Sunday, July 14, 2024

The Difference Between Building a Sand Castle and a Real One

There are common limits imposed upon human imagination and memory. For instance, when I sat down to write this, I burned about 25 minutes trying to remember the name of a French intellectual that was fascinated by the level of sensory information that the average human processes on any given day. As I recall, he sat down in his study and attempted to write a journal that was as exhaustive as humanly possible. Whether it was descriptive, or completely a work of stream of consciousness, I can't recall, but he gave up a few days later after writing some absurd amount of pages. There was just too much to account for. It was the "a picture is worth a thousand words" kind of dilemma. Anyways, I eventually gave up trying to remember his name. If you happen to know it, DM me! 

I very much enjoy open world games, and there are several elements that collectively contribute to their rendering authenticity. Geography, for one, must be close to scale. The density of props and interactable objects in the world must be placed with believable randomness. Structures and buildings must be unique, each with distinguishing features. NPCs must move and act in the environment with convincing variation. And transgressing the given social order must be met with a realistic consequence. Few games, if any, have offered something with this degree of detail and specificity. For the majority of titles, it’s just a crude representation of reality.

Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation describes Disneyland (Chapter 1: The Precession of Simulacra. Section 4 - The Hyperreal and the Imaginary) at length, with it’s segmented districts throughout the park, and how each area represents a microcosm of Americana. The folly, of course, is that each zone is a simulacra, a representation in a series of representations, where the land being represented has no relationship to the original reality. Likewise, when game developers synthesize real life locations into an open world gaming experience, the dev team is inevitably relying on a shared conceptual toolbox of degraded signs and simulacra. The result is that something is always amiss. For instance, in games like Assassin‘s Creed: Odyssey the player is able to sail around the entire Mediterranean world, but each island the player accesses is just a crude distillation. It takes 36 minutes by car to travel from The Temple of Apollo on Naxos to reach Mount Zas, but the player can reach the same location in about 5 minutes in-game, if that. Likewise, the island of Crete (Messara and Pephka) in-game can be ran across in under a half hour. In reality, the island is 260 km long.

Naxos IRL

Environments can have both intensive amounts of detail, as well as a complete lack thereof. It's just a matter of perspective of what's important and what our own attention spans can accommodate. If a player was given the task of traveling 2000 miles of real distance in real time, then nothing would get done. Flying from Los Angeles to London, even going 570 miles per hour, takes about 11 hours. Driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas takes approximately 5 hours to traverse almost 300 miles. In the latter example, most of that space is the Mojave Desert with little to no variation in geography and landmarks. As gamers, we hunger for a sense of scope and realism, but I don’t think we consider how vast (and empty) the real world actually is. With this in mind, the above characterization of Naxos is to the gamer's benefit, even if it thwarts true realism. 

Lately with all the work at Electi Studio, I have reacquainted myself with Fantasy and Sci-fi literature, and the sense of grandeur they evoke. Granted, playing a video game involves the player as a participant in a simulated space. A player can pick up items, traverse obstacles, read and recognize visual cues and text, yet the level of immersion is compromised, once something becomes out of place. In books, at least, the author is selectively futzing with the reader's focus, directing their attention to different aspects of the world. The reader's prerogative is to then fill out the space procedurally with novel contextualization. "A hero walks in to a cave..." Immediately, the reader populates their mind with the image of a cave. "The hero takes a seat on the ground and unpacks a bag of provisions..." The reader then synthesizes the contents of the backpack. Is the cave damp? or is it dry? The author doesn't describe this, but the reader is already feeling the spring water soak through their jeans as they sit. This was my nightmare when working on Hobgoblin as a consultant. I would read something that Mike wrote and the procedural rendering of the scene in my mind would commence, oftentimes differing from his. This is completely normal, obviously, but the work gets complicated when what you see in your head needs to conform to what the author sees in theirs. Mike might describe a colossal cave worm erupting from the ceiling of a cavern, but what recommendations I ultimately make need to conform to his vision. And that's hard, honestly. It's like describing, on a color-blind person's behalf, what red looks like to them to someone who isn't color-blind.  

Worldbuilding aside, in the case of video games and the available technology that is used to render approximations of  the real world, the game developers appear sympathetic to the average gamer seeking better immersion. The invisible walls and poor draw distance are just pragmatism on the developer's part, so that we can enjoy our jaunt in their world without our consoles and PCs catching fire. Technologies like Unreal Engine 5, which can render details so minute that the proprietary term for it is "Nanite", take clever shortcuts to sell the illusion of  detail at varying distances and perspectives. And with AI powered GPUs now saturating the market, other more innocuous details can be generated on the fly, like textures and props. So the response on the part of game developers is not without concerted effort. (Nanite has already been around for some time, even. Consider the level of detail in this demonstration. It was taken 4 years ago!)

Epic Games

It's my hope that someday we can get something truly "photoreal", although a subcutaneous chip capturing sensory data in the gamer's occipital lobe would be pretty rad... Yeah, that would be nice. Or! a table-top gaming experience that relies on our own imagination to build out an AR game board? One can only dream! 

The future is wild my friends!












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