The Pixel is Dead

The majestic gorilla, from primate to pixel

I find deep satisfaction in the recent (ish) trend away from realism in video games. Specifically, high-quality, realistic depictions of fundamentally surreal elements – where 8-bit pixellation and posterization are enshrined in gleaming high-color environments. Let me explain. Start with a gorilla. A real, five-thousand-pound senator dripping chunks of banana and trying to pick lice out of your hair.

Next, sometime in 1981 a Nintendo exec decides that it would be AWESOME to have a gorilla protagonist in an arcade game. While he was musing, everybody over at Disney had been busy drawing cartoon depictions of gorillas, which, coincidentally, are much easier to depict in 8-bit render and probably more appealing to six year olds than the original Fay Wray-crushing silverback.

The game, and many others like it, is a huge success. Everybody plays it. Tiny three-tone pixellated gorillas work their way up ladders and into the collective psyche of a generation, fuelling a flaming digital ejecta of spin-offs and merchandise. Over time, as technology improves, so does the gorilla. He develops hundreds, then thousands, then millions of colors. A half-dozen side kicks show up. Faster frame-rates. Hair. He plops into 3-D and begins appearing as a mascot at game conferences.

Meanwhile the background hardware developed to the point where depicting the original gorilla was feasible. Even easy. Perhaps easier than rendering the abstracted and cartooned version parading across billboards and t-shirts. But instead of returning to the original inspiration, improvements to the abstraction continue unhindered. It’s as though the 8-bit gorilla had replaced the Kong, not only as an artistic precursor but as the object being abstracted: the original gorilla is no longer part of the equation. In it’s place, a beautifully rendered neon orange cartoon gorilla.

Now comes the best part. Over the last five years, some games have stopped trying to imitate semi-realistic environments altogether, even in deeply abstracted forms. Instead, they strive to place the player in the best-rendered cartoon environment possible. You get to feel like you are a robot-piloting adolescent in a cartoon (See Robotech Battlecry). Take the recent Zelda remake Windwaker. A surreal, fully illustrated environment was embraced for being just that, leaving detailed lightblooms and textures to rot. BoomBlox took it a step further, depicting everything as an abstracted pixel, whittling the depiction down to its simplest element. In the marvelous Little Big Planet, the entire game is an abstracted representation of pre-electronic puppetry, gloriously rebuilding a simple technology in a complex digital environment.

The cartoon-o-real smashy-smash
of Deathspank

These games strive to imitate a meta-reality, and call back to artificial worlds of their creator’s youth. They are cartoons, and much more, because they depict elements that were originally crutches (i.e., pixels) as complex elements of beautiful environments, proudly displaying their presence where earlier games might have tried to hide them. Games that pursue realism, on the other hand, are more often than not simulations: of war (past, present or future), sports, and otherwise inaccessible or undesirable experiences – like flight simulators and horror-action trips such as Dead Space. By attempting to recreate reality, they are bound by an implicit need to create a world with minimal suspension of disbelief. A simulation has to be believable. In a cartoon world, however, anything is possible. Meta-realism, therefore, is a trend that will keep the doors of creative and experimental gameplay models wide open, forever immune to technologies that make realism all too easy.

In a glorious pinnacle of exactly what I’m talking about, check out this calculator (ok, actually it’s a subtraction engine) made entirely from the strings and cogs of Little Big Planet. Just think about that. Somebody took tens of hours to build a string and cardboard calculator that is run on a processor that could perform the same calculation in a fraction of a second. Just think about that.