Video games have stopped looking like video games
Joseph Smith
Issue date: 9/22/09 Section: Features
Back in the late 80s, Nintendo was the only name in the video game industry. In those days, video games were portals that could transport gamers to distant lands, where new adventures were waiting to be discovered. So…what happened to that?
Nowadays, if a video game looks too much like a video game, hardcore gamers-many of whom grew up with those kinds of games, no less-refuse to have anything to do with it. These gamers will look at Mario and say, "These guys are plumbers? Dude, that's lame!" They will look at The Legend of Zelda and ask, " Does that guy have a fairy with him? Aw, that's SO lame!"
These days, many games not created by Nintendo are set in a post-apocalyptic future where, apparently, the only colors left on the planet are gray, black, and brown. Video games are meant to show creativity, but it is kind of hard to be creative when you are trying to be "Gears of Spider Man 2: Guns of the Patriots".
The biggest problem with trying to make a video game realistic is trying to instill video game logic into a realistic world. Let us say I am playing a game-we will use a first person shooter for this example-and it tells me I have to find "the red key" to open the door in front of me. Even if the game did not have realistic graphics, this scenario would make no sense, and makes even less sense when the game is set in a realistic-looking world. I just blew up a tank with a rocket launcher, but I cannot use that same rocket launcher to blow up a wooden door?
This situation revolves around a technological term known as the Uncanny Valley, which was first observed by roboticist Masahiro Mori. Basically, the more closely robots approximate human appearance and behavior, the more familiar they seem to a human observer, until a point at which they resemble humans closely, but not perfectly.
Once this point is reached, people begin to act negatively towards robots, citing feelings of eeriness or discomfort about their appearance. Mori calls this shift "the uncanny valley," because of the way a graph depicting the correlation between familiarity and human likeness would dip suddenly and drastically, just before reaching perfect mimicry of the human appearance.
Nowadays, if a video game looks too much like a video game, hardcore gamers-many of whom grew up with those kinds of games, no less-refuse to have anything to do with it. These gamers will look at Mario and say, "These guys are plumbers? Dude, that's lame!" They will look at The Legend of Zelda and ask, " Does that guy have a fairy with him? Aw, that's SO lame!"
These days, many games not created by Nintendo are set in a post-apocalyptic future where, apparently, the only colors left on the planet are gray, black, and brown. Video games are meant to show creativity, but it is kind of hard to be creative when you are trying to be "Gears of Spider Man 2: Guns of the Patriots".
The biggest problem with trying to make a video game realistic is trying to instill video game logic into a realistic world. Let us say I am playing a game-we will use a first person shooter for this example-and it tells me I have to find "the red key" to open the door in front of me. Even if the game did not have realistic graphics, this scenario would make no sense, and makes even less sense when the game is set in a realistic-looking world. I just blew up a tank with a rocket launcher, but I cannot use that same rocket launcher to blow up a wooden door?
This situation revolves around a technological term known as the Uncanny Valley, which was first observed by roboticist Masahiro Mori. Basically, the more closely robots approximate human appearance and behavior, the more familiar they seem to a human observer, until a point at which they resemble humans closely, but not perfectly.
Once this point is reached, people begin to act negatively towards robots, citing feelings of eeriness or discomfort about their appearance. Mori calls this shift "the uncanny valley," because of the way a graph depicting the correlation between familiarity and human likeness would dip suddenly and drastically, just before reaching perfect mimicry of the human appearance.
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