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In a semi-unrelated meme, I was chatting with my friend Aaron a few weeks back about why I disliked 3D graphics, especially in games. To his credit, I don’t play computer games so I miss out any much of the emotional nuance that comes from interacting with simulated gore and I probably shroud my argument with rationales purely to hide my irrational aesthetic bias. But that said, I don’t like 3D graphics for two interrelated reasons. Firstly, I assume that the designers of these graphics curse themselves at the lack of rendering power at their fingertips. Sure, they think their blood spatter looks better than any game that came before it, but if only they had 64 GPU pipelines instead of 32, it would look so much better. George Suerat never complained about the number of lines per inch in his Gillot paper. The paper was chosen for its capabilities and its characteristics were exploited to promote the aesthetic that Seurat was seeking. I have long felt that art and constraints go hand in hand and successful creators express themselves within boundaries. For the most part, game graphics are not timeless. Today people look back on games from 2003 and chuckle at the lack of realism. In 2009 the creators of Halo will secretly wish that they could go back and remake their games with 2009 era technology. Who knows if the makers of Galaga would prefer to recreate their game using today’s technology, my guess is not.

Fundamentally, I find it a little offensive when people make graphics and aren’t happy with the outcome. Sure, game creators (and players) probably really enjoy their work. But whenever they admit that they need a better computer to ‘get the full experience’, they are stating that they are not happy with what they have. Computers are immensely powerful. But I fear that much of that power is being dedicated to doing things very uncomputer-like. If people adapted to and adopted the medium, we may have graphics that look very different to reality but in the abstraction away from reality I think we can find a fluid, informative, and medium appropriate representations. People don’t have an innate understanding of what data looks like, and in the world of statistical analysis and visualization we can afford to break the mold. Perhaps not in many games, but I have seen some games that take this approach and invent new visual realities that are (to my untrained eyes) as emotionally engaging and poorly rendered trees and bump-mapped blood spatter.