Game graphics have increasingly emphasized their ability to capture fine detail – details such as skin texture, fine creases in fabric, and ornate stone and metalwork. We’ve increased poly count, we’ve gone from flat textures to bump maps to normal maps, we’ve even sometimes decreased interactivity in order to give the player more opportunity to notice these fine details. However, when we focus on details we tend to lose sight of the bigger picture – both metaphorically and literally, both as consumer and as creator.
Let’s discuss some of the different ways this issue can manifest:
First: When we spend our time developing the details, we lose focus on creating an overall visually interesting and cohesive scene. If you’re drawing a character and you spend an hour detailing their clothing before you nail down proportions and anatomy, you’re either going to create one messed-up looking character or you’re going to set yourself up for a lot of sadness when you have to erase and redraw all of it. The same dynamic is at play when you create larger scenes and even when you create stories and gameplay – you have to figure out the broad strokes before you can figure out the details, and even once you do so those details can throw off your eye and force miscalculations about the overall style and quality.
Second: If we’re putting a lot of work into creating details, we need to be able to see visual feedback to assess the details we’ve created. Thus, there’s an overall tendency to tweak the presentation of the scene to emphasize those details, to make objects unnaturally shiny or textures unnaturally large so the effects are more visible – even if this results in something that seems jarring and busy, unnaturally ornate and complex to the eye. This tendency particularly bothers me now when I look at Dark Souls 3 – the world is full of fine detail, but tends to lack larger-scale visual differentiation, with nearly every area having approximately the same palette, very little contrast between light and dark areas, and exceptionally shiny materials that create a lot of visual glare from light-sources. The overall effect is very impressive when you first see it, but quickly becomes exhausting when playing the game for long periods of time.
When we’re not the creator, when we’re just playing a game or taking in a scene, when we’re shown these feats of ornate detail we are impressed – however, while we are impressed by these specific details we notice, we may find ourselves more generally turned off, in a way that is difficult to describe, by the overall presentation. It seems to me that much of the time the more visually impressive a game is, the less visually appealing it actually turns out to be – indeed, much of the time the intent to create spectacle works at cross purposes to creating something that is readable and comfortable to spend a lot of time with. When we behold a visually detailed scene, all of the detail creates visual noise which decreases clarity, making it more difficult to understand what’s actually happening.
There’s only so much we can notice, that we can pay attention to. Every detail we place taxes the attention budget of both the developer and the player, and we have to be careful about how we spend this budget. In narrative forms, this principle is often described via the concept of Chekhov’s Gun – that is, if a gun is introduced, it must eventually be fired. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, not every detail must be the setup to a huge dramatic moment, but most details must eventually serve some sort of narrative or aesthetic purpose – otherwise they are destined to merely distract and detract from the intended effect.