Videogames are capable of creating worlds. Amazingly believable worlds, worlds you accept as fact. Worlds of their own internal logic completely divorced from our own. It's that believable part that I find so remarkable. Who upon playing Super Mario Bros for the first time ever asked why there are floating cubes with question marks on them that dispense either money, mushrooms that upon being eaten double your mass, flowers that spew balls of bouncing flame, stars that make a person nigh unstoppable except in the cases of endless voids...that are spread rather liberally about the landscape? These things are ridiculous and yet we don't question them for an instant. Just like in our dreams, the existence of something is it's own justification. Context is not needed, it is what it is. I think this is one of the greatest abilities of videogames as an art form. How easily it can craft it's own believable surrealism.
I think videogames in their purest form are surrealistic by nature. They exist not to extend our reality as a simulation, but to escape reality into one that has been carefully crafted by some one else. They give us something that we can't go outside and easily get. The kind of flight simulators that pilots use aren't what would be traditionally called a videogame. The Sims is a videogame, Autocad programs for people that draft for a living aren't. These are extremes, but to prove a point. Once something simply becomes a utilitarian simulation it starts to lose it's value as a videogame experience. It's the unreality that propels us towards videogames, the ability to lose ourselves in something utterly unlike our day to day experience.
Videogames of the most modern variety seek to stamp out surrealism for realism whenever possible. To create world devoid of illogic, where everything has context. Where everything acts predictably, sensibly, realistically. Videogames today seek to leave behind the Quake 3 model of flying through the air, running fifty miles an hour, absorbing multiple direct hits from hand held rocket launchers, elaborate nonsensical architecture filled with floating platforms, portals, and antigravity springboards in outer space. Instead they seek the COD model of brown and grey warehouses, barely able to jump two vertical feet, take two bullets from a hand gun, brick, mortar, cement, real world grittyness (thank the gods they at least still heal miraculously like wolverine). Realism has become the goal, which is disapointing to say the least.
Let's be clear. I'm not saying videogames as an artform cannot in any way reflect reality. I will be picking up Heavy Rain just like everyone else. I think like books and movies, they can indeed reflect reality if doing so will in some way convey or express an idea befitting it. What I'm saying is that videogames draw their strength from their unreality, from their ability to create worlds that cannot exist outside of them, and (most importantly) give us the ability to interact with worlds that cannot exist outside of them. The goal should not be to elimate that unreality at every available opprotunity to create something mundane and believable. Even the unrealistic games seek to impose realistic worlds. Dante may be slaying demons, but he's doing it in worlds made to be believable by how closely they resemble our own. Link's world in the original wasn't believable because it had trees and we relate to trees. It was believable because we were there and we were interacting with it so we must believe it. Yes, there are huge cavernous dungeons potentially under every rock if you push hard enough, lizards will come out of the water and spit rocks at your head, every bizarre little creature may have money on him, and you can instantly convert that money into arrows to fire at your foes, If you're health is top notch your sword shoots lasers, It's believable because you're doing it. This is why you don't question the absurdities in your dreams, this is why we don't question the worlds created in our Videogames.
I do not call for the end of realism in gaming. Rather I just think it would be great if not every major developer was trying to push that magical surrealism that is at the heart of videogames to the wayside in an attempt to make things believable by mimicing our own world. I like being able to tell the difference between the evening news and a videogame without having to check to see if there is a controller in my hands. I put it to developers, Don't be afraid to make a game where platforms can float around for no reason, your character can fly if he eats an acorn he found, and a teleporting racoon keeps telling you to seek out tomatos. It's ok if it doesn't make sense, we'll believe you anyway.
You can find me on facebook as Markus Van Rijn, if you friend me just mention you're from VGchartz and who you are here.
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