Monday 28 September 2009

Realism Gone Mad

As the game industry grasps it’s claws onto new technology I can’t help but question in which direction games will advance. I’ve already dipped my toe into the overwhelming game future that is Realism but a recent game I played made my mind boggle over whether realism is what we what or need.

In between my many hours of getting to grips with max ( quite successfully I might add) there comes a point where you really, really need a break, so off I trundled into my flatmates room and loaded up our copy of Sims3. I wasn’t really sure why I chose to play that game during my break because surely playing other people’s lives whilst taking a break from your own isn’t really a break blah, blah, blah it’s too complicated and perplexing but nonetheless I digress.

As a laugh and out of curiosity we all gather round and decided to replicate our flat and ourselves. So after some tweaking and lots of immature giggles as we increase our anatomical proportions wildly we finally end up with our little gang. We moved built our flat and moved them in, got them jobs and skills etc and then left it on freewill for a bit.

And this is when it dawned on me

As I watched my Rachel sim sit in her room playing on the computer, my Yogi sim sitting in his room playing his computer, my Matt sim cooking in the kitchen etc. I couldn’t help but feel a chill down my spine as walked around our flat and found everyone behaving exactly as their sims did.

Game realism is going too far

If something as fun as the sims can get my sims living a better life than myself (she’s a well paid rockstar :P) what on earth is going to happen to games in 5 years time or even 2 years???

I don’t want to go to philosophical on the whole topic as this is meant to be just a quick blog whilst waiting for flatmates to return so I can go food shopping and hopefully not starve to death, so I will just leave you with some funny anecdotes of my sims.

Within an hour of my flatmate joeSim moving in he had already developed gay tendencies towards mattSim (cue lots of immature laughter as we try to get them to make-out with each other)

YogiSim got his girlfriend sim pregnant twice and is now vice-president

JoeSim was electrocuted by the TV and died; this was quickly followed by lots of panicked screams (from real flatmates) as everything that day on the sims3 had come true so far. Needless to say we quit without saving and brought his sim back to life.

2 comments:

Michael Powell said...

scary - i reread my dissertation today (from my first degree, 22 >ahem< years ago) and in it i wrote - 'we no longer live our lives, we'd rather watch other people live theirs'

realsim is an interesting aspect in gaming - does it lead to a better experience or a less good one? is F.E.A.R just pacman with better graphics? does stylisation or abstraction lead to a more engaging experience?

some questions for later on this crit studies sess :)

Michael Powell said...

i meant realISM not realSIM, bastard typing