Reality bytes
It’s a cliché to say that less is more – and probably not accurate given that 12-year-old me probably would’ve picked Far Cry 6 over Midwinter
I’ve come to the conclusion that videogames and reality don’t mix. It was while playing Far Cry 6 recently that I had the revelation. The detail in that game, the visuals, the physics… they reach closer to reality than, say, 12-year-old me could ever have imagined was possible. We may not yet be at a point where games are indistinguishable from reality, but we’re coming damn close.
And yet… at no point in Far Cry 6 did I fail to be aware that it was a videogame. Somehow, despite how it looks, it feels so designed. Not that I was trying to suspend disbelief, but never did I lose myself in the experience. Never did I quite find myself living in that environment.
Which is weird when you consider that it happened to me all the time with the games I played as a kid. And I’m really old, so I was a kid literally decades ago. I can’t even put it down to videogames being a relatively new idea back then, or the fact that I was so young. My imagination, I hope, has travelled with me into adulthood, and I’m rarely afraid to slip away into made-up worlds. There was just something so odd about so many of the games back then. Sometimes that oddness was writ large – the Monty Moles or Manic Miners – with bizarre worlds inhabited by bizarre creatures. Other times it was a sort of chilly otherness – Sentinel for example, or Deus Ex Machina. Sometimes the oddness was accidental, a kind of sparseness of detail that resulted from the limits of the technology. I’m thinking Mercenary, or Midwinter, or Skool Daze.
Whatever the case, to me most games felt like a portal to another dimension. You couldn’t argue with the world they presented, because it was so far from the one we know. Oh, sure,
Skool Daze might’ve tried to present a realistic depiction of British school life, but it was more like a surreal, acoustic, reworking of a full-on orchestral epic.
When modern games try to recreate reality, with all the lighting and particle effects available to today’s developers, that uncanny valley effect comes into play. Somehow, I find the doubtlessly motion captured way in which
NPCS run in Far Cry 6 to be less realistic – or, at least, less believable – than the pip-pop-pip-pop scuttle of Eric in Skool Daze.
It’s a cliché to say that less is more – and probably not accurate given that 12-year-old me probably would’ve picked Far Cry 6 over Midwinter, given a choice – but I do wonder whether today’s young gamers have lost something, by being handed so much almost-reality on a plate.
Do they really believe in what they’re playing? Games were more than just games to me. They were experiences, portals to elsewhere, ripe with the possibility of adventure… a place where you could write swear words on a blackboard without the risk of it going on your permanent record.