Originally posted on Medium
1. Visual Disaster
A plainclothes police officer rockets through the air, firing a gun. A man uses a flamethrower to engulf the officer and store in flames. The officer screams, repeatedly, in exactly the same way. This all takes place in a shiny looking Puma store.
We see these images and laugh, which points to how the medium of videogames make it easy to abstract and mess around with reality. The easiest result to achieve with a game is humor, messiness — simply combine two elements in a way that would never occur in reality. It’s why GIFs of glitchy 3D games never cease to amuse.
(From here on, I’ll use ‘game’ to mean ‘videogame’ — games you play on a screen with some kind of controller)
Being computer programs, games make it easy to construct impossible scenarios — chairs suspended in mid-air, cities permanently stuck at nighttime.
2. Traversable
Every game displays an image on a computer screen by changing the pixels. While these images change, games aren’t composed of the same ‘moving images’ of film as the images of games don’t change in a consistent and linear fashion. Instead, the images change following a mixture of the game’s code, and player input. Moving a player, shooting a gun, opening a menu, navigating between passages in a Twine game, as well as even standing still — can cause images of a game to change.
The images of games are changing, dynamic — they’re traversable[1]. Every time you’ve done anything in a game, you’ve traversed images, travelling from one visual state of the screen to another. Of course games aren’t just images. Through the way a game’s images change, they give the illusion of digital space.
3. Digital Space
You traverse a game’s images and begin to perceive the digital spaces of games (hereon space). As you play a chess simulation, you become intimate with the various on-screen board configurations. Or you walk around a forest, and eventually grow to understand how the forest is oriented. Or you read passages of text in a Twine game, and imagine the space in your head. So as you traverse the images of a game, through clicking or pressing a key, you start to perceive a relation between the game’s images — or perceive space in the game and build an understanding similar to that conferred by walking around a familiar place in real life.
So games are good at creating any kind of image, simulating all kinds of spaces. What’s the limitation of that?
4. Limitations
In a recent essay, Zolani Stewart asks what a visual language for games is, in order to figure out how a game might communicate more meaningfully. The essay brings up that games’ visual language is not that of photos. While a photo can capture a busy streetscape, replicating even a slice of this in a game on a purely surface-visual level could take millions of dollars. Even then, the game would not have the depth of the stories of the people walking around the photo.
Games gain a lot from studying the visual language developed by mediums such as photography and film. It’s important to distinguish that while games can emulate those mediums, it is not games’ inherent strength to do so, for example through adding heavily motion-captured movie sequences, or realistic graphics. Those things can benefit a game — or they can be a huge waste of resources!
Again, games are programmable. Which makes them strong at creating spaces and choosing how a player might occupy and come to comprehend that space. Compare the linear presentation of film — even in a long take, which can establish a sense of space, it takes a ton of effort on the film crew’s part (or animators/CGI artists) to pull off, and in the end it’s just one linear take through that space. It’s not inferior to games in that regard, but it is different, and interesting to think about what drives up costs in games vs. film.
Traversable images and digital space are fundamental units of games’ visual languages. Having an intuitive or explicit understanding of what works makes for a richer, more memorable and effective game, because you can understand some other ways in which your game will be perceived, regardless of content.
5. Strong Game Imagery
There’s a number of things you can think about when trying to achieve strong game imagery through utilizing the concept of digital. Here’s a few ideas to start.
One is surprise or contrast. Think of the disturbing, empty towns at the end of Undertale when you choose to kill many NPCs. The empty town space goes against our notion of what a town should feel like. The dark suburb in Anodyne lets you murder NPCs with a knife when usually you just fight with a broom.
A certain space comes with a set of expectations, which a designer can meet or subvert. The end of Persona 5 feels sad because you are traveling over a very familiar Tokyo, a place you spent lots of time in throughout the game, with an entirely different goal — of saying goodbye to your friends and ending the game.
Hand in hand with this is familiarity. Ritualistic games like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley play to this idea, allowing a player to create and inhabit a space that grows within a person’s life. This works akin to how our homes, or neighborhoods, also grow to become memorable through repetition.
The continuity of spaces can be useful. In Final Fantasy X, you develop a strong sense of distance from Besaid, the starting area in the far south, because you nearly walk the entire way to Zanarkand, the final area in the far north. This is far different than if you warped between areas! The sense of continuity is key. The work put into the journey hangs over you , you subconsciously feel the difficulty of returning home. It aids the drama of the game’s narrative.
People love Dark Souls, partly because you get to know it so well through dying and repeating, and because there is a relatively small area to walk around, compared to recent Corporate (“AAA”) games. It’s a world in which you can remember the path of walking from Anor Londo to Lost Izalith, one where simple level geometries are associated with experience and memory. Compare the bowl food asset flip party of many popular Corporate games where every space is immensely detailed yet instantly forgettable.
In Subserial Network, we slowly grow to feel control and knowledge over parts of the game’s simulated web, going from one link to another. This in turn affects how we view the game’s characters. The game also is strong in other areas, such as surprise and the way the game plays with your familiarity with e-mail and search interfaces.
Abstraction is also a useful notion — thinking about what it feels like to occupy a space, physical or digital, in real life, and then representing part of that in a game. In All Our Asias, the surreal cityscapes of Chicago form a base from which a player can start to understand the emotional state of the protagonist and the weight of the game’s themes. This is even more powerful when the player is familiar with the spaces in real life and thus, moving through these spaces can cause a player to reminisce.
SMT Nocturne uses some spaces based on real life Tokyo (see my essay on it here), to various interesting effects. By choosing visual abstraction — making simplifications when creating something in a game, compared to reality — you explore a visual space where you’re forced to decide what you want to keep in the representation of the object. That’s where a lot of interesting style and meaning can arise. Abstraction ties into the idea of lo-fi I’ve been thinking about and trying to express through my games.
While my notion of abstraction is more formal, it relates to the notion of vignette games that has become popular in recent years — taking moments from life or history and reducing them to short, minutes-long games in a small set of spaces. Robert Yang’s The Tearoom does this effectively with rest stop bathrooms, police surveillance and violence, and men having sex with men.
6. Strong Imagery Isn’t Technical Visual Art Skill
You may notice that under this definition, strong game imagery does not at all require traditional visual art skills.
Technical art skills aren’t useless, they enhance a game in the right hands. But they don’t necessarily make a compelling game, just like how a popular GIF mockup of a game, or concept and marketing imagery don’t imply a good game. You can make a game with strong imagery by being consistent with whatever art style you choose and thinking about toward what ends the visual art exists for.
I hope we can all learn to improve, create, and understand game imagery, as more than just “nice pixels” or “cool 3D art”. Let’s think about how it feels to move, circulate through a space — the narrative contexts we have for being there, the suggestions the various objects and symbols make, the decisions a designer may have made in constructing the game.
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Melos is on Twitter and made Anodyne, Even the Ocean and All Our Asias… He runs Analgesic Productions and is working on Anodyne 2: Return to Dust.
Notes
[1] Technically, any GUI-based computer program has Traversable Images. But this essay only cares about thinking about game imagery, so we’re going to stick to thinking about things that were designed with the intention of being a game, rather than any programs, or extreme border cases blurring the lines of games and computer software.
Regarding the term traversable, there were a number of other choices — interactable, explorable, etc… but they didn’t really, to me, capture the essence of what is happening on screen and in the mind with regard to space. No single term is perfect, but traversable felt close.
Again, traversable is not meant in a literal sense that all games are exploration games or something.