This week I’m here to talk about realism in games and games as simulations. As was the case with a couple of my previous blogs some of the points here may be a little on the obvious side, but I think it’s always good to reaffirm this stuff and believe me there is an eventual point to all of this. Before we get into the meat of this particular post though, I’d like to thank Sweep for making this part of the Giant Bomb Blog Initiative. On the off-chance you’ve not yet heard of it, the Blog Initiative is an effort to reinvigorate the blogging scene on Giant Bomb by getting the most notable of Giant Bomb’s bloggers to collectively produce 30 consecutive days of blog posts. So, if you’ve thought about blogging yourself, now is a great time to start and a great time to give some encouragement to your fellow bloggers in the Giant Bomb community.

The Misunderstanding

There seems to be an interesting correlation between how much people know about video games and how much they think the point of a video game is for it to act as a simulation. It’s been a long-held misbelief of people outside of video games that the fun of games comes entirely from them being a simulation of a certain activity, and the idea of gameplay as a source of enjoyment is often forgotten. Surprisingly though, it also appears that even many who do play video games still mistakenly believe that games are primarily simulations and that realism by default makes a game better.

Perhaps one the most prominent misunderstandings of how realism affected games was when the Wii was first shown. It had been a recurring trope of science fiction that motion control gaming would be the way of the future and for some the potentially more realistic input that the Wii would provide seemed like a revolution in games controls. In a way, it was, but not in the way that motion control was going to supersede traditional control schemes. A slightly similar effect can be observed now with the way that some people seem to be assuming that 3D entertainment and by extension 3D gaming are the future, simply because things popping out of the screen is “more realistic” to some.

In fact pretty consistently there have been a certain group people turning their noses up at the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises and the people who play them, because they involve people “pretending” to play real instruments. Never mind it being an accessible approximation of playing an instrument with more immediate, precise and frequent feedback and reward than playing an instrument, all they see was that it was a simulation of an activity they enjoy and started scoffing.

Realism in Gameplay

In terms of gameplay the goal of the designer if of course to create a set of rules that make the game as enjoyable as possible and the rules of the real-world often don’t make a good fit to this. Compared to the kinds of rules we usually see in video games, the real-world is imbalanced, restrictive and full of lots of obligatory but rather boring tasks. That’s not to say that realism can’t be of benefit to a game, most games are after all trying to be simulations to some degree, but more realism alone does not make a game more fun.

Some games try to veer further towards realistic elements than others, but generally games are more widely accepted not when they’re realistic but when they deliver information more openly and clearly than the real-world does, when they’re much simpler than the real-world is, when on a relative scale players can get much larger rewards than they would in the real-world and when players can have a much larger impact on the game world than they would on the real-world. Having players die more quickly from fire in FPS games may be a realistic addition that works within the style of the game design the developers are going for, but in itself it doesn’t make that FPS game better than other FPS game, just like it wouldn’t make Mario any better than other platformers if you gave him a more realistic jump height.

Of course you could argue that there is one genre of game that is purely devoted to realism and that’s the simulators. I think to a certain extent this is a valid statement, but many of the simulators out there can’t really be described as games. They often have no or few goals, rewards or otherwise game-like structures and even if we do accept them as games they are part of a very niche market.

Realism Elsewhere

An argument is often made that more realistic graphics make a game better and realistic graphics work if you’re trying to make your game look like the real world, but realistic graphics do not by any means work to the benefit of all games. Many art styles in and outside of the world of video games thrive on artistic liberties being taken with how things look in reality, or downright abstraction being used. For games like Team Fortress 2 and Kirby’s Epic Yarn it’s the specific brand of “unrealism” in their graphics which makes them brilliant.

As for narrative content, few fictional works like to conform too close to reality, but video games may be the frontrunners at using unrealistic and sometimes downright insane plots and world-building to bring us experiences that are genuinely enjoyable. From Bioshock to Katamari Damacy, video games have shown that when done right, bending and circumventing the rules of the real-world either in major or minor ways can have a huge positive impact on the narrative and/or premise of your games.

The Reality of the Situation

What really makes a creative work good isn’t realism, a lack of realism or even a balance between the two, it’s realism or the lack of it being used well. The whole idea that realism improves something seems to stem from the idea that if something closely mimics the real-world it is more believable and so more immersive.

In actuality works do not need realism to immerse the person enjoying them, and what’s more important to keeping the player/viewer/reader (etc.) engaged is not realism but consistency in how realistic the work is trying to be. A work which is trying to be surreal can’t have random moments of seriousness injected into it and likewise many games, movies, etc. have been damaged by trying to present a serious world, but where moments of ludicrousness are thrown into the mix. This is actually where the person consuming the game/movie/book/whatever is jarred out of their normal state and realises something is wrong.

The Problem

People outside of video games mistaking the medium for being simulations more than games may seem at most like a moderate annoyance to us, but I believe it actually represents a big problem for video games as an entertainment medium. When people outside of the gaming world look at a video games, they often don’t see a twitch-based FPS, an open-world action-adventure game or a deep and complex RTS, they see a game about shooting people, a game about killing zombies, a game about commanding an alien army, and yes this is a good chunk of what our games are about, but when first impressions show the narrative and aesthetic of our medium but not the gameplay, people don’t just miss a big part of what makes video games enjoyable, they miss the unique and fundamental component that no other entertainment medium apart from video games has.

I’m not saying that we’ll ever see or even that we should see a time where people gravitate towards games for the gameplay no matter what aesthetics they have, but the public is very unfamiliar with gameplay as entertainment (or at least the specific kind of gameplay video games tend to use) and so the exact charm of the video game is often lost. Hopefully this is starting to be rectified now that motion control games, Facebook games and iPad/iPhone games are all the rage, and this misconception over simulation is by no means the only thing that has made video games less popular in the general public than other entertainment mediums, but I think we have a long way to go before people really understand gameplay and how it presents itself as part of an entertainment experience. Thank you for reading.

-Gamer_152