Pixel Counterrr

After watching recently The Expendables 2 (2012) and consequently reading a stomach-wrenching making-of piece regarding its VFX production (hat tip to @osulop), I think I’m finally starting to be done with CGI (i.e. non-real-time computer graphics) as a certain kind of ubiquitous, uninspired visual filling that’s found in contemporary mainstream live-action cinema.

For me, it’s particularly sad since the most exhilarating moments I’ve had watching movies involve CGI in one way or another, Terminator 2 (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993) being probably the most profound examples of that. Especially Jurassic Park completely altered the paradigm in my head what cinema can do, and to see for the first time a credible living, breathing dinosaur on the screen was something that unlikely will ever be topped. To me, the experience must have been in the same ballpark than of those who saw moving images for the first time, or at least it felt like it.

Both Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were at their core not only about telling a compelling story, but more importantly pushing the boundaries, showing the unshowable. Of course, the CGI sequences in, say, Terminator 2 do look dated now and stick out like hell, but nevertheless, the effects still resonate ambition and pure will to make an impact to the medium, what they undeniably ended up doing, to say the least.

However, the cost of producing decent CGI has dramatically fallen from the days of aforementioned films, consequently the quality has not being able to keep up with the ever-increasing quantity. What’s worse, to come back to The Expendables 2, CGI is now being (mis)used to cut costs (say that to an ILM worker of 1992) and salvage ill-conceived live-action sequences.  And that’s the use of CGI that frustrates me the most: something ordinary made with CGI only since it’s more convenient that way, not because it would be otherwise impossible.

Conversely, if we look at the very high-end of the modern CGI spectrum, we do see ambition, medium pushing and other traits historically associated with CGI, but there’s not so many players left playing that game. Indeed, it’s almost poetic that James Cameron who started the mainstream CGI revolution with movies like The Abyss (1989) is the one who has been keeping that frontier spirit alive in the recent past.

That being said, I think the grand story of blockbuster CGI is coming to an end little by little, and I believe it was indeed Cameron’s Avatar (2009) that made it ultimately difficult to break genuinely new technological ground within the realm of commercial CGI. I do acknowledge that it’s always dangerous to say such a thing about a field that involves so heavily technology, but like David Cohen wrote on his Variety article, the demise of mainstream CGI in terms of artistic integrity and innovation is already evident and in full effect, and, I might add, most interesting CGI can be now found from small budget students projects all over on Vimeo.

But I’m okay with that. I’ll continue to follow the non-real-time side of computer graphics but I’m no longer excited about it per se or where it’s heading. Indeed, if I could have a sneak peek into the future of any human endeavor, it would be real-time imagery, no question about it, especially now that we are at the brink of the new hardware generation.

I can’t wait for the next gen Gran Turismo, but I can live without Avatar 2.

When it comes to the traditional narrative arc that consists of the exposition, the complication, the climax and the resolution, it really bears no relation to the reality whatsoever. The reason why we love that structure, though, is that it feeds the belief system that in the end all the random occurrences in our lives make sense, as in an “everything happens for a reason” way. The yearning for reason and meaning is so profoundly built into us that billion-dollar industries are based on those premises, the most prominently the mainstream cinema, literature and drama television.

In reality, this structure of narrative can only be found in fiction, and every piece of supposedly non-fiction that adheres perfectly to that logic should be viewed with extreme suspicion. The history has shown time after time that the truth and a really good story tend to be mutually exclusive concepts, and the controversial cases of fabulists presented as truth tellers like James Fry or Mike Daisey are telling of how upset people get when that exceptionally compelling non-fiction ends up being more or less fabricated.

As I have noted before, the medium that is video games isn’t at its core a vehicle for traditional story telling, but rather, ideally speaking, a framework in which people can come up with their own little strings of events. Like kids do with their toys. This should be pretty evident by now for even the most hardcore narrative apologists who keep on hoping for a Citizen Kane (1941) of video games to come up someday and legitimize the medium once and for all.

There is, of course, tremendous value beyond structured narrative, and, I would argue, the apparent inability to convey traditional stories is not the video game’s weakness as a medium but an inevitable outcome of its core strength and substance. The thing is, in video games, especially in ones like Grand Theft Auto IV (2008), the total and complete absurdity of life simply becomes more tangible than through any mainstream prewritten narrative.

Indeed, when for instance driving accidentally over people in GTA IV, it is an empty, cold, meaningless occurrence without any redeeming factor or impact on the larger picture. It just happens. And this kind of representation of such an event resonates so much more with the reality than, say, a mainstream movie where every little detail has to bear meaning and make sense. The movie Signs (2002), for instance, paints a picture that all life’s occurrences, even the most unfortunate ones, form one big jigsaw puzzle that only makes sense once the pieces come together. GTA IV shows us, however, that one wrong turn can result as most nonsensical and meaningless (but sometimes hilarious) casualties, without any reason or redemption.

What makes video games less truthful is the fact that one can always start the game over if one fails by, say, dying. Heavy Rain (2010) acknowledged that and was an attempt in making a narrative-based game without fail states and the need for saving. In fact, the game’s director David Cage explicitly advised everyone not to load a previous state even if the events didn’t go as the player would’ve wanted to. Still, Heavy Rain was more like a glorified choose-your-own-adventure book than the messianic, Oscar winning interactive narrative some of us are still waiting to arrive.

It’s weird that when it comes to representations, the strongest emotions are evoked not by truth but by fabrications. Movies, even so called documentaries, are excellent at that, while games not so much. But, like I said, games can be more truth to the real than movies or any other form of representation will ever be, and that’s what makes video games such a subversive medium.

As much as we’d like to believe otherwise we are not that much, if any, smarter than the people who roamed this sphere before us, generally speaking that is. The thing is, every technological achievement we now manage to pull off rests on the previous discoveries that we now take for granted and consider self-evident, even though they have taken exceptionally creative minds to come up with in the first place. Technology-wise, we’d be rather helpless without our vast cultural heritage and the knowledge that has cumulated over centuries, or even millennia, and the old metaphor about “standing on the shoulders of giants” encapsulates the concept quite nicely.

That said, it’s difficult to imagine more technologically involved a medium than the real-time image. Granted, non-real-time computer graphics (CGI) does take enormous amount of effort and expertise from multiple fields of knowledge, but I’d still assert that producing real-time imagery can be even more technologically demanding because of the additional dimension to take account of that is performance. People at Pixar can tweak, in theory, a singular frame for weeks to make it look perfect without sacrificing anything else than production time, whereas in games there’re only fractions of a second (1/60 usually) to generate one frame, although these two processes aren’t exactly 100 % comparable. In addition, in the world of real-time, there’s no luxury of setting up a so-called render-farm consisting of hundreds of nodes to distribute the rendering burden. We’ll see, though, if cloud gaming will change that at some point in the future.

So the art of real-time image is first and foremost an art of understanding the hardware that is the very enabler of the image to be produced and interacted with. Secondly, the art of real-time image rests on the concept of simulation, or more specifically, on the expertise to understand and produce algorithms that connects various simulations to the real world. This is when things turn complicated.

It indeed takes an enormous amount of skill and expertise from a number of people to produce a modern AAA game, and increasingly so as games become more and more sophisticated. In retrospect, it’s been actually fascinating to witness completely new areas emerging in gaming that were completely absent from the real-time discourse before, like simulation of physics circa early 2000s. And each time the medium refines and introduces a new area of simulation, it gives a birth to a whole new discipline to which a host of talented people will commit their professional and academic lives.

Consequently, a sole developer team – let alone one lone man – cannot excel and push boundaries in every area of the medium anymore, but have to pick their battles instead, even when it comes to bigger studios. In my mind, Doom (1993) was one of the last “perfect games” that really recalibrated the expectations of what real-time imagery can do in almost every respect, and the phenomenal success and cultural impact of the original Doom derives essentially from that fact.

What this means in the grand scheme of things is that innovations and breakthroughs spread unevenly across the games, making some do one or two things medium-pushingly well while lagging behind in others. Consider, for instance, how embarrassingly bad the simulation of physics is in one of the biggest franchises ever, that is Call of Duty, but which at the same time continuously pushes the (ambivalent) art of scripted spectacles forward release after release. Or, how Gran Turismo 5 (2010) excels in the field of simulated light like no other, but handles vehicular damage just about as badly as it gets.

The very nature of technology dictates that once something enters the realm of possibility, it becomes a default soon after the novelty has worn off. In other words, we tend to take for granted something that didn’t exist a moment ago, which, of course, applies beyond gaming and has got to do with the human condition in general.

In the light of all this, one of the better things that have ever happened to the medium is the middleware industry that commodifies innovation and liberates developers from reinventing the wheel over and over again. Still, it frustrates me to see one game doing some particular thing extraordinarily well, like, say, the brilliant birds in Half-life 2 (2004), and realizing that said technology may never end up in other future titles. Ever.

Thus, it is often the ultimate fantasy of a gamer to imagine an all-in-one title that would cherry pick each and every most advanced features across the medium and put them together, but that’s indeed a mere daydream. Unfortunately, the gaming industry just isn’t some communist utopia where everyone works to benefit the medium at large, even if that would definitely sound great.

So, the issue is that yes, the knowledge and innovation does accumulate and spread to a degree across the games over time, but not fast and systematically enough for my liking.

The reality is, the biggest franchises in the current video game space are so-called first-person shooters what comes to genre specification. The franchise that most likely comes to everyone’s mind is the Call of Duty series that is nowadays very common to label as the lowest common denominator of interactive entertainment due to its popularity. Personally, I try my best to avoid seeing artifacts through their social stigmas, and I think it’s quite ridiculous sometimes how far some people go in order to make themselves appear superior by bashing popular pieces of entertainment or art.

Anyhow, it’s not a coincidence that top selling video games are more often than not about shooting people with firearms: people generally like shooting. And one doesn’t have to have real-life experience of an actual combat rifle to recognize that holding and using one is, in a way, an ultimate power trip, as in utter dominance over others. Moreover, the fact that we have this established, massively popular genre known as first-person shooter is indeed telling that the act of shooting is a central theme particularly in first-person games in general.

In fact, there really aren’t any other major genres with the first-person prefix, even though there perhaps should be. It seems that a game to qualify as a first-person one needs to include not only a first-person view (most simulators are depicted from first-person), but also offer a certain level of freedom for the player to wander around the 3D space as a person.  Therefore, I guess, Doom (1993) was considered as a first-person game but Microsoft Flight Simulators aren’t. Many times I wish there was a flight simulator or a racing game that incorporated meaningfully such a freedom into the gameplay, but it’s always about guns, guns, guns.

So, shooting people is such a profound way of interacting with the virtual from the first-person point of view that it feels strange and out of place when an AAA game with said perspective comes along that involves barely use of weaponry, like Mirror’s Edge (2008). Mirror’s Edge was based on finding a right path to come over the obstacles, keeping the momentum going, and avoiding the enemy fire at the same time. However, occasionally the player got a hold of a gun and could fire back, which made the shooting feel that much more special and meaningful, if you will. Now the weapon wasn’t a fundamental part of the player’s character like in most first-person games, but a luxurious object that one kind of cherished and which radiated genuine authority.

This all comes down to the fact that I find it highly fascinating when a first-person game (=shooter) introduces functionality that’s not directly connected to the core ethos of the game, a fascination which dates back to Duke Nukem 3D (1996) that famously contained all kinds of extra stuff to play with. What’s amusing, then, is that in the case of Mirror’s Edge, that functionality was indeed shooting. Also, I remember how exciting it was to be able to drive civilian cars in the original Operation Flashpoint (2001), which had little to do with the actual militaristic gameplay, but which transformed the game as a whole into something much cooler, even if being quite cool to begin with.

I’m not saying shooting isn’t necessarily enough for a game like Call of Duty. I’m saying first-person games should aim a bit higher than being mere shooters in terms of functionality. Crysis (2007) was an ambitious endeavor into that direction in that the player could pick up and hold almost any object, not only a gun (the system is unparalleled even today), and drive around freely with vehicles, military and civilian.

The first-person view is not an artistic statement, but the most natural and obvious way of portraying the virtual, and it frustrates me that the most prevalent first-person genre is tagged with such a specific and limiting term as shooter. At the end of the day, I guess, I want genuine first-person Grand Theft Auto -esque games that deliver on-par experiences in all fronts. Please.

It’s pretty given that life consists of not only everyday, mundane tasks and goals that make our day-to-day living possible in terms of pure existence, but aspirations and ambitions of higher order as well. As cliché as it may sound, I believe it’s the latter form of endeavors that make us human, that our existence can rise upon mere survival and procreation, enabling our very being to connect into something universal, beautiful or some other entity that may be considered transcendental.

Sure, activities like self-expression or learning new things can be seen as some sort of survival of the mind, although only way we can die from lack of such is merely from the inside. So as long as our basic needs are met, we tend to require more sophisticated goals toward which to strive that cater to the creative and intellectual forms of our being.

One of the central goals of my earlier creative life was to learn the art of so-called 3D imaging that was gaining serious popularity in the early 90s. Seeing back then cool looking, but poorly produced by today’s standards, music videos using 3D animation as a visual element, such as Swamp Thing by The Grid, really pushed me to pursue 3D graphics and leave pixel-based animation aside. I just had to find the way to get into that place where I could create computer-generated images just like ones that were so fascinating to look at on TV.

It was somewhere in the latter part of the 90s when I finally cracked the invisible wall between me and 3D imaging by getting a hold of and learning 3D Studio 4 by Autodesk. 3D Studio 4 was rather user friendly a 3D software at the time relatively speaking, but looking at it now 15 years later, it’s striking how dull, limited, stiff and uninspiring the work environment that supposed to feed the creative process really was. Everything was divided into separate modes and sub-programs that made the user constantly to jump in between them. Furthermore, the hardware on which 3D Studio 4 was running on was so sluggish that it struggled to even keep up with the wireframe rendering, making it sometimes quite frustrating to carry out even a slight adjustment to the camera or to the geometry.

However, when 3D accelerated cards finally became everyday items, the whole 3D game, if one pardons the pun, changed in more ways than one. Now using a 3D application like 3ds Max that took advantage of 3D acceleration, was completely different an experience. The engineer-like work environment had turned into a sandbox that was a delight to merely play with, like spinning the camera around a cube in a 3D space at buttery smooth 60 frames per second only because one could, and because it looked so, so cool.

The creative process comes down to iterations, iterations and iterations. So when everything happens in real-time and at high frame-rate, the speed at which new iterations can be made is really limited only by the user. And every fraction of a second the user has to wait the machine to comply with the input, pulls him/her further away from the flow, which is why I generally like working in an environment like 3ds Max as much as possible over After Effects even in the simplest animation cases.

To me, playing around in 3ds Max is in a way purest real-time image experience. There’s no ludus controlling and limiting the play, only one’s imagination and creative skills. The act of 3D modeling, for instance, can be as immersive and captivating of an experience as playing a high-end video game, and Minecraft (2011) proves if anything that creativity and playfulness can be fused together quite successfully.