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Dwarf Fortress ASCII graphics only rule
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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Purists when an artform incorporates another artform: >:(
I'm going to be annoying for a second, but I promise to try and make it worth it: It isn't about purism or even "fun", because not all art is meant to amuse. Art is allowed to be anything, and we should treat critique of art (including games) an an exploration of what the creator was trying to do, to what extent they succeeded and how, what it makes you think of, and possible meanings. Play is merely one aspect of a game's artistic content.
The entire subject of fun in terms of game design is, artistically speaking so nascent that there is hardly any history to that field of study. We've been making up for lost time in recent decades, but the entire concept of game theory is not even a century old.
So, that was probably annoying of me. But the point I'm here to make is that "fun vs graphics" isn't really the conversation we're trying to have.
One conversation we should have is the problem that exists with how games are funded and how those financial incentives can shape the creative side in a way that might hinder what's being done with the medium. Games aren't just art, they're big business, and the conversation is taking place within the context of the tech industry, geopolitical trends, and even monetary policy. Now that the industry is so large, it often feels like creators working with big budgets are becoming risk-averse and often greedy. When traditional artists seem overly risk-averse and driven by financial incentives, the art world turns on them in a big way. Look at Anish Kapoor and vantablack.
Another conversation to have is graphics in gaming within the larger computing industry. We're at the tail end of Moore's law and the GPU market seems like it's starting to turn away from gaming towards other perceived cash cows like LLMs and generative AI. So we should not expect graphics cards to continually get better forever, or even cheaper honestly. It's been the case for decades, but the situation is dynamic.
For a long time, it seems like there has been a bad combination of forces at play in gaming: the promise of endlessly increasing computing power, and lurching shifts in monetary policy that lead initially to massive tech speculation and then periods of focusing intensely on profitability.
I think it's reasonable to predict that we're going to see smaller development budgets in gaming, increased focus on well-optimized code, a shift away from the emphasis on realism in games, or a general collapse in the "big budget" gaming industry as some or all of these fail to materialize.
Meanwhile, indie gaming has been on a hit streak. That food chain has been thriving at lower trophic levels, and no wonder. They're taking more risks, being more generous, and reaching less highly than their larger peers. It's a winning formula under tight monetary policy and the overall larger context.
I've said far too much, sorry to drop this on you.
You kinda moved things to a bit of a pre-decided set of rails there. I don't know that the previous poster was particularly concerned about the concept of "fun" or the economics. But hey, I get wanting to find a place to say your piece.
FWIW, you're not wrong about a lot of that, although I wouldn't express it that way. I do have a few caveats for you.
For one thing, chasing the hardware hasn't been as big of a deal for a while. I don't think most game devs or execs are dumb enough to notice that WoW, Minecraft, The Sims, Roblox and a bunch of other major hits are not on the visuals cutting edge. Competing on high end visuals is comfortable for studios with access to a bunch of funding because it cuts off some of the competition, but there are big chunks of the industry where being flashy and high-tech cuts off big pieces of the potential market (mobile, handheld and PC, traditionally). A big part of this conversation is nerds consistently conflating home console and high end PC with the entirety of the gaming market, when it's a small corner.
I'm also not sure that the investment boom and crunch thing is a cycle. Investment has been there for a long time, it is now leaving. I'm not sure it'll come back. That will probably have the consequence of moderating budgets, as you say, but don't underestimate how much that vacant top end for visuals will remain appetizing to some as competition there dries up.
And conversely don't underestimate how big "indies" can get. I brought it up elsewhere, but Expedition 33 is making waves for being a small team, and they themselves have identified as "double A" a few times. But if you look at that next to, say, Persona 5, those lines start to blur a lot. As the tools evolve and, unfortunately, a bunch of experienced devs brain drain right into unemployment the ability of indies to reach scopes that were AAA just a few years ago will also increase.
On that comparison, by the way, I would not be surprised at all if it turns out all that sleek 2D UI art in Persona or Metaphor (not to mention the anime cutscenes) turned out to have been more expensive than the heavily middleware-reliant cinematic presentation in Expedition 33. Perception of cost is already out of whack and it will probably get weirder in an environment of consolidated engines and weird vectors for machine generation of assets.
Thanks for taking my wall of text as it was intended, mainly just carving out a space for a few of my hobbyhorses and trying to be slightly self-aware about it for once. I knew I was laying down a lot of railroad track and I hope nobody thinks I'm demanding to be taken seriously. Usually the username does the trick there.
I confess I don't read enough interviews with game industry people to know where their heads are at with regard to most things. The prevailing trends they chase and talk about are very commercial in nature, and it just leaves me cold to talk about which creative choices they think will make the most money - if you have a source for more substantive interviews I'm all ears.
I do like that there are "ugly" games (low-poly, or at least less grounded in realism) that are proving that there's money in prioritizing other aspects of the creative - but I worry that they'll just learn the wrong lessons. I read last night that Monopoly Go! has so far spent over a billion USD on advertising alone. I am still reeling from that fact, and I don't have a context to make sense of it. I haven't even played that game, nor do I recall having seen ads for it. A billion doesn't go as far as it used to, I guess.
You're right that it's not necessarily a cycle, any more than tectonic plate migration is a cycle. It's too large and slow to really say how it'll turn out. I think if we zoom out really far, it might be the case that there aren't as many universally cherished cultural touchstones as there used to be, substantive culture feels like it's becoming more diffuse and niche as time goes on. Even a dear friend of over two decades with largely the same tastes can talk for ages without mentioning anything I've ever heard of. There's so much, everyone's bound up in a personal little tornado of content. I guess I'm on a natural phenomena metaphor kick.
I have high hopes for the future of 2D design in games. You can work your ass off on 2D and 3D and make either look good, but the work really shows more with 2D - an example like Sea of Stars spring to mind, with their highly dialed-in Chrono Trigger looks with anime cut scenes. The tools continue to change, but you can always spot when hard work wasn't done.
2D isn't even necessarily cheaper. For small games there are plenty of devs who have the skillset to get some 3D models in place but absolutely could not even begin to hand-animate the same volume of assets. It's not a linear thing anymore, if it ever was.
It's true that most of what you hear in publicly available forums is business talk. In the industry's defense, it's hard to live life on a constant doomsday clock and a lot of the stuff that keeps people employed has historically been some combination of appealing to investors and successfully gaming the marketing game (and I don't just mean for "AAA", whatever that means).
It's not that the artistic conversation doesn't happen, but it lives in game jams and watercooler talks and academia. It doesn't help that it's often dry as all hell. It's one thing to watch famous actors running around in costumes and talking about how long they spend on makeup every day, but who wants to hear about burndown charts and the finer points of coding some random tool to make sure every drawer in an RPG has at least one handkerchief inside it?
For the record, I agree with you that part of it is that in a world without centralized media consumption and driven by algorithm filtering of on-demand content we are no longer all talking about the same five things. That is not just about games, but people still haven't fully wrapped their heads around how much it's messing things up. I one heard a games industry person say that he firmly believed the goal for an indie developer should be to "own a word on Steam's search", and he was not wrong, but that's still a depressing thought. Just like if you're making a TV show the goal is now to break the Netflix top 10 in multiple countries and so on. Storefront placement has replaced the old human gatekeepers and it's not all bad on that process, but it'd be nice to have a door number three we can open somewhere.
It's a little surprising that 2D and 3D are such different skillsets for game dev, since I've seen so much indie 2D and 3D animation being done in blender in the past few years. It's not something I know much about in practical terms though, I'm not in the industry and I don't know the practical tools or workflows at all. The one thing I do know is that the number of A's there are in a conversation about game developers is roughly equal to how loud one feels like screaming.
I do worry that Steam is getting too big for its britches though, and I'm trying to spend more money on places like GOG or Itch.io. The one good thing about there being such an unremitting storm of content these days is that you can easily decide to spend the majority of your time away from the more commercially driven stuff.