I didn't play Burnout Paradise when it first came out for the 360 in 2008. Those were my early days of “next gen” gaming, when I was still indignant about having to pay $60 for a video game. But with with 2009 coming to a close I put it on my Christmas list and the 'rents picked it up for a steal. It is, as all the reviews said, very cool. I am not a fan of racing games in general, but I am a fan of sparks and metal rent asunder, and Burnout Paradise delivers. For those not in the know, the racing series has been around for a while, but what has always set it apart is the focus on crashing. When you crash, the game slows down, the camera zooms in, sparks fly. And you drive on real roads, with traffic. Previous games even included modes where you earned points for each successive car that crashed when you started an accident, allowing you to cause massive chaos. It's awesome.
So Burnout Paradise brings open-world driving to the formula, and the result is Paradise City: miles of road spanning city and countryside, and dozens and dozens of events. The seamless environment is great, because you can run a race from the beach to the county, and then just pick up a new event out there and do something else. Instead of levels or courses, everything is connected. But there's something that bothers me about the game. There are no people. Miles of beach front sidewalks go untouched, crosswalks are left barren. Most bizarre of all, not a single one of the thousands of cars that populate the city has a driver.
The lack of people in a game about glorifying horrible crashes is not so hard to understand. There are the technical considerations of modeling people and animating them, mostly so they can try to jump out of the way, and figuring out what happens to them when the car they were cruising in is compressed into a small pile of scrap. There is the rating consideration too, as adding people inadvertently adds a great deal of violence to a game that has none. Most of all the decision was probably about focus and design. Adding people means crashes have a kill count and pedestrians live in fear of every 12-year-old player with a desire to chase them, and that's just not what the Burnout series is about. So people were a problem, and they left them out.
The lack of people creates another problem, however. For myself at least, driving my driver-less car through the active-yet-uninhabited city is off-putting at best, mildly terrifying at worst. The game's visuals stress realism in all aspects of the driving and the environment, but the game comes off like a strange dream. I am reminded of that episode of The Twilight Zone where the guy wakes up without any context and walks into an abandoned town, where breakfast is cooking on the stove but there's no one to eat it. In Paradise City I can almost see the kids skating around the corner far ahead of me, but no, they aren't really there.
A roboticist in 1970 coined the term “Uncanny Valley” when describing the nature of human and robot interactions. It goes like this: If you were to measure a person's emotional reaction to a robot (or a CGI character, or puppet, etc.), you would see that reaction become more and more favorable as the robot looked more and more human. But there comes a point at which the robot looks almost human, but not quite, and the emotional reaction becomes strongly negative. That's the valley. If the robot continues to look more and more human, you can eventually pull out of it, at which point you should use the robot to replace you and do the menial chores of everyday life while you live la vida loca.
There are a number of explanations as to why the valley exists. My favorite is that by looking so human, the “being” creates a connection between its human elements and the inhuman ones, and basically it's terrifying. A classic example is the movie The Polar Express. Back in school my professor told me he had heard it described “as either a horrible children's movie, or a pretty good horror movie.” One of the sited reasons that The Polar Express was so revolting is that the characters don't have tongues inside their mouths. When they open, they reveal a bottomless maw of black soul-sucking darkness. Yeah, its scary.
To bring the discussion back to video games, my point is this: the theory of the “Uncanny Valley” highlights the problem with disconnects between what we perceive and what we expect. The fundamental idea behind the valley applies broadly, especially in video games, which are all about created worlds, characters, and spaces. I hit on this point in my critique of Assassin's Creed II, which you should read here. The short version is that ACII suffers from a disconnect between the narrative, in which you play a hero seeking revenge, and the gameplay, in which you play a murderous psychopath whose crimes go unpunished. If, as in Assassin's Creed II, the game casts the player as a hero narratively, but then encourages un-hero-like play, you're in the valley. If you create a visually rich world filled with sun-drenched ocean drives, promenades, highways, and country roads, and then leave it with no people, it becomes oddly terrifying.
I mentioned earlier that the case of Burnout Paradise was likely a design choice, but many of the gaps that appear in the presentation of modern games stem directly from the unfortunate use of graphics as the yardstick for achievement. The industry business model seems to be to use graphics to sell the game, and make the gameplay just good enough not to piss everyone off for buying it. But the more convincing the the game environment, the less I'm willing to forgive the rough edges. Burnout looks beautiful, even real, but that means the lack of population sticks out even more.
Another example is Dragon Age: Origins. The game builds off of the Bioware predecessors, and is the best looking yet (minus Mass Effect II maybe, which I haven't played yet), but that becomes one of it's biggest flaws. The game looks beautiful, but plays almost identically to KOTOR, a game I played six years ago. I really hit a wall when I realized that the environments, which look very organic and interesting, play as if you're on a flat 2D map. And there are countless other recent examples of these valley-like disconnects in modern games. Moreover, there will be countless more. Not all areas of game creation advance at the same pace, due to budget, time, priorities, laziness, and on and on. Where two of these areas don't match up, there lies a possible “Uncanny Valley” for players.
Games have just barely been around long enough to begin the “art” discussion, and one of the common, and worst, arguments in favor of calling games art is just how pretty they've gotten. I've got plenty to say about that one, but that's for another time. For today, I'll say this: games have nearly run out of mileage in pushing toward hyper-realistic graphics, physics, etc. The farther you push one element, the more disconnected it becomes from the rest of the experience. To truly go the distance in delivering an immersive experience, the game elements need to match. A less technically impressive, but well matched experience will win over a fancy mismatched one any day, at least on my screen.
More on that to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment