cards turned the entire world of videogames on its ear and made a lot of profit doing it. Now, of course, 3dfx is dead, but Ati and NVIDIA have picked right up where they left off. It’s a big business that now spans all hardware platforms–PCs, consoles, hand-helds, and cell phones. These companies create an artificial demand for their products in order to stay solvent, at least once a year releasing bigger GPUs that use more memory, hold bigger textures, render polygons more efficiently, etc. Of course, if the software wasn’t keeping up. If games didn’t focus so heavily on graphics fidelity, there would be no need for an endless succession of video cards.
It seems to me that it’s in the hardware vendors best interest to keep all the video game development funds sunk into an endless quest for photo realism. Pursuing deeper emotional narratives doesn’t sell the next line of GeForce cards. Selling story doesn’t move Radeons. How much of that development money is provided by the hardware manufacturers themselves? How much does it cost them to get their logo on a game box? Or on the loading screen for the game? How much of their profit is funneled directly in the coffers of EA and Activision and Microsoft Game Studios and Nintendo and Sony Entertainment? How influential are they in the timing of each console generation? Because while the console manufacturers themselves don’t make much (if any) profit off console sales, you had better believe NVIDIA and Ati rake in plenty for designing the silicon you’ll find within them.
It’s only a short step from imagining GPU manufacturers funding graphics-focused video game development to imagining them actively discouraging other types of development. Add in a little advertising revenue to the right sites to spark a few “OMG the great story in this game!” reviews for sub-standard fare (not to mention including graphics as a major component of review scores) and you’ve got yourself a conspiracy intent on actively reducing the quality of our game narratives and hindering the development of our medium as an artistic and expressive form.
“But Corvus!” I hear you cry, “Story based games don’t sell! Look at Psychonauts, look at Beyond Good & Evil!” Story might not sell games, but marketing does. And neither of those games were well marketed. It’s not because of their graphics that no one played them. It’s because no one heard of them that no one played them. And ultimately, I wonder who decides which games get larger portions of the marketing budget… hm? Publishers know which side of their bread is liberally buttered, with cash. And they aren’t likely to promote the games that don’t conform to the agendas of their puppeteers… er… financiers.
I have to confess that my overall spending habits haven’t helped. Yes, even I have spent a lot of money on graphics over the years–starting with Voodoo 1s and Voodoo 2s. On more than one occasion I even forked out the extra cash for additional cards to run in SLI mode. The smoother gameplay and clearer environments were glorious to behold. I fealt compelled to buy games with the Glide label on the box, even though I suspected they weren’t as enjoyable as the games I’d played before the arrival of 3d graphics accelerators. With the exception of the last couple of years, the single most upgraded component of my desktops has been, you guessed it–the graphics card. I’ve even purchased two of the three “next generation” consoles and will likely acquire the third within the year (unless I hear that Fumito Ueda’s next game will also appear on the 360).
But you know, looking back–the games I remember fondly, the games that stand out, the games that I still replay to this day… don’t make use of high powered 3d graphics. Ultima 7 and Ultima Underworld, Fallout, X-COM–these are the PC games I consider to be great. Even the console titles I go back and replay don’t make full use of their platform’s graphics capabilities–Wind Waker, Shadow of thew Colossus, Beyond Good & Evil. Yet when I see some new screenshot, or watch video of the latest GPU in action, I find myself in awe and wondering if it isn’t time to upgrade my graphics card. It’s almost as if I’m under a spell and… in fact–maybe I do blame voodoo, the black magic sort of voodoo, after all.
Tagged:graphics, storytelling, videogames. | 3 Comments »
June 18th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I decided to pull out of the graphics card race right around the time I started seeing screenshots for Crysis. It’s funny that you should mention Shadow of the Colossus as I would love to see a next gen make over for it. As someone who has watched the evolution of graphics back from the atari period to today I say we’re about close to hitting photo realism in our games. I’ve been wondering if we’re going to hit the ceiling for improving graphics and what will happen to all the various graphics card companies.
Personality give me a stylized look (Wind Waker, Killer7, even Sly Cooper on the Ps2) over a super realistic look any day.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
The only graphics card I’ve ever bought in my life is an Nvidia TNT2 because the one that I had at the time was crashing my win98 every 20 minutes because it couldn’t handle a resolution greater than 640×480… so… yeah, it has been a while.
Sounds pathetic now, and surprisingly enough, it was pathetic at the time. I think it has more to do with the fact that my family can’t afford to change hardware for consumeristic reasons.
Oh but I’m not alone, I know too many people that still use their Pentium 2 and 3 computers with windows 98, I guess it’s because changing hardware in argentina has the same economical blow as sending a satellite to Jupiter. Which is nothing compared to how much consoles cost here (The Wii is currently at… 2100 pesos, or around 700 dollars).
June 22nd, 2008 at 8:31 pm
What i cant understand this days is that people pay 600$ just for a video card, and there is no games to use then. After microsoft make the xbox, the pc games release are almost 2 or 3 per year (i mean good games), in the past there where more than 10 tittles, good ones. Now pc games are just ports from consola games (mass effect like example).
Soo why this war with video cards if there is just few games out there to use the cards… (crysis?? just for one game bad coded? lol).