Danny:
Jes:
| Gameplay 6/4/2006 |
We'll get to how that makes sense and how I'm right and also wrong.
Suddenly, it's hip and cool to do away with HUD displays.
It feels more realistic with nothing crowding your cinematic view. It gives a director more control over how a game looks, without overlaying images which could clutter his vision. And it allows a game to be more movie-like than if there were extraenious graphics.
It also takes away much needed information to immerse a player into a game.
The Heads Up Display serves as a continual reminder of what an in-game character should already know. It displays the character's health, their number of lives, their ammo, their armor level, their strength, etc. The HUD displays all things that a real person, in a real situation, is intimately and always implicitly aware of.
By removing these pieces of information from an always-visible state, you rob the player of the internal dialogues a character has in real time. By removing this knowledge, you do not add to the immersivity in a game. To a third person watcher, you add to the realism, yes. To someone simply watching, like a movie, things look more fluid. They look less cluttered. Someone playing, however, now lacks information they ought to have, if they are the person playing.
And you build games for game players. Not my boyfriend.
By removing pieces of intelligence that should be implicit, you break the flow of a game.
I know what you're saying. Displaying numbers, bars, and grids on a screen is not implicit. It is explicit; you're showing them. But you're wrong.
A HUD, on a video game screen, is always silently within a player's view. It's always in the corner of your eye, reminding you of your state of being. More innovative clues: broken bones, bruised eyes, colored sparks coming out of a character, are not. These need to be explicitly triggered or looked out for. And this breaks the rhythm of a game.
If I am in a fire fight, and need to see my chances of standing up to a swarm of enemies, I don't need a mirror to see the marks on my face. I know how much I hurt, and where I'm hurt. And the HUD serves as this internal knowedge. In fact, looking for explicit signs is the wrong way to display a player's stats.
First, it breaks the flow of gameplay, by forcing me to take a break and look for hard information. This slows me down, even if a sec.
Second, it breaks the sense of immersion, by forcing me to examine a character who I supposedly am. For info I should just have in my head.
(Or the corner of my eye.)
The second argument (or third, if you count my writing style) is that the lack of a Heads Up Display adds to the artistic realism of a game. Note, I'm no longer arguing gameplay realism. The fact that flow and immersion break, I've said. I'm now saying that, by leaving out a HUD, a game looks more realistic and shows more directorial skill.
Nuance is the word, I believe.
Video games are not movies. I'm not saying they're better or worse.
But they are not cinematic movies.
There's a lesson in sticking to one's medium. Being true to whatever you're working on, no matter which craft it is. And I'm not just preaching for pretentiousness's sake, for the "love" of "my" craft.
Each medium is best suited to one way of telling a story. Or, more to the point, of providing an entertaining experience. Books don't add more pictures in the interest of more duplicating movies. Picture books aren't considered the fine art of the trade. Music videos aren't made less rhythmical or tell more coherent plotlines to abide by movie standards.
There's no reason that video games should be judged on the same standards that movies are. They're different crafts, and value different things. Where the pinacle of moviemaking is realism (or related), the pinacle of video games is immersion. The goals are different, and forgetting that is forgetting your goals.
There's a reason different mediums exist. It's not analogous to VHS and DVD.
It's music versus TV.
If, in your goals of cinematic realism, you lose immersion at all, you get a net loss. The goal is to build for function, not form. That's sorta what a video game's about.
Well, eating Doritos and not showering is what video games are about. But we can leave that for another day.
By Danny
| Comments (3) | ||
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I should be sure to point out... My groin specifically... Extremely punched.
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You know, I feel that Jes's art is truly at its best when she is depicting Maximus Hodgecles
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Agreed
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