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I think this is true beyond graphics as well. I remember when games started shipping with fully voice-acted dialogue, it felt like all the interesting interacti

by thom 5y ago

I think this is true beyond graphics as well. I remember when games started shipping with fully voice-acted dialogue, it felt like all the interesting interactive text based systems (however clunky) were immediately abandoned. This hurt immersion for me far more than text vs speech ever did. I'm excited by the progress in dynamically generated voices in games happening now, although in many cases that seems more like having better placeholders in your asset pipeline than using them as production-level dialogue.

RobertKerans 5y ago
I'd posit that there's a general principle underpinning this that is true for most things (not games, or art, but everything). This is a bit half-formed in my head, but: Computer tech makes certain important classes of things cheaper and more convenient to create. Sometimes it makes those things feasible in the first place. But it's always via enabling of cheap duplication of an existing process. As tech evolves in power, it can do more. The high-speed duplicative properties of computers are the thing that makes them useful. For them them to be generally useful [and critically, financially useful], crafted, stylised, personal aspects are stripped out. So much does not work as well or look as good or is as interesting as things from the previous evolution that were built or provided or staffed by knowledgable, skilled practitioners. But given that skilled practitioners are finite, on average what comes out is better in some useful aspects than most of the efforts of the previous evolution. And on average it's easier to produce/manage/handle at scale. So pick anything: Amazon, Uber, Google search, medical records, 3D games, etc etc, ad infinitum. Almost anything you can use computer tech for. What's being talked about in the comments: it's not generalisable, so it gets chucked. It's too hard to do, so sand off the sharp edges, cut anything that can't be reduced to an algorithm, package the inferior but much more convenient version that can scale (I assume there is some body of thought with literature relating to this process that I should dig into, but I think people like Walter Benjamin and Milan Kundera have probably described it much better than I can w/r/t art [or maybe Ruskin or Morris, though their idea are all maybe a bit idealistic] this destruction of the personal to the service of the machine)

by thom 5y ago

RobertKerans 5y ago

I'd posit that there's a general principle underpinning this that is true for most things (not games, or art, but everything). This is a bit half-formed in my head, but: Computer tech makes certain important classes of things cheaper and more convenient to create. Sometimes it makes those things feasible in the first place. But it's always via enabling of cheap duplication of an existing process. As tech evolves in power, it can do more. The high-speed duplicative properties of computers are the thing that makes them useful. For them them to be generally useful [and critically, financially useful], crafted, stylised, personal aspects are stripped out. So much does not work as well or look as good or is as interesting as things from the previous evolution that were built or provided or staffed by knowledgable, skilled practitioners. But given that skilled practitioners are finite, on average what comes out is better in some useful aspects than most of the efforts of the previous evolution. And on average it's easier to produce/manage/handle at scale. So pick anything: Amazon, Uber, Google search, medical records, 3D games, etc etc, ad infinitum. Almost anything you can use computer tech for. What's being talked about in the comments: it's not generalisable, so it gets chucked. It's too hard to do, so sand off the sharp edges, cut anything that can't be reduced to an algorithm, package the inferior but much more convenient version that can scale (I assume there is some body of thought with literature relating to this process that I should dig into, but I think people like Walter Benjamin and Milan Kundera have probably described it much better than I can w/r/t art [or maybe Ruskin or Morris, though their idea are all maybe a bit idealistic] this destruction of the personal to the service of the machine)