Derailed by Realism: Video Games

I thought I'd flesh out this ol' post with some more specific examples.

Now in my lifetime there have been a number of game titles that have dominated the world (like mini-Michael Jordans) every couple of years. But I'd be hard pressed to think of a game bigger than Street Fighter II, for sheer mindshare in the early 90's.

SF2 was everywhere, in every lobby that an arcade machine could be plugged in. Kids would pump $40 in to these machines on a weekday to try and haduken their way through M. Bison, back when $40 could buy you a house AND a family.

I spent my first $1 on 36 seconds of glorious E. Honda hand slapping action. I would stand back and look at the little 'move guide' laquered onto the arcade whilst other kids played, dreaming of my big moment when I would flawlessly pull off the forwards backwards joystick move that would send Honda through the air.

Even now I feel like crying over discovering how dissapointingly bad I was on my first attempt. Mind you I was much younger than the typical smoking, spiritually crushed arcade frequenters of the era.

Arcades have pretty much gone now in Australia, and good fucking riddence really, they were ineffecient, unwelcoming, unfriendly, expensive ways to go blow your whole day.

But before they died, Mortal Combat appeared, and perhaps making a bigger splash - mortal combat 2.

The hypothesis I'm presenting to you is that 'kids' think they want 'realism' because it's somehow more mature, more intelligent and better executed. They will describe something as more 'real' for being graphic, because they don't know what 'real' is and they don't know what they want, aside from looking childish and stupid. This probably isn't a young kids fault, but almost always those superior to them in age, who make them feel stupid for being a kid, which is what they are and don't do their actual intelligence credit.

Another way of putting it is my old chestnut 'crime fiction is what adults read when they are too embarrassed to read fantasy'.

One caveat though - I'm firmly on the Moorcock side of the Moorcock vs. Tolkein debate, beyond the realm of fiction, but to everything. That is to say, I'm not anti-realism, because I think we should watch, read and play things that are pure escapist fantasy rather than about actual ideas, emotions and social situations. I think either medium works for writing stuff that is 'about' something, which Tolkein was vehemently against (although I've heard 'The Lord of The Rings' was an allagory of Tolkeins views on race).

The thing is that MKI and then MKII with it's 'realistic' character designs, fatalities and what not took over, and wiped Street Fighter off the map, except its loyalists. Myself included. I can remember standing for hours jaw open on bourke st, roughly where JB Hifi is now but a huge arcade used to be - watching a guy play as Shang Tsung on what must have been one of the first Mortal Kombat II arcades. (It may have even been MKIII now that I think about it).

The real question is how did something that looks this bad:


overtake something that looks this good:



Now obviously, what looks good and what looks bad is a tad subjective. But SF2 predated MKI by a year. What I mean is the design element of street fighter, the animated sprites look so much better than the posed digitised photos employed by Mortal Kombat.

Street Fighter series stuck with the animated style to this day and it looks beautiful, Mortal Kombat only adopted animated characters when it went 3d (another dud tech trap in video gaming that ruined many a franchise), and even then they were based on the live action precedents set up by MK1, 2 & 3. That is to say the characters where drab and boring.

Going back now, I forgive Street Fighter II's original crappy graphics (they got modified and upgraded several times over the games ultimate lifespan) to the shitty resolutions available at the time, but from concept art right through to finished game you could tell an actual artist had touched each stage of the game design.

Whereas some crappy hack had borrowed some costumes from a shop for Mortal Kombat.

Just to hammer home the argument, this is what MK4 ended up looking like:


The pursuit of the latest technology and realism to win fans (like a 3rd dimension) ruining the game experience.

Whereas Capcom stuck to it's guns and this is what Street Fighter 3 looked like:



It probably didn't even use the best available tech, drain your processor power or anything, they put their effort into design and execution. Great characters, great story, great look...

It equally applies to other fads like adventure games that went from poorly animated VGA sierra adventure games to live action monstrosities like 7th Guest, 11th Hour etc, or 3d world explorers like Myst and Zork. These tech innovations I feel did nothing but expedite the death of adventure games in the face of 3d shooters.

In turn 3d shooters like wolfenstein and Doom rather than taking a more designed base approach to make the games less monotonous, where replaced by the same games with 'better' graphics like Quake, some one about a cult with a zillion weapons including a baseball bat (I think it was Cult of the Wolf or something), and so fourth. I was never a fan of the first person shooter, but could have been if the efforts had gone into level design, game play and making interesting characters, not trying to accurately sculpt the environments and guns to match something you could actually buy in texas.

All in all, it still isn't 'real' in any real sense. Nobody actually solves their problems with guns, or ends a fight by ripping somebodies head off. If Mortal Kombat was 'real' after each fight you would go to court for manslaughter at the least. If Golden Eye was 'real' you would go deaf from operating machineguns without protective gear and get post traumatic stress disorder from shooting living human beings in plentitude.

realism is a delusion.