Video Game Graphics: Do They Matter?

Recently a whole slew of new video games have been released. Among them are Halo 4 and Call of Duty Black Ops 2. With these new releases i have been constantly overhearing conversations concerning things like how certain aspects of these games are but one thing always seems to be a serious topic within the discussion. Im talking of course about the graphics. It seems that graphics is one of the most important things to gamers these days. It makes sense. Why wouldn't you want to play a game that has the best graphics around.

While games like Halo and Call of Duty improve there graphics with each new release, there has a computer game released recently that challenges the idea that graphics are one of the most important parts of the game. The game i am referring to is called Minecraft. The concept surrounding this game is very simple. You are a character in an extremely blocky world, mining resources like coal and iron in order to build things. You can build anything from a house to a scale model of the starship enterprise. The graphics in this game are incredibly simple. Everything is made out of blocks and the coloring is very simple. There is no such thing as shading, all of the colors are basic and simple. The most interesting thing about this however is that this game is extremely popular. I found this very interesting because while it is fun to play (albeit extremely time consuming) the graphics look like something that would have been released 15 years ago. However Minecraft is extremely popular. Once released, all over the internet there were forums and screencaps popping up concerning the game and who could build the most ridiculous thing in there chosen world. I really like that this is as popular as it is. It has always bugged me when people get really serious about the graphics in there video games. I personally have never really cared. This shows that there are others out there like me who do not really care that much about graphics and are more concerned with the actual gameplay.

Machinima and Other Content

Video games have been a huge part of my childhood and teenage years. Now, as a college student, I find myself playing them less and less (it's more of a time thing rather than an interest thing). Regardless, I still appreciate the value video games have when it comes to creativity and storytelling. One unique things video games can be used for is to create machinima.

We talked briefly about machinima in class. It is essentially using real-world filmmaking techniques and applying them to interactive virtual spaces, which in most cases is a video game engine. One could think of it as a hybrid between animation and traditional cinema.

The types of videos created using machinima vary from features to music videos. Yes, there is even an academy for machinima arts and an international machinima exposition. I personally don't know of any long-form machinima, but it most certainly is a legitimate form of art/filmmaking.

Some of the only machinima that I have watched is not even true machinima. There is a fantastic YouTuber, Captain Sparklez, who produces video game content as well as music videos about games such as Minecraft.

While some of his earlier work is done mostly through the actual game, some of his stuff (like the video above) does not use the physical video game engine at all to produce machinima content. The style and look is almost exactly like Minecraft, but is actually animation. I personally like it better.

The ability to tell stories through non-traditional ways is really interesting, and machinima is a great outlet. There are many popular series, such as Red v Blue (done using the Halo games). I am excited to see where this form of art can go.

Halo 4

My schedule this semester is tough to describe, but on Monday through Wednesday I have about an hour to myself until 10PM. So in that hour there’s a forty percent chance that I’m playing Halo 3 on Xbox live. I’m hoping I can stop anytime I want, but I think it’s getting me hooked again. The last time I played this game would have been junior year of high school. After two years of not playing, as one can imagine, I was quite rusty. Was I specifically bad? No, but compared to how good I was one could say there was a lot of room for improvement.

I used to be amazing, the record on my old account was winning 881 out of 1009 games. Online you play against people that have the same "skill rank" on a scale from 1-50, 50 being the highest. The way you rank up is by continuously and consecutively winning games. Consequently if you lose, you rank down. To become a 50 you need to win roughly sixty games in a row. I would play with my best friend from home and I had a 50 in Team Doubles. In other playlists I had 48, 46, 42, 38 and 20 in a playlist I did not play much. So I enjoyed being able to not do homework in high school and constantly win games a majority of the time I played.  

So now the year is 2012, the year the world is supposedly going to end. And even though Halo 4 is coming out I feel as though the Halo franchise is officially over. A gameplay trailer of Halo 4 came out and it is no longer Halo. It lost many aspects of it that made Halo, well Halo. Throughout all of its life there was no ability to sprint in Halo, but they added it to this edition. On top of that they added gravity to sniper shots, to make it more realistic, but the thing about Halo was that there was nothing realistic about it in the first place. The main character is a six/seven foot tall man that can jump at least ten feet in the air. There are aliens, lasers, flying ships, you can get shot over fourteen times and still live, regenerate health quickly and you can flip tanks over with your bare hands.

On the release of Halo 3 they grossed over $300 million and millions of people played on Xbox live in the first few days. It had a lot to live up to the Legends of Halo, and Halo 2’s Xbox live experience, but they did deliver. My concern is if Halo 4 will be able to live up to the greatness of its predecessors. This is the first “Halo” game being made by a company other than Bungie. This will be made by 343 Industries. I hope that this franchise will continue to be great, but I am quite skeptical of if they have it in them to deliver a solid product.