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Who Needs Reality?
15 years ago
General
I keep seeing ads on TV for Battlefield Bad Company 2, and I really can't believe what I'm seeing. Between that, The Show, and Final Fantasy XIII, game graphics just keep getting better.
(For Christ's sake, you can see the Alpinestar logos stitched into the driver's gloves in that last shot)
These games make reality look dull. The world I live in doesn't have eye-popping colors or these kinds of details. You can't get these great views and angles without putting yourself in harm's way. And in this world, I'm an unemployed, frustrated adult. Wouldn't it be so much better to be a soldier on the battlefield, or a race car driver or a player on an MLB team? Why sit around on the couch when you could be going hand-to-hand with a fantastical army of evil?
What happens to people when Second Life gets graphics like F1 2010, or Final Fantasy XIII? Do they ever leave the house? Do they ever leave the computer chair? Does the computer ever get turned off? Do people quit jobs so they can exist full-time in Second Life? Or do people find ways to support themselves so they can live there instead? They just have to take those pesky breaks to attend to their biological needs (something which I'm sure will be solved too in short order).
Look, I'm not saying that games with stunning graphics are the end of the world. I'm just amazed at how far they've come in my lifetime (stay tuned for that journal). I have played an actual Atari 2600 VCS. Look at a screen from a 2600 game, then look at one of the examples from the first paragraph.
Seriously, look at The Show again. Can you really tell reality from fantasy?
Remember the joke about how when Virtual Reality becomes good enough and cheap enough that guys can go on a virtual date, then the human race is doomed? Are we there yet?
Because with games like these, who needs reality?
(For Christ's sake, you can see the Alpinestar logos stitched into the driver's gloves in that last shot)
These games make reality look dull. The world I live in doesn't have eye-popping colors or these kinds of details. You can't get these great views and angles without putting yourself in harm's way. And in this world, I'm an unemployed, frustrated adult. Wouldn't it be so much better to be a soldier on the battlefield, or a race car driver or a player on an MLB team? Why sit around on the couch when you could be going hand-to-hand with a fantastical army of evil?
What happens to people when Second Life gets graphics like F1 2010, or Final Fantasy XIII? Do they ever leave the house? Do they ever leave the computer chair? Does the computer ever get turned off? Do people quit jobs so they can exist full-time in Second Life? Or do people find ways to support themselves so they can live there instead? They just have to take those pesky breaks to attend to their biological needs (something which I'm sure will be solved too in short order).
Look, I'm not saying that games with stunning graphics are the end of the world. I'm just amazed at how far they've come in my lifetime (stay tuned for that journal). I have played an actual Atari 2600 VCS. Look at a screen from a 2600 game, then look at one of the examples from the first paragraph.
Seriously, look at The Show again. Can you really tell reality from fantasy?
Remember the joke about how when Virtual Reality becomes good enough and cheap enough that guys can go on a virtual date, then the human race is doomed? Are we there yet?
Because with games like these, who needs reality?
Neuromancer
Johnny Mnenomic
Count Zero
Fragments of a Hologram Rose
Good reading ^.^
Up until that time, if you wanted to do high-end color photography, you shot Kodachrome, and when it was too dark for that, Ektachrome, because they gave lovely fine-grained, high contrast images with beautiful life-like color rendition. It's a look that anyone who's leafed through a National Geographic, from, say 1960-1990, is familiar with. It was the gold standard for color imaging.
Then, in 1990 Fuji released a new slide-film emulsion, Velvia 50, that took a huge bite out of Kodak's market share. And why not use it instead of K-25? It produced sharper images, was a full stop faster, and used the E-6 process, so developing could be done in house. And the color! That's what really made people sit up and notice it. The reds and yellows were super saturated, and as ever, the greens and blues were beautiful and brilliant. It was more real that real, and so long as you weren't taking pictures of people (the extra red saturation tended to make them look sun burnt), it was what you went for. The extra 'punch' in the colors was felt necessary to stand out in a competitive market, where editors went for visual impact rather than authentic reproduction.
While there were, and are people who are resistant to the new standard (Cheese film, or Crayolachrome, they call it), these are mostly people who have no use for it, either as portrait, or fashion photographers, or whatever else. Of course all this is sort of passe, most of these people have migrated to digital work, but then, lots of digital cameras have their sensors running 'hot' too, for nicely over-saturated colors. It's the triumph of the unreal!
So, yeah. To get back to your point after this sort of rambling 'lookit me!' aside, yes. Escapism, and unreality are coming to dominate the world in which we live. What affect this will have on the way we live our lives, I'm not sure, but it's certainly changing the way we play, and the way we look at the world around us!
It's not the games I am afraid of, it's the people who play them. I know I am smart enough to regulate my gaming time and know when to take a break, but then there's those Avatar kind of people... x3 I'm mostly just a graphics whore and I like to push my hardware to the limits, so it's nice how fast games are advancing.
Another nice virtual picture using Unreal Engine 3: http://spiele-hardware.com/files/me.....honor-2010.jpg
Though, I truly cannot blame a fair percentage of people who need their escapism. I sure could use some. But right now I'm choosing to escape into my own little universe of writing.
But I agree with your post most assuredly.