factual opinions

Oh hello, I didn’t see you there.

But now that you’re here, please, sit down, relax and try not to get too bored. Today’s topic is about making games. Or rather a specific set of symptoms in game making that many seem unable to identify. You see, it’s incredibly easy to get lost during the production of a game, and getting lost almost inevitably leads to a series of symptoms I collectively call the Tunnel Vision Syndrome(™).

I hope you’re thinking “What’s TVS?”, ‘cuz otherwise this is not going to be a funny rant for you…

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TVS starts occurring when the artistic vision is mistreated (I’ll get into some examples in a moment), but the symptoms are very difficult to recognize from within the company until it’s too late to do anything about it..
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It starts happening when creativity is mismanaged, for example if you find yourself working on details first and letting the bigger picture form by itself that’s a big symptom. That’s not how a creative product is supposed to be put together! Every good artist knows you start with a rough outline and slowly make your way toward the details. That goes for anything creative really: paintings, movies, books, etc. Unfortunately it’s a pretty common problem, as my examples will show in the next paragraphs. TVS also occurs when technology and deadlines begin limiting the available solutions. If everyone is resorting to quick fixes and hacks you can be pretty sure a TVS infestation is underway…

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I’ll give you some specific examples. Have you seen Prey, from Human Head Studios? Here’s a screenshot. But beware!, if your first thought is it looks kinda good then please read on as to why you’re wrong.

Possessed kids

That’s not pretty. That is objectively not a good looking scene! Would you ever see an action movie use such over-the-top lighting? Or use those dark metal/organic brown environments throughout the entire story? No, you wouldn’t see a movie do that, because a typical movie production nowadays has tight overall creative control that minimizes blatant TVS symptoms. The games industry desperately needs to learn from this.

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But back to the screenshot. What’s the overall expression it’s conveying? What’s the mood? It’s like an old cheap monster movie: generic environments, simplistic characters with senseless features and unrecognizable details, and very crude lighting. Prey just doesn’t speak a nuanced language, it’s all about spastically hitting the notes for violence and occasionally scariness and you know what? That just ain’t good enough! No way is Prey the result of a unified vision, no one has such poor taste that they’d light up zombie children with a powerful red sourceless light on purpose. The level designer might’ve wished for better lighting tools or a more forgiving deadline but that’s exactly what Tunnel Vision Syndrome is all about. By the time you’re wishing for more time and better tools you’re already shit out of luck. Technology and circumstances can’t define your game mid-production!

Basically Prey squanders its potential and it’s a damn shame. There’s a girlfriend in the game you’re supposed to care for, but it never gets anywhere. If Prey had been a movie-production they would’ve made damn sure the emotional connection was present, they would’ve placed meaning and context into the environments, every scene would’ve mattered, and they would’ve used lights and props to subtly accentuate moods. They would’ve created something more than a poor attempt at Good Guy Facing Off Against Bad Guys schlock horror story, but as it stands all we got was a game straight out of 1993 whose highlights includes portals from which enemies pour from and gravity-altering buttons that makes dead aliens fall upwards instead of just slumping to the ground. Bravo indeed.

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Another symptom of TVS: There’s a game called Flatout, a semi-popular action racer released in late 2004 by Bugbear Entertainment Ltd. They made a trailer for the game that contains a surprising revelation. For the first minute of the trailer you’re seeing this:

Wow!, when I saw that I thought it looked awesome (and you should really see it in motion). I was captivated by the beautiful contrast levels, the movie-like hues, the deep dark full shadows and faded subtle colors. Plus gritty filmgrain like a real camera, brilliant, they fucking nailed the looks. But then, without any explanation, it suddenly shifts to this:

I was shocked. What the hell just happened? Turns out that’s how the game really looks! I’m not saying it’s terrible, but that’s clearly an ordinary game. And yet it’s the same assets we’re looking at, it’s the same ground texture, the same car model, the same background…

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What I think is going on here is that the guy who edited the trailer must have thrown on a couple of filters to make it look better. It’s extremely easy to do with a movie clip, anywhere from ten minutes to a few hours’ worth of tinkering will produce the difference seen in the above screenshots.

And that has more ramifications than first meets the eye. What this guy did was so fucking simple to him, yet speaks volumes about why the games industry is so retarded. This trailer guy did a few things: altered the overall contrast, applied some filmgrain, shifted the colors towards a warm red, faked 16:9 widescreen aspect and added motionblur. Completely standard post-processing techniques, and very very doable in real-time (okay sure, at the time motionblur would’ve been difficult). But here’s my mind boggling 10-million-dollar question: Where the friggin’ hell was that guy when Bugbear was making the damn game? Where was this guy to take charge of the visuals? This is another TVS. Bugbear might never even have thought about it, the game just had a look after they put in all the content.. so one asset at a time they ended up with a result they thought looked nice, and no one ever stepped back and looked at the result from afar. Except the trailer guy! He wasn’t bogged down by production stress and habits, he didn’t suffer from Tunnel Vision Syndrome, and for a minute there he got to be sole proprietor of the look and feel of the game and Jesus Christ it made a huge honkin’ difference.

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For several reasons (more than enough to take up entire articles by themselves) making games has a way of making you oddly blind. You get bogged down by so many technical hurdles and day-to-day minutiae that perspective is lost and tunnel vision sets in. Keep this in mind when coming up with funny game ideas, your idea has to survive years of outright abuse and a team full of TVS’ed people and still act as a shining beacon of hope and trust for workers and investors alike. Good luck, we all need it.