Picture: Worth 1000 Words, Costs 5000

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 22, 2012

My favorite death in the original Zork adventure game came from my attempt to brush my teeth using a tube of what appeared (according to the description) to be toothpaste.  Apparently, it was actually “All-Purpose Gunk,” a kind of fast-acting glue. The result was… well, it was actually hilarious, and not entirely unexpected. But one of the fun things about text adventure games in those days was how you could explore the possibility space with the text parser. Sadly, most of the time it only ended in irritation as the game refused to recognize a seemingly obvious approach to solve a problem. But occasionally, particularly Infocom games, your more bizarre actions would be rewarded with some amusing text, or at least recognition that the game was responding to your request.

Is this doable with graphics? Maybe not at the time, with 48k computers, but eventually. The Space Quest games were somewhat notorious with their graphical death-scenes. No doubt each of those death scenes cost considerably more than the quick two or three sentences it took to describe my demise in Zork. Actually, said death scenes were frequently re-used, and included a sentence or two of captions to give the animations a stronger context and more amusing.

But here’s the problem: As graphics get more realistic, we naturally tend to represent all interactions with graphics and animations. But as the realism goes up, so does the expense.

Therefore… interactions are getting more expensive.  ‘Cuz of realistic graphics.

When faced with budgetary concerns (and we always are), game producers / project managers are therefore encouraged to cut interactions.

Without breaking too many rules of predicate logic, we can suggest here that more realistic graphics has had a chilling effect on the level of interactivity. I hesitate to equate “gameplay” (game mechanics) with the level of interactivity – as great gameplay is not necessarily sacrificed as interactivity goes down (often the opposite), but certain kinds of games are potentially negatively affected.  In particular, RPGs and adventure games, which have a greater emphasis on experimentation and exploration than most other genres.

As an example – let’s say there’s a spell that in an RPG causes characters to “hulk out” and go on a rampage. Naturally, you’d want to see that (Heck, I’d LOVE to see Chloe “Hulk Out” in Frayed Knights).  But this would result in serious model changes and new animations for every potential target of the spell in the game.  We then have three choices: Suck up the cost, simplify the representation, or cut the feature. Simplifying the representation might mean doing the old trick of throwing a particle cloud or icon over a character (a la “Berserk” in many Final Fantasy games) to abstractly represent this state. It’d be nowhere near as cool as seeing a realistic hulk-out effect, but may be the best compromise.

Or not. Video games remain a visual medium, and short-changing the visuals is not often a recipe for success, particularly in the highly competitive, hit-driven AAA side of the fence.

Another option that occurred to me just after writing this article (while thinking about the above Final Fantasy shortcut) is to tightly constrain the interaction – reduce it to a (repeatable?) cut-scene. This allows a scaled-down version of the interaction without all the messy variables of different contexts.

I think this is one reason why I’m remain excited about the “retro” trend in indie games. Yeah, sure, they aren’t quite as viscerally satisfying as their more graphically over-the-top cousins, but by being liberated somewhat from the need to show every interaction in exacting detail, they have potential access to a larger library of interactions beyond “Buy,” “Shoot,” and “Destroy.”

Is there a fifth option? More? Another way to compromise?

Filed Under: Adventure Games, Art, Retro - Comments: 6 Comments to Read



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