(Author’s Note: The idea for an entry on this topic has been floating in my head for weeks. However, I was thrown for a loop when I read Roberto Flores’s excellent article, “Beyond Realism.” This article was originally intended to cover much of the same ground. Instead, it will serve as a bit of an art history primer [reader beware!] as well the first part of a response to Roberto’s question, “where do video game graphics go from here?”)

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I’ve wanted to make video games since I was a kid – not just because I enjoyed playing them myself, but because the process of game creation fascinated me.  When I was a high school junior in 2003, my dad took me to Seattle, Washington to visit the Digipen Institute of Technology, which I was interested in attending. I remember trying to explain to my dad exactly why I wanted a career in video games: I told him that the video game industry was poised to enter an era of unheralded creativity due to the approaching limits that technology was reaching in its attempt to emulate real-world experiences, and that in the next five to ten years, what a game looked like would stop mattering so much, as opposed to the level of uniqueness the experience gave the player. In other words, the focus would shift from an emphasis on realism, to an emphasis on experimenting with form and content. He seemed intrigued, if a little confused (I think he still is, but I know he’s proud.) I told him this was why video games excited me more than any other form of entertainment.

And hey, it turns out I was right. The last few years have seen major strides in the success of games that don’t push graphics to the next level, but turn traditional concepts of game design on their head. Braid, Mega Man IX – can anyone imagine these games having mainstream appeal during the previous console generation? I can’t.  Would they have even gotten made? Probably not. And look at the Wii – while much of its success can be attributed to its clever branding by Nintendo as The System Your Grandma Can Enjoy Playing, it’s hard to believe that a product with inferior technological prowess compared to other products on the market would have made any commercial impact in, say, 2001. The reason the Wii has been successful isn’t because it emulates the experiences of those on the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. Rather, it’s created a whole new vocabulary of game play experiences. In fact, when you look at the evolution of video games, nothing about the last thirty years of advancements gives us precedent for some of the things we’ve seen achieve both critical success and commercial viability in the last three years. 

So how did I magically predict that all this was going to happen when I was 17 years old? It’s certainly not because I’m smart. It’s just a matter of history repeating itself.

Since before the time of Christ, paintings, drawings, sculptures and the like have been, by and large, representational in nature; the function they served has been to convey the effect of looking at an actual person, place, or object. In some cases, this was done with strict attention to detail and a diligent focus on anatomy, form, and space (Ancient Rome and Greece, High Renaissance Europe,) in other cases with a visual representation reliant on a nod to conventions of the period (Ancient Egypt, Byzantine Empire.) Regardless of the efficiency, relative beauty, or technique utilized throughout the ages, this was always the primary intention of these forms of art. 

This changed dramatically with the advent of the modern camera in the mid 19^th century. Although the technology was not put into truly mainstream use until Kodak’s introduction of the “Brownie” in 1900, for many artists this signaled the end of their usefulness as artists - as a tool of representation, the camera was superior to the hand of a painter in terms of efficiency and ease. Why hire a person to do what a machine can do better, and for less money?

However, this by no means signaled the collapse of fine art or its significance. On the contrary, it ushered in a new era of renewed interest in the arts, and over the century and a half, every rule of art was either broken or turned on its head.  Claude Monet and the Impressionists used visible brushstrokes to evoke texture and explored the dynamic qualities of light, creating works of art out of mundane scenes. Fauvists like Henry Matisse eschewed an emphasis on figural representation and focused on color usage. Dadaist art ushered in the era of the avant-garde, soundly rejecting preconceived notions of what art was or was not.                                                   

Although the pursuit to achieve or highlight visual virtuosity in the world of fine art didn’t happen in as straight a line as in the video game world, the parallels are obvious. It stands to reason that it might continue to evolve along similar lines once the so-called “uncanny valley” is reached. So where do video game graphics go from here?

The evolution of graphical fidelity doesn’t just tell us where video game graphics will go – it tells us a lot about the relatively less important role mirroring reality may play in the coming years, and how games might use new, hitherto unexplored methods of gameplay to draw us into their worlds. In layman's terms, the future of video game graphics won't just decide what our games look like, but what they feel like and play like as well.