Pixel Counterrr

In his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less, American psychologist Barry Schwartz argued that, in general, the more choice we as consumers are given to, the less happy we become. Turns out, the psychological burden that comes with an array of choices actually outweighs the hypothetical gain of the optimal decision, which leads to anxiety and distress. Making choices makes us by and large miserable, it seems.

The things that bother us in choices are the trade-offs and, consequently, feelings of loss that we have to deal with when evaluating the options in hand. Yes, for some reason we tend to think, as Schwartz writes, that we actually lose all the alternative choices as a whole when we have to pick just one, which is obviously an erroneous line of thinking. Still, it hurts to make a decision whenever there’s plenty to choose from, and one has to only observe a kid at McDonald’s choosing his/her Happy Meal toy to see how painful it sometimes can be when there’re mutually exclusive but equally enchanting options on the table.

The McDonald’s kid leads us conveniently to the agony most PC gamers face every time they launch a freshly installed game, which is the host of sliders and drop-down menus found in the graphics options. Of course, the graphics options are a non-issue for the players who happen to possess a top of the line PC on which everything can be maxed out, quite joyfully so, I’d assume. But for the rest of us, the graphics sliders can be a serious source of misery and distress.

The agonizing trade-off here is the classic performance vs. image-quality dichotomy, which is something that has defined the real-time image throughout its existence. When operating on a certain piece of hardware, we simply can’t have both maximum performance and maximum image-quality happening at the same time, both of the notions being, of course, theoretical ideals in and of themselves. Once there’s a single pixel drawn on the screen, we are trading performance for image-quality.

The key question, then, rises: To what extent we are willing to sacrifice performance over image-quality? The one thing I love about consoles is that, due to their fixed hardware specs, it’s developers who solve the performance / image-quality equation for the player, which a) makes console games more auteur, and b) means the console gaming experience is identical throughout the platform so no one feels left out.

However, as said, the PC player with a lower-end hardware isn’t that fortunate. Adjusting the graphics settings to “Low” or “Medium” isn’t the source of anxiety per se, but rather the pure awareness of the fact that there’re also “High” and “Very High” or, let alone, “Ultra” settings available, but at the same time, unattainable performance-wise. It’s indeed amusing, and sad, how the high-end settings can make the current settings seem worse by mere existence. And what’s worse, the “Low” and “High” settings bear no absolute value whatsoever. I believe people would’ve been much happier with Crysis (2007) if the “Medium” setting had been simply renamed “High”, just like in Starbucks “Small” is called “Tall”, I hear. It’s all relative.

In the end, the true agony of graphics options comes down to the heartbreaking optimization process when the player struggles to find some magical combination out of tens of sliders that affect the performance the least while still keeping the image-quality acceptable. Personally, I’m all about performance so every frame below 60 per second is a compromise in my eyes, which keeps me jumping between the gameplay and the settings for a quite some time.

There’re indeed usually tens of choices and trade-offs to be made before the game can really start for many playing on a dated PC hardware. Don’t get me wrong, though: I’m all for options, tweaking, fine-tuning, and all that. Yet, the freedom of choice tends to come with a considerable psychological price that console gamers are generally free of.

A price that keeps us mulling over what we can’t have instead of enjoying what we do have.

One way of comprehending the software side of the real-time image is to divide it roughly into two basic components or layers. The first layer can be seen consisting of art assets, such as 3D models, textures, sprites, and so forth that populate the virtual space. The second, perhaps more fundamental, or even metaphysical, layer covers the collection of algorithms, popularly referred to as the graphics/game engine, which deals with simulation of space, light, and motion, and in the end, puts everything together. Put differently, the former layer deals with the static, and the latter with the dynamic.

The above dualism comes actually down to the earlier post regarding the dichotomy of algorithm vs. design, which was about the idea that algorithms cannot produce genuine design structures in and of themselves, but that dictated by a set of rules. For instance, a physics engine does produce an unlimited number of different outcomes, which is the beauty of it, but which all are deterministic and thus predictable in nature. The same goes with everything else produced algorithmically, like shading, perspective, post processing, or even fractals. Therefore, sure, an engine can provide a solid foundation upon which to build a modern high-end video game, but overplaying a specific engine in marketing as a certification for quality is usually just that: marketing.

Still, I believe the relative importance of engines in general has exponentially increased over the time as the technology behind the games has become more sophisticated. If we look at the dawn of the real-time image, such as Pong (1972), there wasn’t that much either design or complex algorithms involved. It was the era of Commodore 64 and the likes, when we really started to see actual art direction emerging in games, such as Andrew Braybrook’s Paradroid (1985) and Uridium (1986), which both had a distinct visual style to them.

However, if we scrutinize the said games merely through still images, the engine being used really contributed nothing to the ultimate look of the games. The art assets, such as sprites and background elements, appeared on the screen just like they were initially designed pixel by pixel in a paint program or what have you. Here, the visual impact of the engine came to play only after the piece like Uridum started to move and became dynamic. And, like said, in the end it’s the engine what makes things dynamic in the realm of real-time imagery, which meant in the C64’s case basically little more than moving art assets along the x- and y-axis.

In the C64 era no one talked about graphics engines. It was only after the art assets started to traverse along the z-axis in a massive scale in games like Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Doom (1993) when the serious engine-discourse started to take place, I believe. Now the engine did contribute fundamentally to the overall outcome of the real-time image, which came across even through still images. Indeed, art assets no longer displayed on the screen as is, but went through algorithmic processes, like simulation of perspective (i.e. space) and/or illumination, before hitting the player’s retina.

Now marketing departments and people in general started to evangelize all of a sudden about the Doom engine, Build engine, and let alone Quake engine(s), which led to a plethora of derivate games coming to existence through engine licensing. The more sophisticated technology behind the games became, the more it made sense to license it instead of developing one’s own from the ground up, it seemed.

Yet, the most relevant developers today generally don’t use off-the-self graphics engines, but propriety engines instead, or at least heavily modified licensed ones. I guess it’s fitting here to adapt the famous saying of Alan Kay: People who are really serious about their games should make their own engine.

Except for the physics engine, that is. There’s still no better physics engine than Euphoria in the market.

Today I came across with this image on the Internet that reflects the popular myth of graphics as a trivial aspect in gaming, which is, of course, wrong and dishonest on so many levels.

So, I prefer my edited version instead:

One can ask oneself, which element has seen more evolution over the decades: the visuals or the stories?

The Princess is still in another castle.

Before the millions of colors today’s hardware is able to push on the screen, we, as consumers of real-time imagery, have had to put up with a number of far more modest color configurations, starting all the way from a palette of two distinct colors.

It seems that the more limited a color palette is, the more recognizable look and feel it tends to produce to a given image. For instance, the Commodore 64’s 16-color palette is so iconic that I, for one, can quite easily single out C64 screenshots from other platforms with similar specs. And besides playing games with the system, the C64 palette burned somewhat permanently onto my mind through extensive use of paint and animation software, which were the cases that made me realize of how restricted the 16-color palette really was.

Little did I know, though, that the 16 colors of my C64 was luxury in comparison to the palettes found in PCs of that era. Back then PCs meant strictly business so they consequently lacked everything that even remotely had to do with producing aesthetic pleasure, both visually and aurally.

Personally, the PC palette I found the most appalling at the time was the 4-color CGA variant that consisted of cyan and magenta as primary colors in addition to black and white. The games using the CGA palette were almost insultingly horrible looking, and to combine that with the screeching sound of the PC speaker, it seems now like a miracle that people, me included, willingly played such games in the first place.

So basically my animation is a study, if you will, of something about which I wrote a while ago, that is using medium specific artifacts as a means for artistic expression. The animation in question adheres indeed not only to the now obsolete CGA color palette, but other technical characteristics and limitations (listed under Content) of that era as well.

On top of that, the animation utilizes the idea of an additional medium through which the imagery is presented, which renders, as I wrote, the content in some cases more authentic and credible. In this one, I decided to simulate a CRT monitor of which parameters are broke down under Simulated Screen. To me, the CRT look just fits perfectly with low-definition computer imagery, which is why I mainly prefer using a scanline filter when playing older games on a TFT screen.

And finally there is the Actual Screen on which the imagery is displayed to the viewer, which is, of course, beyond artistic control. For what I know, someone could be indeed watching my animation even with a real CRT monitor, which would be interesting setting considering the animation attempts to simulate one.

The end goal was to create an exceedingly “mediumized” piece of animation, and as such, I’d consider it a reasonable success. And now, in 2012, I find the three decades old CGA palette actually not that appalling anymore when using it by choice, and not because the technology says so.