https://youtu.be/2Qq-6wByLPI
Complete English subtitles by yours truly, so don't worry if you don't speak our froggy language.
We often talk about ecology on here, and we often talk about video games, so I thought it would be interesting to look at both things in conjunction.
I'm honestly almost happy at the possibility of the meaningless technological race discontinuing and people focusing more on videogames themselves rather than how detailed or graphically impressive it is.
The gaming world has demonstrated over and over again that good graphics literally do not mean anything, and that something as graphically primitive as Dwarf Fortress can be just as immersive as Crysis because the human brain has the ability to fill in the blanks with imagination and visualization.
Not to mention that creating graphically intensive games takes a massive amount of resources away from actually focusing on the gameplay, which also shows, with many games basically trying to be interactive movies or falling into the walking simulator category.
Binding of Isaac has been one of my favorite games that I played recently and that game has the graphics of a fucking glorified Flash game. I also constantly play Doom mods which are also extremely graphically simple.
It simply does not make sense to pour so much effort into having a high polygon count if it forces game devs into working for shitty greedy corporations while having nauseatingly enormous teams that end up releasing a game that is more of a carefully engineered cash grab than a work of art.
And the weirdest thing is that ultra high graphics never even felt particularly good to me because they paradoxically disconnect me from the game a lot more than something stylized or more blatantly videogamey, it is no accident why games like Half Life feel so nice.
definitively? i'd claim the latest EA/DICE games beat Crysis in visuals, but i guess there's something more under the surface?
I don't know, they look sort of nicer in some respects but I would not say that they drop dead defeat it, it's like a victory by an inch sort of situation.
that's interesting actually, I found myself more immersed into STALKER than I ever was into Crysis. IMO graphical fidelity isn't important as long as you can provide an immersive and atmospheric experience with your graphics
I feel like we're going to hit 2098 and we'll still be struggling to hit 30fps at 1080p because now each individual skin pore needs thousnds of polygons and specialised lighting effects.
We could also utilize careful stylization a lot more. Silent Hill 1 has a very cool unintentional stylization effect where all the game models sort of jiggle and warp a little bit which makes it look even more like the nightmare it's supposed to be.
Relatively recently I also discovered a Silent HIll inspired game called Harrow which has an intentional low fi effect throughout.
tbh I feel like HL2, a game in 2004, has better face animation than more than half of the games released today.
It also stands as being massively exemplar in the area of atmosphere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afup1rayMiA
It's a shame that focusing so much on graphical fidelity was highly encouraged in the gaming industry. Look at random Steam reviews and you'll notice a considerable amount of reviews (obviously not professional game critics) always include a criteria for graphics, and then you think for a moment - are you telling me this person isn't going to buy a game like West of Loathing where the childish graphics are part of the charm?
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It's sad to think how much money that went into visual tech could have been spent on art and other, more subtle intricacies that make a game good.
Undoubtedly, the majority of effort and budget needs to go into gameplay, gamefeel, and personality rather than how much detail the graphics have. It's ten times more charming to play an indie game that has cartoonish graphics and stellar gameplay than an indie game with underwhelming gameplay and ULTRA REALISTIC TO THE MAX faces, and not even indie games specifically.
Graphical advancement didn't end, it's simply in a lull until 12bit color and ray tracing are standardized as well as other platforms. We haven't even ever hit kind of good enough in modeling in non-cutscene assets.
Several of crysis' assets are old as balls and look it.
People used to point to Jurassic Park and the Prequels and the Matrix trilogy (lol) as unbeatable, just so good no more advancement is necessary; and today they look 'good enough for the time', and games aren't any different.
This isn't even touching there are tons of indie games based directly around ultimate playability and strength of concept and 'immaculate stylization' that sell well enough to be a blip on a radar for the hipster cred and that's as far as that shit goes. For Ori there a literally a hundred 'pixel hipster' games just clogging up the page of a sale site.
The race for more better graphics is not only alive, but Intel is fixing to attempt to kick it back into high gear again after AMD failed to keep up with nVIdia's barrage of heavy handed marketing and mandatory feature creep.
As for the paradigm of games themselves, they're already in the process of replacing movies and television, and even with "degrowth" as he puts it, they're still going to replace non-interactive entertainment to a large degree.
On his point of materials for games, uhm japan and africa, both have more of shtta shit than we can use even at our current ridiculous rate for the next two centuries or even double our current use.
And lastly the author needs to google yellowstone caldera and younger-dryas if he thinks the current shit is the end times; the current bullshit is the flu comparatively speaking to shit that has happened in the past.
I'm sort of split when it comes to this. I feel like a lot of games simply wouldn't have been the same had they not been as breathtakingly beautiful and advanced as they are/were. Main examples on the top of my head being Half-Life, Half-Life 2, FarCry, Oblivion, Crysis, and The Witcher 3
Still not exactly an ugly game though is it from a graphical fidelity standpoint?
I feel that one of the reasons why people point to the Matrix trilogy is that they sort of have a point. While plenty of modern films do beat it in terms of CGI detail, it's kind of difficult to top it in terms of its sheer personality and variety of things that happens in it. It's not just about fidelity, it's also about complexity.
I do not believe that movies are going to go extinct, although I am definitely hoping to some kind of reform in the popular media regarding what is being released. If videogames somehow were to replace movies then a large portion of them would no longer really be labeled as videogames I think, and would become entirely their own beast.
The video was not just talking about the raw quantity of resources available, he was also talking about the raw quantities of energy required to extract it and the fossil fuels that are paradoxically consumed to create renewable which cause the reportedly imminent global warming thread that could have apocalyptic consequences if we do not do shit about it literally NOW. So even if we started mining all of that shit we would still be faced with the whole fossil fuel bullshit and the apparent imminent apocalypse as the result of it.
The video presents the notion that we have to fundamentally change into a post modern (or I guess post whatever we are living in now) civilization in order to stay even remotely functional and avoid nightmare scenarios.
The planet is not the problem, the state of our civilization is the problem. If 90% of all life on Earth got wiped out from a fucked up volcanic eruption the planet would be completely fine in several hundreds of millions of years, the human civilization on other hand would be considerably less happy as a result.
A special form of Blinn's Law, which states that rendering times will remain constant as computers continue to grow more powerful, because the more powerful our computers become, the more we throw at them.
Replace "rendering times" with "framerates," and I think it actually holds up pretty well.
Well atleast we will get to run Counter Strike: Source at 10k fps.
I'd like to throw Halo 1 in there too. The constant use of programmable shaders looks fucking great, plus Bungie hit it out of the park with their full 3D skyboxes. It even had subtle things like the sun filtering through the trees (a very Bungie thing to do, the effect is even missing on every rerelease since the Xbox original)
It looks simple compared to Halo 2 (which nowadays doesn't look so hot due to Bungie's use of normals and bumpmaps out the ass) but it nailed the style. Still one of the best looking games on Xbox.
Fuck, I miss Halo 1-3 Bungie.
Okay, I partially agree with you and partially don't. For example, I loved the Fallout 3 side quests, but I definitely felt more immersed in Fallout 4, especially in 4K, despite the fact its side quests were mostly kinda boring/lacklustre.
There are definitely some games I can get totally immersed in like Total War or even Hearts of Iron III/Crusader Kings/Europa Universalis 4, etc., so I definitely see your point, but I also think graphics have a role, even if not as significant as some other factors, in provoking immersion.
He's talking about what is said in the video. Something Genkaz already mentioned as well. Putting aside the fact that some rare earths (since, you know, there are several types of them) like indium which are slated to become unprofitable in the next 10 years regardless of labor costs, there's the little known fact that profitability isn't the only thing we should pay attention to. Extracting those resources consumes a lot of energy, which in turn emits a lot of CO2, and it will only get less efficient and more polluting as reserves dwindle.
The point is that, if we're to remain below a 2°C global increase in temperature, and stay under the carbon threshold that requires, we can't get away with extracting more than a fraction of what we currently mine. This means curbing if not outright stopping the gaming components race, and keeping the same components for more than a decade rather than upgrade every four to six years. This is of particular importance given that renewable energy also requires rare earths and it should obviously be prioritized.
To be honest though, gameplay is what's important. Yes, graphics are cool and all that, but I still play Half LIfe 1 mods and HL2 stuff, so graphics staying relatively the same is not going to cause video games to die.
I didn't watch all of the video, but mainly because of how many disagree ratings it had kinda put me off, as that usually means lots of cringe. Apologies for that though, as I've obviously missed some key information.
Funnily enough, that's also the author's conclusion. That this paradigm shift won't necessarily lead to a less interesting scene.
It has nothing to do with cringe, it's basically a 40 minutes documentary about why we're going down the path of civilizational collapse and what role video games have in it. It mainly consists of experts interviews and presentations linked together by the author to create an encompassing debate.
As Cigarettes said, I have no idea why so many people rated it disagree (or dumb). I assume they haven't watched the video since none of them have provided counterpoints here. They probably saw the thumbnail, thought it was talking about another 1983 video game crash, rated it accordingly and went on with their day. One thing I've learned from my years on FP is that sometimes posts get piled on with ratings for the dumbest of reasons and you can't really refer to them as accurate indicators of quality.
Yeah, this is the folly with the ratings system - it can prime us to expect something. I also find that if a post is rated with one dumb rating, people are far more likely to follow mob mentality and begin spamming that rating. It's one of the arguments against the rating system in general. It was wrong of me not to watch the whole video and I apologise for doing that - it was bad etiquette.
I can understand not reusing some medical supplies for safety reason, but if you mention it I assume a large part of that waste could be prevented.
The thing with sobriety is that it's impossible to achieve under the current system. There's a reason companies now make flimsy, fragile products rather than sturdy and reliable ones, and it's not technical limitations. Even if everybody suddenly decided to limit they environmental impact to a minimum and adopt more sober livestyles, we'd still have to rely on those short-lived tools because no company in the world would be interested in making ones that last a lifetime.
Sobriety can't work as an individual decision, our entire infrastructure need to be re-thought accordingly, and that can't be done when there are private interests around every corner. And that's without even going down the rabbit hole that is corporate lobbyism...
Just watched the whole video and the premise is that in order to keep up with climate change, we need to stop producing new consoles and new games, and current games and systems should be taken to be rented. even going so far as to say that buying games on steam should be an act of "rental"
to that I say:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6ZUfjmW1XM
We can keep making new games, we just need to massively curb production of new hardware.
I already feel like we're starting to hit the logical extreme when it comes to graphics in games. Way back when, developers were forced to work around hardware limitations, they still are but the limitations are far less stringent and poor optimization seems more like a sign of negligence than solely the fault of the machines themselves. I'd argue there's nothing you can't portray graphically anymore, you can only make things prettier with reflections and volumetric lighting effects and I find that to be a pretty hollow endeavor because nobody will pay attention to the sweat literally forming out of that guy's facial sweat glands and casting full world reflections when they're too busy shooting at people.
Games are moving more and more towards live service business models and being a social activity instead of a private one. As a predominantly single player who grew up in an era where games sans expansions cost 40€, I'm kinda offended about games becoming more greedy and more focused on social phenomena like E-Sports because it goes from a place of escape and mechanical exploration to a place of financial exploitation and unfriendly competition but considering the indie market still cares for people like me, I can confidently say that video games are not ruined. Only mostly.
I'll still take it over being ostracized for playing video games, though. Boy, those kids sure have it easy.
I disagree. Crysis was primitive in its approach to graphical fidelity and basically took on a brute-force approach that ran everything at 100% all the time with no regards for optimization or clever tricks to keep the visuals with acceptable performance. Further than that, Crysis 1 has no real art direction to speak of and is frankly a really drab game to look at because so little of it feels like there was any legitimate thought behind it other than "rendering this one model will cut 10 fps off the counter, let's put it in". Generally speaking the whole crysis series was an exercise in excess.
I think that right now the PS4 holds the best looking games because they work extra hard to compensate for the limited hardware, both with technical tricks like checkerboard rendering but also with excellent art direction. It's gotten to a point where screenshots legitimately cannot do the games justice.
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