One of the weirdest things about the new generation of consoles is that Nintendo has insisted that better graphics aren’t the wave of the future. As a result, while the X360 and PS3 are pretty substantial steps forward in terms of graphical fidelity, about the most the Wii will provide is what the xbox *currently* provides. Nintendo’s mantra has been “accessibility uber alles.”
Here’s why it won’t work:
When you take a 2-D game, your brain abstracts it into some representation of reality. Your brain has been trained since near infancy to interpret two-dimensional images, whether photorealistic, or completely iconic, as representations of some form of reality. You understand, fundamentally, how to interpret 2-D of various quality, resolution, etc.
However, CG “3D” is nowhere near photorealistic yet – even the most talented of artists cannot make faces that are indistinguishable from reality with the current hardware, because people are so trained to look at the detail of a human face, and understand all of its nuances. 3-D is *too much like reality*. Your brain does not easily abstract a dodecahedron into a sphere – it’s only by immersing yourself in that context that you understand how to translate those visual abstractions into reality. This is *not* a process that has been as deeply ingrained as a person’s ability to interpret drawings, or effectively, sprites.
The critical piece is this: 3-D technology is currently progressing *towards* shedding the technical limitations, and being artist-dependent, in terms of replicating visual fidelity. That’s important because essentially what it means is that learning how to interpret “bad 3-D” (low-poly models, low-boned animation skeletons, etc.) is a skill that people are going to lose in the near future, because it simply won’t be necessary anymore. And as a result, something like the Wii, which has settled for obviously “bad 3-D,” will literally look terrible to anyone who’s lost that skill, because they’ve grown accustomed to looking at less abstracted representations of reality.
Look at Virtua Fighter. Not the new ones, the original. How *terrible* does that look? That one would consider that a valid representation of a human in *today’s* context is a *joke*. Look at old Playstation games. They’re almost unplayably terrible looking. But look at SNES games. They still look remarkably good. Sure, they’re low-res, by and large, but Super Mario World is *still beautiful*. It’s because the skill of interpreting low-poly 3-D is transient. Once someone’s adapted to the better technology, and lost that skill, things simply look bad. You don’t tolerate texture warping, pop-in, pointy circles, etc.
So, what Nintendo’s banking on is that the visual difference between the xbox and the x360 isn’t substantial enough that a gamer would care about the difference. What they’re *also* banking on is that that’s not the factor in making games accessbile to everyone.
And in my opinion, that’s where they’ve completely, totally blown it.
I dont’ see it as big of a problem due to the fact that many Nintendo games don’t attempt to represent reality quite as literally as MS or Sony. Their bread and butter properties, Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, don’t try to give consumers a representation of reality that doesn’t run up against the “uncommon valley” phenomenon. The power of the Wii console seems to be sufficient to provide a bump in graphics for their properties that will satisfy a lot of consumers.
I mean, if they were banking on a GRAW competitor to move units, then they’d be in trouble.
Oops. “reality that [runs] up against the “uncommon valley” phenomenon.”
The problem I’m trying to get at, though, is that I think that *MOST* consumers (non-gamers), find the current 3-D abstractions to be visually unappealing in a way that actually creates a barrier to immersion. And for all people, once the 360’s level of graphics become “standard,” the Wii will actively look *terrible* in the same way that the Saturn became almost unplayable mere moments after the Dreamcast came out. Nintendo’s banking on that it’s “good enough,” but I don’t think it is.
Oh, and not to be a snot, but it’s the “uncanny valley.”
I know you don’t mean to be a snot. It just comes naturally. 😉
In any case, I understand what you’re trying to say, but I believe Nintendo’s strategy wholly avoids that problem with immersion.
Look to World of Warcraft versus every other MMORPG. I think one of the major reasons that it suceeds where others don’t is that developers going for a realistic representation run up against the problem of representing reality. There’s the UNCANNY (:)) valley problem. I look at something like Chad’s favorite, Guild Wars and everybody in it looks a little weird and creepy.
With the WoW characters, Blizzard, I think, took the Nintendo route and said “fuck it” and made it about the design, but not about representing reality. Thus, no immersion problem.
Sure, PC gamers are pretty used to a pretty high level of graphics these days, indeed, probably higher than console gamers, and have no problem transitioning between the two.
I mean, WoW and Oblivion are selling like gangbusters, and they are polar opposites when it comes to 3-D abstractions. They are both successful despite the fact that gamers are used to Oblivion graphics literally (PC Oblivion is pretty close to 360 graphics) and figuratively. I think the Wii (or the Xbox) could render WoW graphically.
Moreover, I don’t think we’re going to get like-like 3D representations with 360s or PS3s. Indeed, I think we’re going to run up (or down) against the uncanny valley harder with them. So, within this generation, I think one could argue that Sony and MS are going to have more “immersion barriers” than Nintendo with the current generation of hardware.