Realism. You see it toted around on the backs of game boxes and spoken so often at game expos. More games claim to be the most realistic game to date than movies claim to be the best film of the summer or the only movie you want to see this year.
Realistic graphics, realistic physics, realistic weapons… The list goes on. The big thing has been realism since gaming consoles evolved beyond chipset tunes and repeating sprite backgrounds. It has typically spurred good changes in the industry such as a goal for more powerful gaming consoles and improved the quality of voice acting in every genre, yet only recently has it gone out of control.
I, and I know countless others, who play video games to escape real life. I would rather pull out an unrealistic laser cannon than be stuck with a small little gun that has the horrible limitations of ammo. I would rather jump from rooftop to rooftop to be a cool ninja than to be stuck barely hopping a few feet off the ground. I would love a game where you blow someone up and candy and confetti pour out of their wounds than graphic gore.
I know I do not speak for everyone in every single instance of the world, nor do I only want those things. I am only setting out points to show that realism is not always king nor can it always be accurately portrayed in video games. I won’t even get into an argument on realistic games rotting our children’s brains as such things are quite silly. Now, I want a piñata-killing game…
Why Is Everything So Dark?
I don’t know about you, but I have vision problems. My eyes are terrible. I still, however, have not had as much issue seeing things in real life as much as I do in “realistic” games. Never have I seen a real world occasion where everything is as brown or dark as half of the war games on the market nowadays. Recently they seem to have pulled away from this, but to prevent relapse, it needs to be battered into several game developer’s heads that real life is not brown. Someone needs to steal their tan-tinted goggles or whatever else made some people think such a stupid thing as the outside world being eternally overcast by russet clouds.
Then there are the games that try to portray a real life night time… Where everything is black. Pitch black. Nope, you don’t get any help. This may be helpful in horror games to set the mood, but every other genre needs to lighten things up. If I get asked to find a black box on the side of a black building in the pitch black of a moonless night again, I shall scream.
Yes, realistically humans cannot see much at night without the help of lights? So what? We want to be able to see the amount of work you put into the enemies and environment in a game. We need to be able to see the doorway to know where to go next without running around aimlessly in a single corridor for half an hour. Dark settings are fine. Darkness to add to suspense is fine. Having a game where you cannot see what you need to see is just frustrating.
I’m Not Quite Sure but I Think Someone Is Shooting Me
One of the more recent, relatively speaking, achievements in making games more realistic is to completely remove any sort of visible user interface or heads up display. After all, it only makes sense as we don’t have a menu or health bar floating around us in real life, right? We have to rely on these magical things called nerves to know how much we are hurting or if we can pick up an object to interact with it.
The problem comes in that our nerves only work with our body. Our own physical form is the only thing we can feel. We cannot feel how much mister random soldier on screen is hurt. If there was a game where you could, well, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to play it. This is why the user interface was created and why we need one.
I’m not asking for the entire lower half of the screen like the old original first person shooters or something to clog up the four corners of a screen. Not every game needs everything either. I don’t need to know how much ammo I have in a Mario game nor do I need to know how many Power Stars I have every five seconds in Call of Duty. I would, however, like a more concrete way to know my character is dying other than… My screen is flashing red slightly more than it was flashing a second ago.
Not to mention, in several of these games where the only heads up display is the flashing red when you’re injured, your wounds will heal after the screen stops its annoying crimson blinking. That doesn’t seem very realistic to me. I don’t think I’d heal from five bullet wounds in about thirty seconds. It seems kind of pointless to me to make a game more realistic by deleting that ancient piece of hardware known as a health bar and instead adding in the –obviously- much more believable magical mutant healing powers. I’m certain humanity will figure out little robots to fly above your head to show how long you have to live well before we figure out how to heal from a shotgun blast as if it were a prick on the finger.
This isn’t only true for health. I want to know I’m low on ammunition –before- my gun starts clicking. If I’m in a free flowing overworld where I can head wherever I want at any time, I want a map to know where I’m going. If I have a time limit, I want to know exactly how much time I do indeed have. Cutting back on excess junk is great! But cutting back on what you need is quite the opposite.
Talk… Talk… Talk… Talk… Can I Flirt Now? No… Talk…
Thankfully this last big moment of too much realism seems to mostly be contained to a single genre of games. The simulation. Back to my original point; why do we often play games? To get away from real life. Why do we want to get away from real life? Because it’s often more boring than the alternative.
Why would I spend half an hour watching a character read a book inside a video game when I could very easily go over there and read a book? The Sims rests on such a precarious fence between reality and virtual reality that it has to be mentioned in this. I’m not saying the game is terrible, it’s obviously not with the amount of people I constantly hear about getting addicted to it. Yet, I’m not saying it is perfect either. It does its job of being a reality simulator where you can control a family that (you hope) has a better life than your own. Yet, there are several points where it brings in the tedium of real life where it doesn’t need to.
One of the biggest challenges of the game is finding time to get everything done in a day. You need to eat, sleep, socialize, take care of your business, work, and so on. Yet, due to the time being cut down, many activities take far too much percentage of a day. If I wanted to stress about not having enough time to do everything in a day, I would play more video games… Wait, not the best example.
What I am trying to say here is that it seems the Sims brought in way too many of the boring or tedious elements of our lives and made them still boring and tedious in the game. While, yes, for a true reality simulator the Sims still need to use the restroom. However, the developers could have made showers not take two hours of in-game time. Nor does it take half an hour to take out the trash. Or pay your bills.
And it isn’t simply real life simulators that pose problems of too much reality. Job simulators also seem prone to bring in far too much of the tedium of the task and not enough of the fun. By job simulators, I mean the various “Tycoon” titles or similar things such as Evil Genius. Evil Genius is certainly a great example of a game that brought in too much of the trouble of the task. You have five stats to worry about on every single henchman, visitor to your island, and enemy. You have to watch henchmen all over the globe constantly. You have to monitor your base constantly to properly tag every foe or visitor so your henchmen know what to do with them. You have to constantly deal with every inch of your base’s construction and maintenance. You have to manage henchmen training and recruitment. You have to control your biggest henchmen’s abilities. You have to manage money, stolen goods, and doomsday weapon products. All. At. Once. I’m sure I’m missing several things. The only way to succeed in the game is to be able to multi-task the ever-loving snot out of your island and its inhabitants. All of the work you have to do tends to over shadow the fun you’re having, which is a shame on such a fun concept. It makes you wonder when you’ll be getting your check in the mail for managing such a huge company… if you do so successfully.
Realism is a great step to improving games in general, yet with every single human advancement made, there are people that still persist in mucking it all up. Trial and error is how we seem to succeed as an industry, so hopefully we will have less people repeating the errors.
