I always have a fondness for writers who tell it like it is. You know, the guys who defend levels in RPGs and think that hit points work just fine. Even if you disagree with those stances, I think too many people dismiss the status quo without really understanding how we got there.

This morning, Andrew Phelps challenges the notion that gameplay always trumps graphics.

In the not-to-distant future each of us will be asked to plunk down a not insignificant amount of money for a new console, either an X-Box 360 or a PS3 or a Revolution. Well, the first thing I’m going to do is play a game on my new toy, and it had damn well better look better than the last console.
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That’s a really important point so I will say it again a bit differently: the consumer is deciding whether or not a title is worthy of personal investment based on its appearance. Yeah, I know, shallow. So transparent. But I can guarantee that no one will know about your super-smart awesome character AI and intricate plot details (and believe me, I love super-smart toons and plot details – its why I read science fiction in the first place) if there isn’t a pretty face to suck people in. It has got to look worthy of investment.

Translation: you don’t know if the girl at the bar has a good personality until you talk to her. But you’re more likely to talk to her if, from a distance, she’s got SOMETHING going for her.Andrew continues:

A lot has been made comparing the relative success of World of Warcraft with that of EverQuest2. Allegedly WoW is creaming EQ2 (I say ‘allegedly’ because I don’t know the real numbers. I will take it on faith from those making this argument that this is true – if it isn’t, my apologies. It makes no difference to my argument). Critics point at WoW and say ‘See! This company invested in the game-play of this game! That’s why it’s a success! They aren’t interested in graphics like those screw heads over at SONY!’ Whooooah. Time out. Not interested in graphics? Have you looked at WoW? It’s freaking gorgeous!

Indeed. And this segueways into Corvus at Man Bytes Blog, who says that it’s not Graphics that don’t matter. It’s photorealism that doesn’t matter.

[C]onsistant, clear, quality graphics are an extremely important part of the medium. Games that pick a graphic style, stick to it, and implement it very well are utilizing one of the essential communication channels of gaming, the bits that pass through your eyes.

Half Life 2, from everything I’ve seen, does an excellent job at presenting you with a consistant, and beautiful world. Zelda: Wind Waker also presents you with a consistant and beautiful world. Two very different types of game, with different designs and experiential goals. Both, utilizing graphics to present their worlds to the fullest effect possible.

Which, of course, brings us back to the uncanny valley. It’s also worth noting that, the closer you get to photorealistic, the closer you get to looking like everyone else. Many of the best-selling games (WoW, the Sims, Starcraft) all have clear, visual identities that you can tell at a glance. But they all look GOOD.

Here’s my corollary (and this is important). In other recent threads, we’ve discussed how immersion can be achieved through both graphics and gameplay. But the complaint is that game companies only seemed focus on doing it through graphics nowadays. There’s actually a very good reason for this. Graphical immersion is easy.

It’s low-risk. You can cobble together some concept art and then some screenshots quickly and tell if you’ve got something that works. Add some sound, some music, and a dash of physics, AI or good scripting and you’ve got a play space that is what Nathan Johnson calls in this thread ‘Graphical or narrative immersion’. What’s more, it’s easy to show all this in a demo to an executive, who may or may not know anything about games, but controls the purse strings.

Gameplay, on the other hand, is hard. It can take numerous iterations to take a novel gameplay idea and turn it into reality. Some gameplay ideas are dead sharks. A gameplay idea that plays great may not demo to an exec well. It might be incomprehensible on the floor of E3, where a game has roughly 90 seconds to capture your attention.

Does that mean I favor graphics over gameplay? Hell, no. But if graphics are easy and gameplay is hard, doesn’t it make sense to do the best-looking graphics you can along the way? And do you really think that all of those pretty-but-vacuous games out there were initially concieved that way? I’ll bet 90% of them had wacky gameplay ideas that we’d love in the abstract here in the peanut gallery but were thrown out along the way because, it turns out, fun is hard.

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