Acceptable Departures from Reality
Video games take a LOT of shortcuts for the sake of convenience. There are certain games designed entirely around the novelty of performing actions in excruciating detail. But for most games, it’s better to distill important actions down to a single button press, even if in real life the action would require a series of focused and precise movements.
For example, reloading a gun is many different motions in real life, with the user pressing and moving multiple components around. Doing it quickly and consistently without jamming or dropping anything takes practice. But in a game, it's distilled down to a single button press. And ammo is magically distributed amongst its clips. Even if you only fired one round and then reloaded, all of the ammo that would remain in the clip is automatically returned to your ammo pool. This is all in service of abstracting the actions down to a concept, giving the player less to worry about and letting them focus on the core aspects of the game.
Inventories are another common area that abstraction is used for the purpose of enjoyment. Game characters can often hold hundreds of pounds worth of various items in their pockets and still move about freely. Unless it’s designed to be an intentional challenge or feature, we don’t need to see them carefully carrying 5 bundles of wood with physics simulations around with their arms. It’s generally more enjoyable for the player to simply have the resource abstracted down to a number.
Lighting up dark places in Tears of the Kingdom is not realistic at all. When you deploy a Brightbloom seed to light up an area, objects in front of the source do not block the beam or cast realistic shadows. This is most likely a concession to account for the fact that the Switch is not powerful enough to spare the resources to realistically simulate light and shadows, but it is also because it serves an intuitive gameplay function. A Brightbloom Seed will light up everything within a certain radius. You don't have to worry about walls or objects obscuring your view with shadows. It's the concept of light filtered through a layer of abstraction that serves to simplify the gameplay in a positive way. And it's perfectly acceptable because the game's world is already abstracted in many other ways. Irrationality is only out of place in a rational world.
Some seem to think that games behaving in a way that is “unrealistic” or overly “video-gamey” is a negative that damages the player’s sense of immersion.However, I would argue that precisely the opposite is true; the more such departures from reality there are, the more immersive a game can become. Games will never be able to fully replicate reality in 1:1 state. There will always be shortcuts one way or another, forced by either the constraints of technology or enjoyability. With fewer forced connections to a reality that games are largely unsuited to recreate, the game can instead forge its own, simpler reality with more freedom to set its own rules. Players have proven repeatedly that they are willing to accept these worlds for what they are and what they are going for. We’ve said it before on this blog, but games don’t have to represent our own reality; we just need to be able to accept the reality the game presents. And that is a much easier proposition if the game aims for a reality games are suited for.
When a high-fidelity human character with realistic animation does something strange, impossible, or unnatural, it can fall into the uncanny valley. The game has already established a higher standard of realism, so when anything in the game inevitably drops below that standard at some point, it is much more noticeable and silly looking than otherwise would be in a game with more abstracted and simple reality. A more cartoonishly designed and animated character in a less rational world gets away with much more than a realistic human in a world that is trying its hardest to pass off as our own. It’s one of the reasons Mario looks so much more natural doing a wall jump than Star Wars: Jedi Survivor’s Cal Kestis does.
For example, reloading a gun is many different motions in real life, with the user pressing and moving multiple components around. Doing it quickly and consistently without jamming or dropping anything takes practice. But in a game, it's distilled down to a single button press. And ammo is magically distributed amongst its clips. Even if you only fired one round and then reloaded, all of the ammo that would remain in the clip is automatically returned to your ammo pool. This is all in service of abstracting the actions down to a concept, giving the player less to worry about and letting them focus on the core aspects of the game.
Inventories are another common area that abstraction is used for the purpose of enjoyment. Game characters can often hold hundreds of pounds worth of various items in their pockets and still move about freely. Unless it’s designed to be an intentional challenge or feature, we don’t need to see them carefully carrying 5 bundles of wood with physics simulations around with their arms. It’s generally more enjoyable for the player to simply have the resource abstracted down to a number.
Lighting up dark places in Tears of the Kingdom is not realistic at all. When you deploy a Brightbloom seed to light up an area, objects in front of the source do not block the beam or cast realistic shadows. This is most likely a concession to account for the fact that the Switch is not powerful enough to spare the resources to realistically simulate light and shadows, but it is also because it serves an intuitive gameplay function. A Brightbloom Seed will light up everything within a certain radius. You don't have to worry about walls or objects obscuring your view with shadows. It's the concept of light filtered through a layer of abstraction that serves to simplify the gameplay in a positive way. And it's perfectly acceptable because the game's world is already abstracted in many other ways. Irrationality is only out of place in a rational world.
Some seem to think that games behaving in a way that is “unrealistic” or overly “video-gamey” is a negative that damages the player’s sense of immersion.However, I would argue that precisely the opposite is true; the more such departures from reality there are, the more immersive a game can become. Games will never be able to fully replicate reality in 1:1 state. There will always be shortcuts one way or another, forced by either the constraints of technology or enjoyability. With fewer forced connections to a reality that games are largely unsuited to recreate, the game can instead forge its own, simpler reality with more freedom to set its own rules. Players have proven repeatedly that they are willing to accept these worlds for what they are and what they are going for. We’ve said it before on this blog, but games don’t have to represent our own reality; we just need to be able to accept the reality the game presents. And that is a much easier proposition if the game aims for a reality games are suited for.
When a high-fidelity human character with realistic animation does something strange, impossible, or unnatural, it can fall into the uncanny valley. The game has already established a higher standard of realism, so when anything in the game inevitably drops below that standard at some point, it is much more noticeable and silly looking than otherwise would be in a game with more abstracted and simple reality. A more cartoonishly designed and animated character in a less rational world gets away with much more than a realistic human in a world that is trying its hardest to pass off as our own. It’s one of the reasons Mario looks so much more natural doing a wall jump than Star Wars: Jedi Survivor’s Cal Kestis does.
Leave a comment