— 8 November 2005

How technology matters

I recently read an article on Gamesindustry that caught my attention. Nintendo has gone public with a statement about the next-gen console battle. Their position is that specifications does not matter and they even seem to go as far as to never officially release any specs for the Revolution console. Critics will probably ridicule them and say that Nintendo is doing this because they are getting behind in the performance-battle with Sony and Microsoft, and perhaps Nintendo are losing that battle. Or perhaps they never intended to fight it in the first place? I sincerely hope so. I also hope and believe that Nintendo is trying to point us into a new direction…

The whole video game industry is keen on uttering its favourite catch-phrase: “game play is king”. But frankly, I see a lot that seriously contradicts the idea that game play comes first. I won’t go as far, but in some cases I wonder if a more suiting phrase would be “tech is king”. Games are constantly praised for their visuals and technological advances and games with sub-par game play can get sky-high scores on technical achievements only.

The tech-show is going on on all levels of the industry, from the console manufacturers (Microsoft and Sony) screaming “performance, performance, performance” to developers and magazines and gamers… How come?

From a manufacturer view it is understandable. Developers are largely techno-freaks so it is probably wise to get their juices flowing. A typical developer would sacrifice his mother’s heart if he were allowed to code on the currently most amazing piece of hardware on the planet. Somehow I can understand that. And from the developers, the tech-focus flows out and through the industry all the way down to the consumers.

So, what’s the problem with all this? Well, none if tech is regarded the tool we use to make our game visions come true. But technology seems to sometimes become part of the vision, and that’s where I believe we slip off the tracks.

Let me take an example. In the game “Doom 3” (and in “Riddick”, for that matter) the characters and the world have a look that has been described as if everything was “wrapped in plastic”. I read a letter to a games magazine from a reader who wondered why that was the case.

The editor answered that it was due to “normal mapping” a texturing technique that allows high level of seemingly full-depth detail in the textures. The “plastic” look is just an inevitable side-effect of that technique, they wrote. I won’t go into the specifics of how normal mapping works. The thing is that the magazine was only partly right. A more correct answer would be:

“Those games look like that because they use a technique called ‘normal mapping’. And since the developers want to show that they use normal mapping, they crank up the specular component in the textures so that you should see the normal mapping effect more clearly. Hence the ‘plastic wrap’ look.”

Perhaps the magazine just simplified their answer, but that is not the point. The point is this: advanced tech is often premiered before aestethics. If you ask a hard-core render engine programmer wiz or a die-hard Doom player he (it is a he, right?) would probably disagree and claim that the visuals come first, but I suspect that visuals and tech are inseparable in that person’s view of the world. And in my world, you should only use the tech that adds to the emotional impact of the game. If you are forced to sacrifice artistic vision because of a new tech-feature, you should seriously consider sacrifice the tech.

So, I hope that Nintendo will help taking the focus away from tech and instead make us concentrate on what is actually happening inside our games. We developers need to constantly scrutinize ourselves and ask whether what we are doing adds to the emotional impact of the game, or if it’s just another tech show-off.

— sicher